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Part of Snow White’s charm and power lies in its lingering redolence of the world of animated shorts. The shorthand way that Snow White and the Prince fall in love — an early scene in which the Prince comes upon Snow in her ragged attire at the wishing well, and serenades her briefly at her balcony, professing already that his heart is hers alone — works here in a way that it wouldn’t have in, say, Cinderella. (Granted, one magical date and a quixotic quest with a glass slipper isn’t much more on which to hang a life together, but still the romance in Cinderella is treated with more naturalism than Snow White.)
The key to Snow White’s storybook feel is its pervasive musical milieu. Animation and synchronized music had become inseparable since Steamboat Willie, and it was natural for Snow White to be full of song, as many subsequent animated musicals have been. But characters in Snow White don’t just burst into song (though of course they do — and such songs!). They unselfconsciously embody a singsong world of rhythm and rhyme in which music is never far away, from the lyrical exchanges of the evil Queen and her magic mirror, to Doc’s spoken-verse “Washing Song,” to dialogue like the following lines from Snow White, addressed to the woodland creatures after her fright in the forest:
“I’m awfully sorry — I didn’t mean to frighten you. But you don’t know what I’ve been through! And all because I was afraid … I’m so ashamed of the fuss I’ve made.” Then, to a family of birds: “What do you do when things go wrong? … oh! You sing a song!” Of course; what else?
Snow’s dulcet little-girl voice, provided by 19-year-old Adriana Caselotti, is probably the most dated element of the production, along with the heroine’s “Someday my Prince will come” romantic passivity (and, for some, her domesticity). (As recently as The Princess and the Frog, Disney was still doing penance for the “wish on a star” magical thinking of its early films.) Still, Caselotti’s voice conveys the character’s innocence and goodness, and she has some nice line readings, such as when she charms the dwarfs into letting her stay. (Her gentle mockery of Grumpy isn’t her only show of humor, but it’s my favorite.)
Visually, Snow White is a marvelous achievement, a heroine who ideally balances the grace and naturalistic movement of rotoscoping (tracing live-action images of an actor) with the stylized proportions of a semi-realistic cartoon heroine. Rotoscoping is a powerful technique, but used too mechanically it can create a hyperrealism that diminishes the charm of animation. (The Snow White–inspired Fleischer Studios feature Gulliver’s Travels, with its uncannily lifelike Gulliver, is an instructive counterpoint.)
The blush of red on Snow’s cheeks is a notable example of the Disney team’s experimentation and innovation. In keeping with her name and description, the animators gave Snow a pale complexion, but at first her cheeks looked bloodless. They tried touching up her cheeks with a ruddier hue, but given the limitations of cel art she looked like a clown with painted cheeks. Gradations of color were easy on static painted backgrounds, but there was no good technology in those days for producing them on the painted cels for animated characters.
Then one of the ink-and-paint girls — women tasked with creating the colored animation cels from the animators’ pencil-and-paper drawings — suggested that they might apply real rouge or blush to the cels to give Snow’s cheeks some color. To Walt’s skeptical query whether the girls would be able to apply the rouge consistently on each cel, she shot back, “What do you think we’ve been doing to our own faces all our lives?”
Although the material has certainly been Disneyfied, with the Greek chorus of forest animals and the dwarfs’ slapstick, Disneyfication was not yet the debilitating condition it would later become. The animals and slapstick add their notes to the main theme without detracting from it, like the escapades of the mice in Cinderella.
What is most impressive about Snow White is that amid all the effort and technological and artistic innovation, what emerges is not just an impressive showcase of technique, but a film of simple and enduring power that still draws in and dazzles viewers. Even after all all the pomo deconstruction of Enchanted and its ilk, Snow White’s potent spell is unbroken.
Related: SDG’s Top 5 Fairy-tale Movies!
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SDG, do you feel the ending of this film is a little….rushed???
Good question, Benchwarmer. After Snow White succumbs to the “sleeping death,” the film uses a storybook transition (mirroring the introduction) to skip as quickly as possible to the arrival of the Prince and the resuscitation of Snow White. I can see where one might find it rushed, but honestly, I can’t see what else they could have done. Certainly they couldn’t stretch out Snow White being dead. The youngest viewers wouldn’t be able to take it. The appearance of the evil Queen and the death of Snow White is so traumatic that she needs to come back as quickly as possible. All in all, I think they handled it about as gracefully as they could have.
We watched this and there were NO fart jokes, NO rapping animals, and will.i.am was NO WHERE on the soundtrack. Not to mention there were NO contrived, third-act conveyor belt chase scenes. What a family movie night disaster….
;-)
It’s about darn time!
I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Great review, SDG, thanks. I love the rouge anecdote.
Is Snow White the first ever animated feature? That distinction is sometimes given to The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which was made using the “silhouette technique” (cardboard and metal cutouts in front of an illuminated background).
No worries, Pachyderminator. :-)
Good question. The “first-ness” of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs can be expressed from a number of different angles. The angle I chose, “the first feature-length animated film in Hollywood history,” tacitly exempts The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a non-Hollywood film.
Snow White can also lay claim to being the first feature-length work of cel (or hand-drawn) animation, as well as the first animated feature film in color.
P.S. I also have loved that rouge anecdote since I ran across it researching a paper on Snow White back in my college days. :-)
I love Disney’s Snow White but I also believe of the others that you mentioned, Lady and the Tramp deserves some recognition. The scene where both are eating spaghetti is one to remember! And I think the best one was Mary Poppins, his crowning movie which combined animation with live characters.
None of the Disney movies now can compare with these. After he died, a great generation of animators and writers did too.
Steven,
Great Review - thank you.
While in grad school, I often babysat my two youngest girls… as their mother could not. Frankly, I cheated and frequently studied (engineering) with a movie in the background. So… I have seen Snow White over forty times and possibly many more.
SW is one of my Favorite Movies: When you have seen a film once, you notice the similarities with previous efforts, the cliches, the nonsense. Most films (Transformers, Watchmen, John Carter…) have your eyes bleeding before you even get to the profanity, sex, senseless action, anti-everything, and political “huey” insulting every fiber of your culture; if not your very living guts.
SW misses that mark. No, I don’t think it was “Walt” or anyone else. Accident? Coincidence? or just the truth of the Fairy Tale of the Wicked Step-mother overcoming the failings of mortals?
To me it is beyond incredible the film’s message is so simple, clean, and pure.
After about seeing this film twenty or thirty times, I finally understood the Fairy Tale: Snow White is a True Tale. A Fairy Tale told of Truth.
Her Father and Mother: Adam and Eve.
The Drop of Blood: Original Sin.
The Wicked Step-mother: Satan as the !@#$% of Babylon.
Snow White: Our Soul or the Church (or both).
Her Beauty: Innocence or Purity.
The Huntsman: A Good Thief. Blinded by Truth. (The Truth Sets You Free).
Cleaning and cooking: Humble Service and Worthy Works (and Penance taken on not for the sake of self redemption but for others)
The Seven Dwarfs: Our virtues (Our sins).
The Mine: Worldly concerns and Futile Works.
The Apple: Sin and Temptation. Work of the Devil.
The Prince… duh.
It’s so simple, it’s hardly an allegory.
Your review makes me want to see it again.
Peg: Thanks so much. That’s one of the most encouraging responses to a review one can get. Cheers.
Even for a negative review?
Since nobody from the League of Puritanism has said it yet, let me do it:
“I am shocked—shocked!—that you could recommend a film with magic and witchcraft in it to a family audience, Mr. Greydanus. There are impressionable children out there and exposure to this sort of occultic activity is a clear gateway drug to further involvement in the occult and the black arts. I have heard rumors on the internet—and what more reliable source is there?—that children who watch Snow White and similar films with magic and witchcraft in them become demon-possessed. All movies and stories with any use of magic in them are all dangers to the soul and anyone who says anything positive about them lacks spiritual discernment. Cancel my subscription.”
There. Just providing that always-heard-sooner-or-later contribution to any discussion of children’s fantasy. You may now resume regular broadcasting (of a review with which I entirely agree).
Topeka - thanks for pointing out the hidden meaning in Snow White. I read many fairy tales as a child and took great pleasure in reading them to my children. They are morality stories - told in a way that even the youngest can understand and internalize. Much better than the ‘hooey’ that passes for entertainment these days.
Excellent write-up of an excellent film (which happens to be one of my younger son’s favorites at the moment).
Just wondering, do you consider Pinocchio to be part of the “fairy-tale canon”? It does have a fairy, but it’s about a boy rather than a girl, and thus it might belong to a different category than Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, etc.
I ask because I have long thought that Pinocchio was a marked improvement on Snow White, at least in the storytelling department; it seems to me that Snow White suffers a bit from the sort of narrative padding that you’d expect when Disney was transitioning from short films to features, whereas Pinocchio has a sturdier narrative backbone.
Hence, your comment that Snow White is “matched only by Beauty and the Beast” in “the Disney fairy-tale canon” leapt out at me.
Peter T Chattaway: You’ve got me on Pinocchio. On some level it certainly qualifies as a fairy tale, and I see that at Decent Films I did include it in my tag for fairy-tale films. Yet for some reason I’ve repeatedly made that Snow White / Beauty & the Beast comparison without thinking of Pinocchio.
It can’t be simply that the protagonist is a boy rather than a girl; I wouldn’t hold this against Jack and the Beanstalk, for example. Perhaps I discount Pinocchio as being quite in the true fairy-tale tradition because I think of fairy tales as originating in folk tradition, whereas Pinocchio is very much Collodi’s invention?
I see that Wikipedia says, “Pinocchio’s world is not in a traditional fairy-tale world, instead containing the hard realities of the need for food, shelter, and the basic measures of daily life. The setting of the story is in fact the very real Tuscan area of Italy as a background. It was a unique literary melding of genres for its time.”
However, I’m not sure this is really persuasive. “the hard realities of the need for food, shelter, and the basic measures of daily life” seem to me to figure in many fairy tales, e.g., Hansel & Gretel.
Regardless, none of these considerations is sufficient to justify my inclusion of Snow White rather than Pinocchio in my Top 5 Fairy-tale Movies, since in addition to the blatantly counter-intuitive example of Star Wars I also included The Wizard of Oz and The Princess Bride. Yet for whatever reason I still want to include Snow White rather than Pinocchio, and not only, I think, because having just made my list I’m disinclined to revise it so quickly. Hm hm hm.
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