Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

I’d like to dance and tap my feet,
But they won’t keep in rhythm.
You see, I washed ’em both today
And I can do nothin’ with ’em.— Happy

Grown men were said to have cried, women to have soaked their third tissue and little kids—why, they experienced all the emotions, and then some, of their elders and a bit of the fears that didn’t particularly faze the grown-ups.  For in this true extravaganza of a movie, a young prince, long expected to some day come had, indeed, arrived on a great white horse to awaken with a kiss—the only way to restore to life—a young girl who had been poisoned by an envious, evil stepmother.

Although the human mourners who had gathered around the casket, along with the animals of the forest, were, indeed, dwarfs, they had come to love this young girl they had first regarded as an interloper in their all-male domain.  In their various personalities were all the emotions and characteristics of full-grown humans, epitomized in their names, and that early audience at the December 21, 1937, premiere responded accordingly.

Of course, it is Walt Disney’s first full-length feature cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Walt Disney, for all his sophistication and pioneering spirit, was a man who had never grown up—fortunately for so many!  He had had the idea of Snow White since he was fifteen years old.  By his mid-thirties he had converted a fledgling cartoon studio into one with the highest technical facilities, one capable of bringing his dream to fruition.

The studio required a staff of over four hundred, including animators and their assistants, effects animators, layout artists, twenty-five water colorists for backgrounds alone and women painters and inkers.  The resulting, 83-minute cartoon required two million illustrations and 1,500 shades of paint.

The harsher, more frightening details of the source material, the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, had to be toned down.  Even then, when the British distributed the film to theaters with a rating reflective of those possibly child-unfriendly moments—the storm, the appearance of the Witch, the death of the Queen—managers ignored the cautionary rating.

Walt, seeing it as more than a mere cartoon, was obsessive about showing everything correctly, making sure each of the dwarfs had his own personality and photographing Marge Champion in motion to obtain the most realistic body movements, even to the natural flow of her dress.

As Walt had been the original voice of Mickey Mouse, his brother Roy twisted an old leather wallet to create the creaking sound as Dopey’s walk across a wooden floor.

German animator Wolfgang Reitherman solved the problem of properly capturing the Mask in the Magic Mirror by drawing half a face on a folded piece of paper, then tracing the same image on the other half.  Much of the final result, however, was obscured by fire, smoke and a distorted mirror.

In auditioning various actresses for the voice/singing part of Snow White, Walt deemed Deanna Durbin’s voice “too mature,” and settled on a classically trained singer, Adriana Caselotti.  And because he wanted to restrict her voice to this one-time appearance, a firm contract prohibited her from ever singing in any subsequent movie.  For the voice of the Witch, Caselotti demonstrated to Walt that her thin, operatic voice could also mimic the shaky crackle of an old woman.

The music in Snow White is clearly a prime feature, after the revolutionary animation and the scintillating motion.  While Paul Smith, Leigh Harline and Larry Morey composed the incidental music, the songs are by Frank Churchill, the lyrics by Morey.

The best-remembered songs have to be “Whistle While You Work,” “Heigh-Ho” and “Some Day My Prince Will Come.”  At the time, the Disney studio was bereft of its own music publishing house, so the songs were administered through another firm.  In conjunction with the release of the film, a 78 rpm soundtrack recording was issued, the first American film to have such an album.

The simple plot is known to all.  When an evil Queen (voiced by Lucille La Verne) learns from the Mask (Moroni Olsen) in her Magic Mirror that she is no longer “the fairest one of all,” she sets out to do in her rival Snow White.

The beautiful young girl has taken up housekeeping—in the most respectable Disney sense—in the cottage of Seven Dwarfs: Grumpy (voiced by Pinto Colvig), Dopey (Eddie Collins), Bashful (Scotty Mattraw), Sleepy (also Colvig), Sneezy (Billy Gilbert), Happy (Otis Harlan) and Doc (Roy Atwell).

Having unsuccessfully sent out a Huntsman (Stuart Buchanan) to kill Snow White, the Queen transforms herself into an old hag and entices her victim to bite into a poison apple.  With the dwarfs in pursuit, the Queen is killed in a fall from a cliff.

Snow White dies and is placed in a casket built by the dwarfs.  Along with the seven little men and the animals, the Prince (Harry Stockwell) she had met earlier comes to mourn.  He kisses her and she is restored to life by the power of true love.

The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, 1925, Alexander Nevsky, 1938, etc.) regardedSnow White as the greatest movie ever made.

Soon after its premiere at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Hollywood, Variety magazine declared, rather clumsily, “ . . . so perfect is the illusion, so tender the romance and fantasy, so emotional are certain portions when the acting of the characters strikes a depth comparable to the sincerity of human players, that the film approaches real greatness.”

What the author was trying to say, the movie goes to the heart.  It still does, more than eighty years later.

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