Walt Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," 83 swiftly moving minutes long, is the first animated cartoon feature ever made, and for that reason alone has a secure place in film history. In world history, however, "Snow White" has a stile more important place. Among the world's greatest communicators, Walt Disney built a team of artists and technicians who, together, turned ancient human impulses into a globally cherished work of art. Thirty thousand years ago, when human beings started drawing animals on the walls of their caves, an artist where Altamira, Spain, is today tried to suggest the movement of a fellow creature by giving a picture of a wild boar two sets of legs. In the 20th century A.D., Otis Ferguson, film critic of "The New Republic" magazine, saw that Walt Disney had not only succeeded in creating an emotionally stirring illusion of moving drawings in his first feature film, but had achieved real beauty in such scenes as the one in which an animated drawing of one of the deer carrying the dwarfs back to their cottage to rescue Snow White, "moves awkward and unsteady on its long pins in the crush of animals, milling about, as it should, but presently is graceful in flight, out in front like a flash."
In the long history of human communication, the seven reels of moving drawings in consonance with sound and color called "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" is a seminal work in the development of language, combining graphic symbols, and music, and color as language in the new global art of the moving image. But beyond even that, the carefully constructed rhythmic beauty of this film has consistently won a purely emotional response that is the hallmark of the ability of art anywhere to evoke both laughter and tears. At "Snow White"'s premiere, when the up-to-then laughter-provoking dwarfs gathered, sorrowing, around her bier, people openly wept, and moving drawings became, for the first time, "moving" drawings.
"The principal object of any of the fine arts is to get a purely emotional reaction from the beholder," said Walt Disney to me in the backyard of his Los Angeles home, when his daughter Diane brought us together for an afternoon of animation talk on Sunday, August 26, 1951. Disney didn't doubt that animation had such power.
I was a 17-year-old American Midwesterner, already convinced by the art of Walt Disney that animation was my country's most important contribution to the arts -- a view that the years since have not changed. I asked Walt -- as he insisted I call him -- to name his own most important achievement.
"The whole damn thing," he answered me, in a voice as Midwestern as my own. "The fact that I was able to build an organization, and hold it, and point it at certain goals."
He said he had learned from his cartoon shorts how to get emotional reactions -- laughter, mostly; but on "Snow White" he ventured to lead his team toward a more formidable goal: a feature film in which characters would go through emotions that a few short years before would have seemed impossible to convey with a cartoon character. Still, he said he knew when he started "Snow White" that he had the secret of taking audiences within the magic bounds of his enchanted worlds, and the ways were also seven: story, design, direction, layout, animation, backgrounds, and color.
"Snow White at 50: Undimmed Magic," read the headline in the Sunday "New York Times" when the film's "Golden Anniversary" reissue in 1987 prompted "a consideration of the revolutionary effect that 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' had in its first release -- on the film industry, on the moviegoing public all over the world, and on some of the greatest artists of the 20th century." Its gentle, hopeful caricature of life continues to communicate with those who will influence the appreciation of life in the 21st century.
The history of this first animated cartoon feature, over the decades that have passed since its premiere at the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles, four days before Christmas of 1937, attests to the ongoing emotional response it inspires. Even the presentation of Walt Disney's special Academy Award® for "Snow White," which recognized the film as "a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field for the motion picture cartoon," was an emotional occasion.
Frank Capra, then president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, later told me that it was his idea to make the award voted to his friend Walt a suitably unique and charming one -- one big golden statuette with seven small ones alongside on a stair-step arrangement. Capra, who went on to direct another beloved film classic, "It's a Wonderful Life," said that he and Walt shared the belief that "comedy is victory -- over all kinds of evils -- even over death." And since Walt said he made his films for the child in us all, Capra arranged for a beloved child star, ten-year-old Shirley Temple, to present the award at the 1939 Academy Awards. "Oh!" she exclaimed to Disney, as the Academy rose, cheering, "Isn't it bright and shiny!"
From the outset, however, "Snow White" was recognized as more than a pioneering and charming entertainment. One of the world's outstanding political cartoonists and caricaturists, Great Britain's Sir David Low, best known for his political cartoons of the years before and during World War II that sported Nazi caricatures Hitler hated, knew at once what Walt had wrought. In a 1942 article entitled "Leonardo da Disney" that Low wrote for America's "New Republic" magazine, Sir David said: "I do not know whether he draws a line himself. I hear that at his studio he employs hundreds of artists to do the work. But I assume that his is the direction, the constant aiming after improvement in the new expression, the tackling of its problems in an ascending scale and seemingly with aspirations over and above mere commercial success. It is the direction of a real artist. It makes Disney, not as a draftsman but as an artist who uses his brains, the most significant figure in graphic art since Leonardo."

"Snow White"'s greatest significance, of course, lay in the use of moving drawings to tell a story that continues to touch millions of people each year. The work, for which Walt Disney risked his already successful career by spending $1.5 million in mostly borrowed dollars, made an unprecedented $8.5 million on its first release, and has been successfully reissued in 1944, 1952, 1958, 1967, 1983, 1987, and 1993. It has remained on the box-office list of all-time favorites and has a worldwide gross to date of about half a billion dollars. Millions have been earned since 1994 by a best-selling videocassette that continues to charm the first generation that will grow to maturity in the 21st century. And all of this started in the years when movie admissions cost not dollars but dimes.
Most often, Disney's films earned their emotional reactions with believable personalities. "Our most important aim is to get a definite personality in our cartoon characters," said Walt Disney. "Without a definite personality, a character can't be believed, and belief is what I'm after."
This started with his creation of Mickey Mouse in 1928, the year after Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic, as the embodiment of human effort and optimism. In "Three Little Pigs" in 1933, glowed Walt, "at last we have achieved personality in a whole picture." The wolf at the door was seen by audiences as a scary embodiment of the economic depression; but audiences identified with the comical pigs singing "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?"
Beyond believability, even, Walt wanted characters that his audiences would love. With Mickey and Donald and Pluto, he found that the best way to do that was to present characters that he loved himself. "I have to have a story hit me over the heart," he often said.
From his adolescence, the story of "Little Snow White" had hit him over the heart. And he thought that everyone rooted for innocence to survive jealousy and envy. "I do not make films primarily for children," he explained on a radio broadcast when his "Snow White" came out. "I make them for the child in all of us, whether we be six or sixty. Call the child innocence. The worst of us is not without innocence, although buried deeply it might be. In my work I try to reach and speak to that innocence, showing it the fun and joy of living; showing it that laughter is healthy; showing it that the human species, although happily ridiculous at times, is still reaching for the stars."
Walt remembered that as a 15-year-old newsboy in Kansas City, Missouri, in February 1917 (he wouldn't turn 16 until December 5, 1917), he had seen the silent live-action feature of "Snow White" with Marguerite Clark (1883-1940), a rival of Mary Pickford for roles stressing innocence, sweetness, and purity. Disney was always impressed by the Pickford/Clark type of heroine (he made his own "Pollyanna" with Hayley Mills in 1960), but he also had his own idea for improving the contact the Dwarfs made with audiences. He would eventually give each one a definite and appealing personality, identified with his name: Doc, Dopey, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, Grumpy, and, of course, Happy.
"First you get the story right," Walt always said.

Why a feature at all, for an artist whose cartoon shorts were lovingly accepted all over the world? Walt had three reasons. First, cartoon shorts, no matter how popular, could never make back the kind of money Disney was spending to improve their quality. Indeed, in the mid-1930s, it was the royalties from dolls and toys using Disney characters in their designs that made the difference to the studio between profit and loss. Secondly, Disney the master storyteller was anxious to develop fuller characters and to tell more complex stories than were possible in his seven-minute Mickey Mouse or Silly Symphony cartoons. In 1932, he had already made another fairy tale from Grimm, "Hansel and Gretel," as "Babes in the Woods," but it was too short for maximum emotional effect. The third, and to Walt Disney the greatest, reason was the opportunity to expand the emotional range of his films. In 1934, Walt set up a small group of artists in the office next to his own and began working on getting the story right.
"The original concept was a gagfest starring the Seven Dwarfs," said Ollie Johnston, who would be assistant to supervising animator Fred Moore on the film. "The evil incarnated in the Queen transformed that concept into the ultimate 'murder story' starring Snow White as the innocent victim."
Albert Hurter, a Swiss-born artist whose story sketches had inspired the characters in "Three Little Pigs," soon produced inspirational sketches of dwarfs, settings, props, and other characters -- including a Witch who was an advance on his witch for "Babes in the Woods."
But Hurter had what one colleague described as a "Black Forest kind of mind," and when Walt assigned the cheery Fred Moore, principal animator of the "Three Little Pigs," and the emotional, classically trained Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, the studio's best draftsman, to be the two supervising animators for the Dwarfs, their look changed. "Hurter's dwarfs were very Germanic, sour and dour." Tytla told me in 1967, at the First World Retrospective of Animation Cinema in Montreal, Canada. "Their heads were set deeply in their shoulders and they were sort of mean looking. Freddy and I kept working back and forth until we made them more appealing to the American taste."
Meanwhile, the first Disney experiments with a human heroine, Persephone, who brings spring back to the world in the myth of "The Goddess of Spring" (1934), were not successful. But when "Who Killed Cock Robin?" (1935) produced a caricature of Mae West as the bird vamp Jenny Wren, animated by Ham Luske with a convincing femininity, Walt named Luske supervising animator of the Snow White character.
Then, in 1936, Joe Grant, a former caricaturist for a newspaper drama page whom Walt had recruited to caricature movie stars in "Mickey's Gala Premiere" (1933), produced drawings of a Witch and a Queen who seemed to Walt to offer animators greater opportunities for acting than ever before. Walt teamed Grant with storyman Bill Cottrell to develop sequences for the Queen and the Witch that would allow his animators, his "actors with a pencil," to give great performances.
Meanwhile, Albert Hurter's drawings had already begun to inspire a growing circle of Walt's artists, "largely because of," as Ollie Johnston and animator Frank Thomas explained in their book, "Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life," "the stimulation that came from seeing characters in attitudes and relationships." When Grant and Cottrell not only got the Queen right, but also her Witch persona's relationship to the raven in her laboratory, three-dimensional characters began to emerge. Walt made Norman Ferguson, who had created Pluto and animated the Big Bad Wolf in "Three Little Pigs," the supervising animator of the Witch, giving the film its four supervising animators: Moore, Tytla, Luske, and Ferguson. He made Cottrell a sequence director to help shepherd good ideas to the screen.

Albert Hurter and Joe Grant were the two artists whom Walt would credit as the "character designers" of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." But it was the evil incarnated in the Queen and Witch in Joe Grant's inspirational drawings and the animation of Norman Ferguson on the Witch and Art Babbitt and Robert Stokes on the Queen that changed the character of the film. To compare a story sketch of Snow White yawning and stretching as she wakes up with the feminine innocence of Ham Luske's animation drawings of the same action is to understand, in Hemingway's fine phrase, "the sequence of fact and motion that made the emotion." If Walt could help it, Snow White's survival was going to be a joyous celebration of a victory of innocence.
Negative reaction immediately dubbed the production "Disney's Folly." Many of Disney's sincerest well-wishers told him he was crazy. In the first place, there was a Hollywood truism that fantasies were failures at the box office. In the second place, the public wouldn't sit through so long a cartoon. In the third place, an adult audience wouldn't go to see a fairy tale. And if a fourth place were needed, the juvenile audience wasn't large enough to pay for the cost of production. At that time, Disney told the "New York Times Magazine" that "Snow White" might eventually cost as much as $250,000. In the end, it cost almost six times that.
Walt and his brother and business partner Roy borrowed money from the Bank of America to try to make up the difference, and when that ran out and they tried to borrow more, they had to show what they had completed to bank vice president Joe Rosenberg. Walt linked the screening of unfinished bits together in the banker's mind by telling him what he would see on the screen if the loan were approved. The clarity of Walt's vision of the finished production convinced Rosenberg. As he left he told the 35-year-old artist, "That thing is going to make a hatful of money." Through Walt's impassioned telling of the tale, the banker had seen it, too. But Walt's way was to tell his animated fables through the victories of appealing personalities, and since it was difficult enough to create one personality in an animated short, he had a long way to go. True, he had won Academy Awards for the creation of Mickey Mouse, star of the first cartoon with synchronized sound ("Steamboat Willie", 1928); for "Flowers and Trees," the first three-color Technicolor cartoon (1932); and for "Three Little Pigs," an international success at communicating confidence with a story and a song ("Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?") in the face of worldwide economic depression. But the characters in "Flowers and Trees" were not memorable. Achieving believable personalities in all four characters in "The Three Little Pigs" (including the Big Bad Wolf, of course) was to Walt simply a challenge to be met, then topped.
In "Snow White" he proposed to develop believable personalities in no less than ten major characters -- the Princess, the Prince, the Evil Queen (who transforms herself into a hag), and the Seven Dwarfs. There were, in addition, the Queen's huntsman, her raven, the two vultures who follow her to the dwarfs' cottage, and at least a dozen individualized birds and animals -- from the mother deer who appreciates her fawn to the baby songbird who embarrasses its parents with a sour note and the turtle who is always the last one up the stairs.
Walt Disney was a natural communicator brimming with self-confidence. He always wanted to know what stuck in viewers' minds from his films because, he explained, it was not what he got up on the screen that was most important to him, but what he got off the screen into people's heads -- and above all, hearts. "I don't think anything without heart is good -- or will last," he kept telling his associates. John Hench, a key artist in the design of the Disney parks, understood Walt's basic concern to be for "using images to communicate, to develop a visual language." I asked Hench once what Walt was trying to communicate, and he surprised me by saying "strategies for survival." And yet the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, best known for his work with emotionally disturbed children, wrote of the folktale of "Snow White" in his book "The Uses of Enchantment" that it presented a strategy for surviving jealousy and envy and cruelty and greed.
The strategy was to love and be loved in return. Snow White took refuge with seven protectors who loved and were loved by her, and Walt felt that those who are seen to love and be loved, from Mickey and Minnie to Mowgli and Baloo, engage an audience's emotions. That is the reason why Frank Thomas' animation of sorrowing cartoon dwarfs could make audiences weep, too. And that is the reason why, when the most sympathetic of her seven protectors is lifted for her goodbye kiss at the end, and she lovingly croons, "Awww, Dopey!," audiences share in the joy of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." These opportunities for honest emotion made Walt Disney consider this story "the perfect plot."
"It has sympathy going for it all the way," Walt told his daughter, Diane. His hero and heroine were pure and innocent lovers, a prince and princess. He told her he found the Dwarfs "appealing and sympathetic." As for the villain, story-meeting notes from October 1934 explain that "QUEEN wants to marry PRINCE, but he refuses to acknowledge 'that she is the fairest in the land,' since he has seen SNOW WHITE." Walt expected audiences, who hope to survive jealousy and envy themselves, to feel sympathy for victims of those universal negative emotions, and to consider those who act on their jealousy and envy and hate and cruelty, whether in "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," or "101 Dalmatians," to be villains.

"I'm the bee that carries the pollen," Walt Disney said to me in his backyard in 1951, explaining how he worked with his artists and technicians. He cupped his hands in front of him. "I've got to know whether an idea goes here --"he dumped some imaginary pollen into his swimming pool -- "or there" -- he threw some pollen in the direction of his combination screening room and soda fountain -- "or there" -- he scattered some pollen where the wind could take it toward the replica of his Marceline, Missouri, childhood barn containing the shop for his miniature train.
Jerome Kern, the composer who seamlessly integrated story and song in "Show Boat" on Broadway in 1927, wrote in 1936 that "cartoonist Walt Disney has made the 20th century's only important contribution to music. Disney has made use of music as language. In the synchronization of humorous episodes with humorous music, he has unquestionably given us the outstanding contribution of our time." For "Snow White," Disney went further, synchronizing the whole comedy-drama to music and song. The score, by composers Frank Churchill and lyricist Larry Morey, co-expressed the story with the animation in nine songs that became standards in the music world: "I'm Wishing," "One Song," "With a Smile and a Song," "Whistle While You Work," "We Dig, Dig, Dig," "Heigh-Ho," "Bluddle-Uddle-Um-Dum" and "The Silly Song" (songs for the Dwarfs to sing as they wash up and put on a musical entertainment for Snow White), and "Someday My Prince Will Come" (which is reprised at the end to underscore the theme of love being stronger than death).
Gruff, conscientious David Hand helped Walt organize his story into 35 sequences, three of which Walt cut toward the end of production. Walt gave Hand credit as supervising director of the film.
"Time" magazine would call "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" "the sad, searching fantasy of universal childhood," but it is closer to the childlike wisdom of Solomon, who spoke of souls with "hope full of immortality." Disney's Wicked Witch recites maliciously from her book of magic spells, "The victim of the sleeping death can be awakened only by love's first kiss," then scornfully reassures her pet raven, "No fear of that. The Dwarfs will think she's dead. She'll be buried alive!" But the Disney version dramatizes how the Prince finds Snow White in her glass coffin, and it shows love, as in the New Testament story of the resurrection, proving to be stronger than death. The image that ends the film is a layout attributed to a Disney art director named Terrell Stapp that shows the Prince and his resurrected Princess going to a castle that appears in the setting sun. It is the very image used by Wordsworth in "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" to describe "the joy/Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something ... whose dwelling is the light of setting suns ..." Of Wordsworth's image, Tennyson said, "The line is almost the grandest in the English language. " The Disney version of that image is certainly the grandest in all of animation. It is nothing less than an image of eternal life.
We know that Walt was impressed by such an image when he was eight. According to Bob Thomas' authorized biography, "Walt Disney: An American Original," the first movie Walt ever saw, an after-school impulse in Marceline, Missouri, with his younger sister Ruth, when they were eight and six, was an enactment on a bedsheet screen in the town's new movie house of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. This was probably at the Cater Opera House, at Easter of 1910, for the Cater began showing films that year in the same hall where Walt's brother Roy made his first attempt at acting in a Marceline High School class play. "It was dark when they emerged," said Thomas of Walt and his little sister, "and they hurried home fearful of what would happen to them for staying out so late. Nothing did, because their parents were so relieved that the two children were safe."
The cycle of life-struggle-death-resurrection would become the adult Walt Disney's most potent theme, and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" is his most powerful statement of that theme. The story itself is a fairy tale from a centuries-old oral tradition that had its emotional effect at hearthsides long before it was written down by the Brothers Grimm early in the 19th century. The Queen, her stepmother, hates Snow White because she envies a beauty that is more than skin deep.

The girl flees alone through a great forest and takes refuge in the cottage of the Seven Dwarfs, who say "If you will take care of our house, cook, make the beds, sew, and knit, and if you will keep everything neat and clean, you can stay with us and you shall want for nothing." "Yes," said Snow White, "with all my heart." But the Queen finds her and makes three attempts to kill her, finally succeeding with a poisoned apple. "The poor child was dead, and remained dead," wrote the Brothers Grimm. She remains dead, that is, until a king's son asks for the glass coffin in which the dwarfs have placed her, to "honor and prize her as my dearest possession." As he spoke in this way the good dwarfs took pity upon him, and gave him the coffin. But his servants drop the coffin, "and with the shock the poisonous piece of apple which Snow-white had bitten off came out of her throat. And before long, she opened her eyes, lifted up the lid of the coffin, sat up, and was once more alive." It was Walt Disney who added "love's first kiss" to that story.
"Comedy is essentially a carrying away of death, a triumph over mortality by some absurd faith in rebirth, restoration and salvation," wrote Wylie Sypher in his widely read essay, "The Meaning of Comedy." "No logic can explain this magic victory over Winter, Sin, and the Devil," Sypher concedes; still, humankind from tribal days has been turning its sense of such victories into art, celebrating them with dances and rituals. This is not the tragic arc of birth, suffering, and death, but the comic Circle of Life: birth, suffering, death, and rebirth -- the victory humankind intuits as spring comes again, as love seeks to triumph over death, as human beings hope for what they symbolize as some kind of paradise.
It is not often commented on, but Disney's best films are all about such victories. "Snow White" and "Pinocchio" show innocence and purity winning out over sin and death (the Queen's jealousy and envy; the temptations of Pleasure Island); "Fantasia" ends with a pilgrims' chorus singing an "Ave Maria" to the dawn, once death and the Devil and the terrors of the night have retreated with Chernobog into Bald Mountain; the return of spring and the birth of a new generation at the end of "Bambi" put into proportion winter and fire and even the death of a beloved mother as the heavenly choir sings Walt's insistence that "love is a song that never ends."
"We feel and know that we are eternal," wrote the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza in his "Ethics" of 1677. It is an intuition that has been expressed by classics of world literature from Dante's "Divine Comedy" to Goethe's "Faust" to Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," but by few films. Wilder's sympathy with Disney's work prompted him to tell a "Tulsa Tribune" interviewer in 1936 that "the two presiding geniuses of the movies are Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney." In 1938, the same year that "Snow White" made its initial international impression, Wilder's "Our Town" was Broadway's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and its Stage Manager character was saying: "I don't care what anybody says with their mouths -- everybody knows that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars ... everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about human beings."
In "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," Walt Disney got hold of it again.
Early in 1934, as human beings moved inexorably toward a second world war in one century, Disney began producing the celebration of eternal love that would be his version of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Serge Prokofiev would be "enraptured" by it, and Sergei Eisenstein would find its "true-cinematography of sound-and-sight consonance" to be "wonderful."
Chaplin would love Dopey and John Barrymore would leap to his feet to applaud the artwork. But four- and even three-year-olds, from China to Rockford, Illinois, will tell you as enthusiastically what they loved most. In fact, each time one studies those 35 sequences, arranged like a flower garden between the film's "Story Book Opening" and its "And They Lived Happily Ever After" fade-out, one understands more about how to communicate with what Walt was always insisting is "a small world after all."
Biography of the author: John Culhane
John Culhane, author of the books "Walt Disney's Fantasia" and "Disney's Aladdin: The Making of an Animated Film," teaches the world history of animation at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Culhane, a writer, lecturer, filmmaker, and film historian, created the first animation history course for college credit anywhere in the world, at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in 1972. His animated film credits include a feature, Richard Williams' "The Thief and the Cobbler" (1995). With his late cousin, Shamus Culhane (the animator who made the Seven Dwarfs march home singing "Heigh-Ho" in "Snow White"), John Culhane cowrote three prime-time animated television specials, "Noah's Animals" (1975), "King of the Beasts" (1976), and "Last of the Red-Hot Dragons" (1977), for which he was the voice of the dragon. He wrote the television documentaries "Backstage at Disney's" (1983) and "Disney's 'Aladdin': A Whole New World," and appeared as a commentator in the documentaries "Fantasia: The Making of a Masterpiece" (1991), "Frank and Ollie" (1996), and "The Making of Jungle Book" (1997). He has lectured on animation everywhere from New York City's Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art to Washington's Kennedy Center to the California Institute of the Arts, and at 35 colleges and universities in between. Disney artists caricatured him as "Mr. Snoops" in their 1977 animated feature "The Rescuers."
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