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The original poster for the first release of "Snow White"
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When Walt decided to
create the world's first feature-length animated film -- "Snow White" -- virtually
everyone thought he was headed down the wrong path. Roy and Lilly were unhappy.
With Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies doing well, the brothers had plenty
of money. Why gamble? After all, a feature-length cartoon was estimated to
cost at least half a million dollars (and, largely due to Walt's perfectionism,
it would ultimately cost about three times that). His wife and brother weren't
alone. Others in the entertainment business thought he was foolhardy too.
They didn't think Walt could come up with a story line that would hold people's
attention for over an hour of animation. They thought that such a cartoon
would hurt audiences' eyes. They called the venture Disney's Folly. Of course,
Walt listened to none of this.
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In fact, Walt was a better
businessman than many realized. He knew that movie houses were no longer showing
as many cartoons as they once did (a casualty of increasingly common double
features, which left less time for animated shorts). What's more, Walt's competitors
were coming on strong with cartoons -- like Popeye -- that rivaled Mickey
Mouse in popularity. "I knew if we wanted to get anywhere we'd have to go
beyond the short subject," he said. The selection of Snow White was carefully
thought out. Walt: "I had the sympathetic dwarfs, you see? I had the heavy.
I had the prince. And the girl. The romance. I thought it was a perfect story."
Staffers were convinced he was right after an evening in early 1934 when he
acted out the entire story -- all by himself. After several exhausting hours
playing an evil queen, a sweet heroine, a handsome prince, and seven individual
dwarfs, they were won over.
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Snow White confronts the huntsman in this original sketch for Walt's first feature-length animated film
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Lilly and Walt join other guests for the premiere of "Snow White"
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As "Snow White" proceeded,
alongside a prodigious output of shorts, the studio expanded. In 1935 alone, 300 additional artists were added. Meanwhile, Walt was convinced that in order
to really progress he needed to train his own staff; there was simply no
place else for them to learn the skills he was demanding. So he held classes
every night as well as for two half days each week. His artists became increasingly
proficient at re-creating the real world in an animated feature. "I definitely
feel that we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real until we can
do the real," he said. The Silly Symphony "The Old Mill" gave Walt's animators
the opportunity to experiment with a new invention, the multiplane camera,
which gave them the ability to simulate depth. Another Silly Symphony, "The
Goddess of Spring," was utilized to help them with the extremely difficult
task of animating the human form.
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Scenes were added and
cut, and when "Snow White" was close to completion, Walt decided she looked too
pale. So inkers and painters added blush to her cheeks in tens of thousands
of drawings. It was all worth it. The film opened on December 21, 1937, in
the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles. Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, Jack
Benny, Shirley Temple, and George Burns were all there. As animator Ward Kimball
recalled, "The highlight was at the climax of the film, when Snow White is
presumed to be dead and she's laid out on the slab ... . Here was a cartoon,
and here was the audience crying. The biggest stars, you name them, were all
wiping their eyes." As John Culhane, an animation authority and author of
the soon-to-be released "Fantasia 2000: Visions of Hope," has written, "In Disney's
'Snow White,' for the first time, moving drawings became moving drawings."
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"Snow White is laid out on the slab ... and the audience is crying. The biggest stars, you name them, were all wiping their eyes."
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