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The One That Started It All
When Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in 1937, it had been three years in production and a long hard fight for Walt Disney. Disney's wife, Lillian, and his brother (and business partner), Roy, tried to talk him out of the idea of a full-length animated picture. "Walt's Folly," many others in the industry declared. Disney's bread and butter up until that time had been its short cartoons starring Mickey Mouse, who had turned into a minor licensing bonanza for the company. But with his long-running Silly Symphonies series, Disney was preparing his animators for something bigger. These short films (see "Flowers and Trees," 1932, and "The Old Mill," 1937) were a place for the Disney artists to experiment with color and movement. When Snow White was finally released in December, 1937, those that had scoffed at the idea of a feature-length "cartoon" changed their tune. Within days of the film's premiere, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had landed on the cover of Time Magazine. The film went on to gross millions of dollars in its initial run, and from its profits, Disney went on to even greater artistic triumphs with Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi. Snow White, as a character, isn’t among Disney’s deepest thinkers, though she does seem to have a special connection to animals and pint-sized men. As the film opens, she's seen cleaning the castle (Does she live there or work there? If she's a princess, why are her clothes so tattered?). The Prince arrives and instantly falls in love with her.
Here, the Disney artists clearly have great fun giving each character a unique personality. Snow White cares for the dwarfs' cottage, but is tricked by the Wicked Queen into biting a poisoned apple. The Wicked Queen eventually meets her maker and the Prince shows up to awaken Snow White with True Love's Kiss. The plot may be simple, but the realization of it is extraordinary, especially by 1937 standards. How astonishing it must have been to see this film back then, and experience for the first time animated characters that move, think, feel, and dream like their live action counterparts! And though they’ve managed to gain some respect since then, cartoons were hardly seen as an art form in the 1930s. But look at the film now. When Snow White is seen running through an enchanted forest, you can see the influence of German Expressionism, and spooky movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which Walt Disney reportedly told his staff to watch before work on Snow White. A new invention at the time, the multiplane camera, lends a sense of depth to the onscreen image that had hitherto been difficult to achieve. And Snow White was not only the first animated feature film, but the first of a long line of Disney films to feature a song that found its way into the popular songbook. "Someday My Prince Will Come" continues to be a lovely standard (my favorite interpretation is by Miles Davis).
Special features on this release include a commentary track pieced together from interviews featuring Walt Disney himself, a Tetris-like game where you make Grumpy catch falling jewels in a mine cart, and an interactive look back at Disney's early studio days that I have barely been able to scratch the surface of. Archive footage and photos, early cartoons, audio recordings, it's all here, an astonishing collection that you could spend a few days with, if given the time. Some of the other features on the disc take advantage of the Blu-ray player's ability to connect to the Internet. Enter your telephone number, and you'll get a call five minutes later from a Disney princess. THAT impressed my four-year-old. And the Magic Mirror that guides you through the menus on the Blu-ray disc has an uncanny ability to know the time of day, and even the weather conditions outside. It all adds up to an experience that more closely reaches the "interactive" moniker that DVDs have been trying to live up to in the ten years since they've been available to the general public. In short, if you need a reason to upgrade to Blu-ray, the Diamond Edition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would easily qualify. 11/13/09 Photo Credits: ©WDSHE. All Rights Reserved Back to the main Cinema Tuesdays Reviews page More about the Cinema Tuesdays series  |
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The Wicked Queen, jealous over Snow White's beauty, arranges to have her killed, and once she runs away, Snow White finds herself in the cottage of seven dwarfs. If the emotional heft is a little lacking from this early feature, then the characterization of the dwarfs surely isn't. 
Disney has chosen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to launch their latest home video product line, the Diamond Collection. In case you were wondering, the Diamond Collection follows the Limited Issue, the Special Edition, the Gold Collection, and the Platinum Edition. One wonders where they can go from here. Perhaps the Large Cap Stock Edition. For a limited time, all sales of the DVD also come with a Blu-ray edition of the film. Families without a Blu-ray player will find themselves with a terrific restored version of the film on DVD, but if you have a Blu-ray player or PlayStation 3, you're in for a real treat. The Blu-ray of "Snow White" looks amazing; the image is so painterly you'll swear you're looking at a gallery work that's come to life. Colors are rich, and character movement is even smoother than on standard DVDs.