1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Before I say anything about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, it’s important to remember that this isn’t just Disney’s first full-length feature; it’s the first full-length, traditionally animated feature to ever be produced. This kind of thing simply hadn’t been done at the time – animation was generally still viewed as kid’s stuff, silly little shorts you might see before a movie, never the feature presentation.  Nobody had faith in this project except Walt Disney himself, everyone thought it was going to flop, even his wife tried to talk him out of it; people called it “Disney’s Folly” and openly mocked his costly decision. It is crucial, then, to note just how impressive it is that Disney was not only able to make this film, but also that it was such a critical and financial success - it proved that animation was an art form just as worthy of respect as any other and even Disney’s harshest critics were blown away by just how much time and effort had gone into this film and how well it paid off. With this in mind, I ask you to take any further criticism with a grain of salt, as I absolutely acknowledge how groundbreaking this film was and how fantastic and original it must have seemed at the time. However, viewed alongside the rest of the Disney animated canon, their first effort doesn’t quite stand up against the greats; again, this is understandable, Disney were treading new ground with this project and had yet to fully develop their signature style or learn all the tricks of the trade – namely, because they invented, or at least, popularised many of them. So, I ask you to bear this in mind as I try to gently explain how Snow White and the Seven Dwarves might be... just okay.  

As the first of its kind, Snow White had a lot to prove – the focus of the film is, unsurprisingly then, the animation; this unfortunately causes a few things to fall by the wayside, but I’ll get to that later. Thankfully, they achieved their primary goal, as over seventy-five years later this film still looks fantastic; the backgrounds are great, highly detailed and subtle in their colouring. Disney’s later work often uses, for better or worse, very bright and vibrant colours; Snow White is more careful, it keeps thing colourful and aesthetically pleasing, but not too gaudy. Backgrounds resemble soft, watercolour paintings, which effectively capture the serene forest environment where most of the action takes place and help develop a calm, peaceful mood that fits well with the tone of the film.

Picturesque as shit

The animation of the more “cartoony” characters is top-notch and on par with some of Disney’s best – the forest animals and Dwarves have stylised designs that suit animation well, their movement is fluid, exaggerated and highly expressive. Perhaps most impressive is the Evil Queen after she transforms into an old hag – the extreme nature of her design, the bulbous eyes and crooked nose and the menacing style of her animation, slinking around, hunching her shoulders, grinning widely, all matches her character perfectly and only serve to make her more frightening. The contrast with the more stiff and limited animation in her normal form really help cement the fact that a true “transformation” has taken place. The animation of the more “human” characters, however, is unfortunately a little lacking. The Evil Queen’s normal form looks decent enough, her sweeping, grandiose movements and the way she carries herself, though somewhat stiff, appropriately convey a sense of power and sinister megalomania, even if she does look a little like post-surgery Michael Jackson, but Snow White herself is a little... off. Her character design seems to be an attempt at a more realistic depiction of human beings – by all means, she has touches of Disney’s style, in particular her wide, round eyes and doll-like face, but she is certainly less stylised than the Dwarves. Her animation is rubbery and unnatural; you can see her lines wobbling as the animators struggle and fail to draw careful, realistic movements. She is animated not as extreme or cartoony as the Dwarves, but not realistic enough to be considered human either, leaving her in an awkward limbo state. This unfortunately leaves her looking, more often than not, a little unsettling; I don’t think Disney quite managed to capture realistic human expressions or movement here, making Snow White look kind of like a marionette, awkwardly jigging around in an attempt to look human, but ultimately just looking creepy.

Yeah let's uh... let's not let her near the knives

The prince, though only featured in a couple of scenes, looks even worse – his face is almost as devoid of detail as his personality, leaving him to look even more like an awkward puppet with a blank expression and... weirdly red lips. Perhaps this is why Disney films tended to move towards featuring casts of talking animals, their style seems more suited to this - or at least to overly stylised humanoids - than it is to realistic looking people; it makes sense, considering the company’s origins and the animal casts of its previous shorts. Ultimately, this failed attempt serves to be quite distracting, which likely explains why the Dwarves, who are more traditionally cartoony, are the focus of the film and somewhat eclipse Snow White after their introduction.

Like seriously, is he wearing lipstick?

The characterisation is pretty flat; again, this film was the first of its kind, so you can understand why it focuses more on gags and visual set-pieces than interesting, three dimensional characters – the animated shorts that Disney were used to making didn’t last long enough to really build or develop characters anyway, so it’s unsurprising that the protagonists of the film are a little underdeveloped. The Dwarves are, by their nature, one-note, with their names summing up their sole character trait; except Doc. Why is he called Doc? He’s not a doctor, is he? I don’t know, his thing is he’s the leader and messes up words and I guess they couldn’t have called him “Leady” or “Poor Diction-y” but whatever. The only Dwarves to really get much time are him, Dopey and Grumpy, the other four just kind of stand there and occasionally say the equivalent of ‘Aw shucks’ whenever  Snow White smiles at them; they’re hardly complex and well-crafted characters, but they serve their purpose.

The only character that really spells any trouble is the one who receives the most attention – Dopey. Now, Dopey is harmless enough, he’s silly and fun and well animated and I’m sure kids get a kick out of his antics (Though to be honest I’m pretty sure I thought he was pretty annoying even when I was a kid) but he foreshadows trouble later down the line. Dopey is the predecessor to a deadly archetype in Disney films I like to refer to as “The Hooter”. If you’ve never seen Captain EO, it’s a goofy little short film made for Disneyland in the late 80’s, starring Michael Jackson and a motley crew of alien puppets. I’ll let that sink in for a minute. Anyway, this rag tag group of misfits never seem to get any respect, because they fail every mission they’re assigned; but they seem pretty competent, so what’s the problem? THE PROBLEM IS FUCKING HOOTER. Hooter is a clumsy idiot who seems to exist solely to make dumb fart jokes and screw up his friends’ plans every two seconds because he’s a fucking idiot, yet all Michael Jackson and crew have to say is “Oh, Hooter, you goofball!” WHY DON’T THEY JUST GET RID OF HOOTER EVERYTHING WOULD BE FINE WITHOUT HIM UGH.

FUCKING HOOTER

Don’t get me wrong, Captain EO is so wonderfully cheesy that everything about it, including Hooter, is charming enough. But had it been a full-length movie... Hooter probably would have worn down my patience and unfortunately, many Disney movies employ this character archetype, this goofy, accident-prone moron who seems to exist purely to screw over the other characters at every turn and act as comic relief for kids, but they’re not actually funny they’re just ANNOYING SO WHAT IS THE POINT. Is Dopey one of these? Not quite, but you can definitely see the seeds of this character type in him and I’ll get to the worst examples when they roll around. Even so, Dopey can get a little irritating as he seems to almost constantly slip up and cause the other Dwarves trouble, again prompting thoughts of ‘JUST GET RID OF HIM’ but this becomes less frequent by the end of the film and he’s charming enough that his antics don’t get too difficult to handle.

Ears like the FA Cup

The Queen is just as one-note, she’s certainly not called the “Evil Queen” for nothing and is appropriately villainous for the most petty of reasons – ‘some mirror said this chick is cuter than me so I’m going to murder her’. Cool. It’s extreme, but she seems to take so much joy in being evil that it kind of rubs off on you and you get a kick out of how ridiculously villainous she is too. She’s not a complex antagonist, no, but she’s definitely fun to watch – it’s a shame she isn’t in more of the movie, really, but the few scenes she is in definitely steal the show. I always remember her transformation scene terrifying me as a kid and it’s still powerful, the way they build tension and hide the reveal of her new form for just as long as they can is really cool and the colours and lighting are just great. The weakest character – not including the Prince who literally doesn’t even get a name, but is only in two scenes so we’ll let it slide – is Snow White herself. When people complain about Disney’s female characters being sexist and boring, this is what they’re talking about – she’s sweet, but dull, doesn’t seem to have much of a personality and is completely inactive and weak. She lets other characters lead her for pretty much the whole movie, to the point where she even needs cute woodland critters to make her decisions for her; she sings about how one day her true love will just come and get her, showing no intentions of going out to find him herself and she is so air headed it’s kind of hard to root for her. I know it’s good to be kind and not judge a book by its cover, but to take food from a stranger, especially considering the Dwarves just warned her not to and the fact that she KNOWS the Queen is out for her, she KNOWS the Queen has magic powers that can disguise her and the stranger in question looks like this? 

Come on. Again, you kinda have to give Disney a break here – views on women’s roles were obviously a lot different in 1937 and this is supposed to be a fairy tale; the traditional Disney clichés of the inactive princess, the “one true love” they’ve only known for a few minutes, the power of true love’s kiss and the standard “Happily Ever After” ending hadn’t been established as clichés yet, so you have to take this into account and not be too fierce. Still, Snow White is pretty much as flat as they come so it’s hard to really get too invested in her plight.

The story is the film’s weakest point, you can definitely tell that this is Disney’s first attempt at a full-length feature, because it doesn’t play like a feature film so much as an extended short, or rather, a bunch of different shorts packed together. There isn’t much of a narrative, so much as a very weak plot thread that ties these various shorts together and while some of the scenes are great, some are a little underwhelming and they almost all feel quite disconnected from one another. You can forgive the weak narrative, as Disney were in new territory and still used to making shorts, but the pacing is pretty unforgivable. The beginning and end are almost too rushed, with the defeat of the evil Queen being cool to look at, but pretty anticlimactic and the final resolution being a bit of a sudden and desperate rush to get to “Happily Ever After”. The middle of the film, however, is torturously slow; many scenes go on for far too long and struggled to hold my interest. Sections such as Snow White exploring the Dwarves’ house and the Dwarves’ returning home to find Snow White are painfully uninteresting and seemed to go on forever – by the time they finally cut back to the Evil Queen, I’d forgotten she even existed. Though some scenes still hold up very well today, these long, middling segments definitely hold the film back.

The songs are... okay, they’re nothing special. Several, such as “Whistle While You Work” are definitely well known and ingrained in Western culture, but that doesn’t change the fact that they aren’t particularly inventive. They’re not bad, they’re just alright – even “Heigh Ho”, which is very catchy and quite beloved, doesn’t have any more to it than the same two lines over and over and as a result, is a little flat. The songs fit the cutesy, happy-go-lucky tone of the movie, but that’s all they are: cute. They are very samey and lacking the lyrical ingenuity of Disney’s later songs; the closest that comes to matching this style is “Bluddle-Uddle-Um-Dum (The Dwarfs’ Washing Song)” which has elements of Disney’s future tendency to use rhyme and language playfully and its creative use of unusual sounds, its name and chorus coming from the noise the Dwarves make when they rinse their faces. “The Dwarf’s Yodel Song (The Silly Song)” is also, appropriately, silly, good fun; the way the movement of the characters fits the rhythm of the music is great and the classic scene of Dopey dancing with Snow White on Sneezy’s shoulders is lovingly animated and still fun to watch. The music is hardly the most memorable in Disney’s repertoire, but there aren’t really any bad numbers here, either.

Altogether, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a perfectly good movie. The animation is mostly great, the backgrounds are lovingly and carefully created and the chirpy music suits the tone. However, the lack of a cohesive narrative or strong characters holds the movie back a little and the poor pacing in particular makes it hard to stay interested for the whole eighty-three minutes – the short run time only goes to show how badly paced the movie is, as in my opinion, it felt much longer. However, as I’ve said over and over, many of these mistakes can be looked over or at least, understood, because Disney had no guidelines to follow here and were forging this path alone. The fact that this is not of one the better movies in the animated canon serves only to show how far Disney came in terms of storytelling and characterisation in particular, rather than to suggest that they were off to a poor start. Considering its age, this film holds up very well and I definitely recognise it as a milestone in, not just animation, but in filmmaking and art in general. But overall, as a film, it’s just okay.

Other Thoughts

• The scene where Snow White runs through the forest and all the trees and plants look like monsters and start grasping at her is awesome! Very creative and possibly the best sequence in the film.

Boo spooky trees

•  The coolest thing in the whole movie is the magic mirror the Queen should’ve just carried him around or something look how cool this guy is. 

Who is the sickest of them all? This guy

• I can’t believe I couldn’t remember these vultures from when I was a kid, they’re terrifying! They just follow the Evil Queen, their creepy grins getting bigger and bigger until she falls off the cliff and then they swoop in to eat her corpse, like they knew where she was headed the whole time! They don’t even outright state their intent or really draw attention to them, that much; they’re just there, waiting. This was a really cool touch and the way the sound and picture just fades away as they fly down to feast on their prey is genuinely quite chilling.

The Jungle Book vultures looking pretty soft right now

6/10 

Next Week: Pinocchio!

Email: joetalksaboutstuff@gmail.com
Twitter: @JSChilds