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A Review of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves' (1937)

 A Review of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves' (1937)

- Anand Nair

When Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs won the New York Film Critics Circle Award in 1937 (followed by an honorary Oscar) it announced a milestone in motion picture animation. The immensely popular film also became immensely influential, which is something that cannot be claimed for the routinely praised animated films of our era such as The Lion King, Finding Nemo and Wall-E. 

Instead of compartmentalizing Disney’s signature animated features (the three masterworks Fantasia, Pinocchio and Dumbo) as an outmoded approach, Snow White And the Seven Dwarves (1937) brings back the beginning of a classical style and the reason why it mattered. On the DVD commentary, animator John Canemaker pays homage by comparing the film to Birth of a Nation and then Citizen Kane “for staging ideas” (Canemaker doesn’t say, but he surely means the presentation of Xanadu) and the programming of musical numbers and fantasy in The Wizard of Oz. 

More precisely, Snow White set the template for animating universal fantasy, the western visionary heritage. This would even apply to such Japanese animation as Miyazaki but Snow White shows the reason people rarely go back to those films. Here is the foundation of how the modern world mentally interpreted those old folktales. It isn’t simply that Disney dominated the animation mainstream; his house-style of figuration and his formula for style was a translation of the Brothers Grimm. (The Little Mermaid was a bowdlerization of Hans Christian Andersen.) 

Chief artist Hamilton Luske explained the rule: “Our [humans] uninteresting progression from one situation to another must be skipped. We want to make things more interesting than ordinary life. So the characters flow—dreamlike. This works best with non-human figures—as in the dwarf caricatures, the evil queen but especially the animals.” It’s the human Snow White who is so chinless, neckless and amorphous that her “goodness” is off-putting. And the Prince also moves like a zombie. This proves it’s not the Ideal that Disney animation perfects but the opposite—the stylized vision. 

Snow White triumphantly established the way film could visualize the imagination—as when trees and frogs metamorphose into crocodiles, ghouls and skeletons. Lavish details of nature, woodland creatures proceed from the animal spiritual metaphors of Griffith’s silent era into ecstatic symbolism. Note the bluebird singing to Snow White in the house cleaning sequence—a vision that eventually influenced Happy Feet but was also distorted into ugly absurdity in Disney’s own Enchantment. Obviously, these lessons need to be relearned.


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