"Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs" (1937)

The most exciting motion picture news of 1937 was when Walt Disney completed and produced his first full length feature production in Technicolour. An entirely new form of storytelling, it was the most daring adventure in screen entertainment since the first motion picture. Its credits titles were the longest in cinema history and audiences realised for the first time the tremendous amount of manpower required for the its production.

It is only in the recent months that I actually watched this original Snow White film. I have always loved Disney movies, having enjoyed many of them when I was younger, but somehow I never got around to seeing this particular one. Of course I knew the story, and had read books of it when I was younger, but had never actually seen this one.

I can’t say I care too much for the actual story. If I’m being honest, I think it’s downright sexist. For one thing, Grumpy quite blatantly passes various sexist remarks towards women, and none of them are later contradicted, but rather, almost reinforced. Snow White’s character is perceived as weak, fragile, naive and helpless. Her happiness comes from the ability to clean the house and look after seven men while they go out to work every day. When faced with a crisis she is unable to help herself, but “can only” and must be saved by “true love’s kiss” aka a man. There are only two women actually in this story; Snow White, and her “evil” Stepmother. Both are polar opposites. It is worth noting that incidentally the woman with power is perceived as evil and vengeful, while the one with no power is the heroine of the hour. The whole story is based on the belief that beauty is everything and without beauty, both women are useless and have nothing in the world. The only reason the dwarfs took such a shine to Snow White was because of her beauty, otherwise they would have thrown her out for intruding. The stepmother then goes about tricking Snow White by putting a spell on herself to turn her into an old woman...of course making herself ugly as it would seem “ugly” is perceived as being more threatening. The only good thing about apple incident is, it teaches kids not to talk to strangers, no matter how nice they may first seem! They may as well take something out of the film because everything else should be completely ignored as it’s giving kids the wrong idea altogether.

However, rant now over, I think the story aside, the actual production and mechanisms behind creating this film are incredible. The amount of work, devotion and determination that must have gone into making it is astonishing and even quite fascinating.

The basic principle of animation is drawing little figures on a series of pages in a pad, flicking them, and seeing how they move! Of course, one needs a story too! This job was handed to the Disney writers and sketch artists, and after much trial and error, several hundred rough drawings were completed. Following this, a director would have gone through the story and artwork a final time before calling in a musical composer to plan the score for the picture, timing out each scene carefully, and sometimes even acting out every movable action so that the men working with him would have been able to visualise what the scene would look like on the screen.

This is followed by the animators drawing every movement in complete detail just as it would be seen in the theatre. Each animator’s drawing board would have been lighted from below so that they could look through the paper at the previous character they would have outlined, and drawn the next character in correct position. A mirror was used to capture trickier facial expressions.

The test-camera-department was up next. Here, the animators’ rough drawings would have been photographed in sequence, one at a time. This film would then be developed and returned to the animator to check how good it is by running it in a small projection machine called a Moviola. Once ok, the thousands of pencil drawings went to the inking department where hundreds of people coloured the drawings with sheets of transparent celluloid. Then they would have painstakingly traced every line of every drawing in ink.

Finally, the picture would have moved to the studio laboratory where, for Snow White specifically, over 1500 shades of colour were developed through special formulas. The ink celluloids then went to the painting department to be applied to the pages. Snow White required over 250 thousand celluloids to be painted. In another department artists would have delicately painted the backgrounds and stage-settings for the picture. These backgrounds were done in water colour. They would have worked for months on the interior of the dwarfs’ cottage alone.

The backgrounds and celluloids would then have been photographed by what was known as a master-camera in technicolour. (Technicolour is a process of colour cinematography using synchronized monochrome films, each of a different colour, to produce a colour print). This would have been done by placing a celluloid down on the background and the overhead camera coming down over it to expose one frame of film at a time. In order for Snow White to be photographed, the operation had to be repeated more than half a million times.

The sound effects would have been recorded next. These were done through varied and creative means, from dropping a sheet of metal from the height of a ladder, to knocking a pile of timber boxes, to acquire the specific sounds needed. A symphony orchestra would then have recorded the film’s score.

Apparently more than 3 million paintings and drawings were created by Walt Disney and his staff of artists to complete this motion picture at a cost of more than 1.5 million dollars.

Final conclusion? Personally, I just don’t like the story and I think it sets a terrible example for what kids should aspire or look up to...That being said, it is a classic and is the first Disney movie, so for that, and being able to appreciate what went into making it, I would say it is worth watching. If nothing else, just to be able to say you watched it!

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