Alas, quite the opposite happened, and a popular artform was born. Disney had already established himself as a master of animation, with his “Silly Symphonies” redefining the relationship between sound and image and introducing the viewing audience to the wonders of Technicolor throughout the 1930s. His work was hugely popular with audiences, and he had also attracted doting admirers among other filmmakers and artists, including Charles Chaplin, who labeled Dopey “one of the greatest comedians of all time,” and the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, who traveled to the U.S. during the 1930s and spent a great deal of time studying Disney (Eisenstein would later use many elements of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in his own films, particularly Ivan the Terrible).

Like most of Disney’s early animated films, Snow White is based on a fairy tale, in this case one of the most well-known of the Brothers Grimm. Yet, it was not the first time that this particular story had been adapted to the screen; in fact, Disney had been inspired to make movies after he saw the 1916 silent version of Snow White starring Marguerite Clark in Kansas City when he was 15 years old. Nevertheless, Disney’s musical take on the ages-old story (there are variations of it in virtually every country in Europe) has become the defining one, and not just because it was the first time that specific names and unique personalities had been assigned to the seven dwarfs. Rather, it is because Disney and his talented team of animators and designers recognized how such a simple story could be used as a framework for expanding the evocative beauty of animation.

Make no mistake: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is one of the richest, most beautifully animated films ever made, and Disney spared no expense and tackled every challenge with a mixture of creativity and clever technology (including the multiplane camera, which Disney had experimented with as early as 1933 to create a sense of depth in the animated image). What is most amazing about the film is the leap it represents in the art of animation when compared to the crude illustrations of Steamboat Willie (1927), which introduced both Mickey Mouse and synchronized sound in an animated film a mere 10 years earlier.

What is equally intriguing about Snow White is the breadth of tones it encompasses—everything from broad slapstick comedy (the dwarfs’ bumbling antics), to syrupy sentimentalism (Snow White, voiced by Adriana Caselotti, singing “I’m Wishing” into an echoing wishing well or virtually any scene involving the woodland creatures), to outright horror (which follows in line with Disney’s “Silly Symphony” cartoons, many of which are undeniably creepy in their depictions of cannibalistic witches, reanimated skeletons, and mad doctors). Indeed, it is not accidental that the godfather of Italian horror, director Mario Bava, has cited Snow White as one of his primary influences and recreated its most infamous scary sequence—Snow White’s terrified flight through a forest that grows increasingly threatening with leering eyes and scowling trees ripping at her clothes—in his film Black Sunday (1960). The scare factor in Snow White remains even today, lending credence to the possibly apocryphal story that all the seats in the New York theater that originally screened the film had to be replaced because so many children had wet their pants in fear.

The presence of death is certainly everywhere in Snow White, both directly and indirectly. At the very beginning of the story we are informed of the nefarious intentions of Snow White’s evil stepmother, the Queen (Lucille La Vern), which immediately suggests that the deaths, somewhere off-screen before the story proper begins, of both her mother (hence the existence of a step-mother) and her father, the King (hence the Queen’s unchallenged power), are the Queen’s doing. Snow White herself is constantly threatened by death, first by the Huntsman (Stuart Buchanan) who the Queen sends to kill her in the forest, and then by the Queen herself in the guise of an old hag. While the Queen eventually gets her just desserts in a harrowing sequence at the film’s climax that finds her plummeting to her death from a stony ledge and then crushed beneath a falling boulder (all off-screen, of course, but still pretty grisly), it is not just the evil who die in Snow White. Althouh we do not see exactly what happens to the Huntsman when he returns to the castle after having failed to kill Snow White, we get the gist of it when the Queen walks blithely past a skeleton whose his bony arm is stretched out toward a cup just beyond its grasp (thus also suggesting torture of the cruelest sort).

Thus, even though we often think of Snow White fondly as a romanticized fairy tale that helped establish the basic template for all cinematic fairy tales to come, it is actually a much more complex achievement that balances more tonal shifts in its brief 84 minutes that most epic films. Some of it has not worn particularly well over time, most notably Snow White’s overly little-girlish voice, which is clearly at odds with her visual presentation as a young woman and helped establish the rather troubling Disney trend of combining interior girlishness with exterior female sexuality in their heroines. Nevertheless, the film’s overall effect is undeniable, not only on the history of cinema as a whole, but in each new viewing that reveals another dimension or additional detail, the sum total of which is one of the true cinematic masterpieces.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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