Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Notes

Alternate Versions

Disney had gotten the idea for the film when he was a newsboy in Kansas City, and he saw a major presentation of a silent film version of the story staring Marguerite Clark. The screening was held at the city's Convntion Hall in Febuary 1917, and the film was projected onto a four-sided screen using four seperate projectors. The movie made a tremendous impression on the 15-year-old viewer because he was sitting where h could see two sides of the screen at once, and thy were not quite in sync.

When Walt Disney initiated the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1934, he was a respected producer of animated cartoons, including Mickey Mouse and innovative musical shorts called Silly Symphonies. His idea for Snow White was revolutionary-an animated cartoon that would involve the audience emotionally for more than an hour.

One night in 1934, Walt told his enraptured animation staff the story of Snow White until nearly midnight. His presentation galvanized the young group, and story and character development began in earnest almost immediately.

Animation commenced in 1936, and ultimately more than 750 artists worked on the film, including 32 animators, 102 animation assistants, 107 in-betweeners, 20 layout men, 25 background artists, 65 effects animators, and 158 inkers and painters. In all, at least two million sketches were created, and more than 250,000 drawings were used on screen. The Disney paint laboratory ground special pigments and mixed 1,500 colors and shades for the characters and backgrounds.

One of the greatest challenges to the Disney team was creating a cast of characters that would be developed sufficiently to maintain the interest and sympathy of an audience. Gag man Pinto Colvig suggested creating characters based on physical or personality traits. Dozens of names were suggested and rejected; the seven were finally named Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, Dopey, and Doc.

By the time the film was near completion, bankruptcy loomed, and the survival of Walt Disney Productions rested on Snow White. Though it had earned the derisive nickname "Disney's Folly," Snow White was a smashing success-but was almost completely overlooked at Oscar time in 1938. The Academy finally recognized the film with a special Oscar in 1939.

The visual style of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a departure from the short cartoons produced by Disney to that time. Instead of bright, primary colors, Snow White had a sophisticated color palette; the backgrounds were painted in grayed-down transparent watercolors. The overall styling was evocative of the storybook illustrations of N.C. Wyeth and Arthur Rackham. Respected illustrator Gustav Tenggren contributed enormously to the overall "look" of Snow White.

Even the colors of the dwarfs' clothing match their personalities. Doc's russet jacket reflects his cheery mood, Grumpy's clothes were dulled down, and comic Dopey was dressed in saffron and lavender-gray.

In order to realistically animate the human characters in Snow White, Disney animators performed an exhaustive study of anatomy. Extensive reference footage of a live-action model named Marge Belcher (later famous as Marge Champion) was also shot to accurately create the movements of Snow White.

To achieve the realistic illusion of dimensional depth, Disney technicians developed the Multiplane Camera, which was tested in the Academy Awards-winning 1937 Silly Symphony, The Old Mill. This greater illusion of life is one of the many techniques that added credibility to Snow White.

For a while after its release, the film became the highest grossing motion piture of all time, until finially surpassed by "Gone with the Wind" a couple of years later. This stastic is all the more surpassing when one releases that children were paying a dime to get into theaters in 1937, and the film had great appeal to that age group. The original worldwide gross was $8.5 million, a figure that would translate into several hundreds of millions in today dollars. In England, the film was deemed too scary for children, and those under 16 had to be accompanied by a parent. In 1993, the reissue the film was completely restored, being the first ever to be digitized by computer, cleared up, and then printed back to film.

The Making of Snow White book and documentary is included in the Deluxe Editions of both the VHS and laserdisc. In addition, the laserdisc includes extensive still frame files and alternate audio info.

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