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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Disney Studios, 1937

83 minutes, color

Based on the fable "Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs" as told by the Brothers Grimm in Kinder-und Hausmarchen (c. 1812)

Click here for the introductory slideshow

Scenes for study (require RealPlayer, available as free download from www.real.com)

• Snow White's narrow escape

• The Queen's demise

"Magic mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?" asks the Wicked Queen in this, the first full-length animated feature both in color and with direct sound.  The answer: Snow White, that virginal, virtuous, impossibly cleanly--and cosmetically improbable--heroine of the first of Disney's many successful full-length animated features.  As in later films Pinocchio, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and others, Disney turned to a well-known children's story for source material, adapting its telling not only to prevailing cultural expectations and morés--but to the studio's own artistic, commercial, and technological needs.

Dubbed "Disney's Folly" by its detractors, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a remarkable success, its hundreds of thousands of handcrafted drawings eventually yielding over eight million dollars in box office receipts (a stunning performance for the time) and impressing skeptical audiences worldwide with pioneering, vibrant animation.

Disney was adamant about maintaining the entirety of the Grimm Brothers' title (he would not allow his film's title to be truncated to merely "Snow White"), but he also engineered a number of substantive changes to story elements in his adaptation, changes which significantly alter the thematics of the tale being told.

Links

• The Grimm Brothers' fable
• Detailed plot summary by Tim Dirks
• What Our Daughters See in Disney Movies, by Arnie Rincover, from a site called "The Career Doctor"
• An interview with cultural critic Carl Hiassen, author of Team Rodent
• A little levity: Politically Correct Snow White for the '90s

Questions for discussion

1. In production for three years and finally released in winter of 1937, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs sits at the historical intersection of sound and color technologies. We've studied three films from this era (this, Lang's M, and Chaplin's Modern Times): how were the three auteurs' approaches to the prospects of direct sound similar to, or different from, each other?
2. In his article "Breaking the Disney Spell," Jack Zipes lists seven major changes Disney induced in adapting the Grimm Brothers' telling.  Of these changes, which seem to create new meanings and/or effects, and (you knew I'd ask this) what precisely are those meanings and effects?
3. Think through the adaptations we've studied so far--Letter from an Unknown Woman and Stagecoach.  To what extent can a filmmaker "stray from" source material and still claim the adaptation to tell the same story (whether that original be a novel, a story, a biography, a play, or a fable)?
4. According to Arnie Rincover's brief article "What Our Daughters See in Disney Movies," Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs conveys these messages: "beauty is all-important, cooking is the province of women (and the way to a man's heart), and only men can save women from their troubles."  Zipes further suggests that the film follows "the classic 'sexist' narrative about the framing of women's lives through a male discourse..., [pitting] women against women in competition for male approval (the mirror) of their beauty that is short-lived" (36).  Is Disney's heroine a mere reflection of the prevailing cultural attitudes of the film's era?  Or does Disney's heroine--like other Disney heroines--help shape the prevailing cultural attitudes of an era?
5. What would the film's themes about the virtues of hard work, solidarity, cheerfulness, and industriousness have meant to a Depression-era audience?
6. Assess Disney's animation style: Do shots and cuts follow the "grammar" of live-action cinematography, or do they confound viewer expectations? Do color and sound work to provide verisimilitude, subjective expressionism, or pure fantasy? Are animals and nonhuman elements anthropomorphized (given human characteristics and emotions), or are they simply part of a realistic background?
7. "Disney" has become, of course, more than the last name of Walt, that ambitious animator from Kansas City; even aside from the omnipresent marketing of the Magic Kingdom, the word "Disney" now denotes a mega-mega-corporation, one that owns major news and cable networks (ABC, ESPN), sports teams, theme parks (worldwide!), whole "towns" ("Celebration, USA"), and, some say, touches nearly every aspect of contemporary life. (Check out the brief interview with cultural critic Carl Hiassen, author of Team Rodent, for an overview of this perspective.)   What is it that "Disney" (in the broader sense) teaches or means?
8. Which of the various critical approaches to interpreting film (formal/technical, auteurist, feminist, psychological, genre, etc.) seems most useful in understanding Snow White and the seven Dwarfs, and what meaning(s) does it yield?
9. Does Snow White--like other "Disneyfied" versions of folk tales--qualify itself, as some suggest, as simply one more kind of folklore, not unlike the Grimm Brothers' written version (or the oral fable that preceded theirs, or the English translation that followed it)?  Or does the sheer potency and pervasiveness of "The Disney Spell" make this (and other) film versions somehow a more "false" or a more "true" telling of the story?