Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs arrived at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles on the 21st of December, 1937, and the audience rose to its feet before the final frame had faded. Among those in that standing ovation were Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, and Charles Laughton. Six days later, Walt Disney and seven small illustrated figures appeared together on the cover of Time magazine. No animated feature film had ever been made before in the United States. The film industry had called the whole venture "Disney's Folly," and Disney's own wife and brother had begged him to stop. He had mortgaged his house to keep production going. What possessed a man to risk everything on a fairy tale his studio had barely the skills to tell? And how did a film built on doubt, financial panic, and an experimental art class in the Hollywood Hills end up holding the record for the highest-grossing animated film of all time, adjusted for inflation?

• 2. From Silly Shorts to Feature Dreams

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  Walt Disney first conceived of making a feature-length film in 1933, at a time when his studio lived entirely on animated short films. The Silly Symphonies series was popular, but Disney believed the shorts could not generate enough profit to grow his studio. He wanted something larger: elaborate plots, real character development, what he called expanded "storytelling possibilities." The earliest candidates were surprising. Mary Pickford proposed an animated and live-action version of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but Paramount Pictures began their own version and the plan collapsed. Disney then turned to Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," imagining Will Rogers in the lead, only for Paramount to again block the way by holding the rights. Even Felix Salten's Bambi was offered to Disney around this time, though he declined, feeling his studio lacked the technical readiness. After the Silly Symphony short Three Little Pigs became a hit in May 1933, Disney quietly began planting the idea among his staff one conversation at a time, what he later called a "slow infiltration." He had decided on Brothers Grimm's fairy tale "Snow White" by the spring of 1934. He had known the story since his teens, having seen the 1916 silent film version, which he later cited as the deciding reason for the choice.

• 3. Disney's Folly Takes Shape

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  On the 30th of October, 1934, Disney gathered his animators on the studio sound stage and, for three hours, acted out the entire story of Snow White himself. He played every character. He concluded the performance by announcing their first feature film. The official budget estimate Disney gave to The New York Times in June 1934 was $250,000 - roughly ten times the cost of a Silly Symphony short. That figure did not hold. The actual total came to $1,488,422.74. The project the staff called "Disney's Folly" and that Hollywood moguls said could never work - Ward Kimball recalled being told by insiders that bright colors would hurt eyes and audiences would walk out after six minutes - ran so far over budget that Disney needed a $250,000 loan midway through production. He ran a rough cut for Joseph Rosenberg of Bank of America, who sat without expression through the screening. Then Rosenberg turned to Disney and said, "Walt, that thing is going to make a hatful of money," and approved the loan. Both Disney's wife Lillian and his brother Roy had tried and failed to talk him out of the project entirely.

• 4. Building the Seven

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  The earliest known story outline, compiled by staff writer Richard Creedon on the 9th of August, 1934, ran to twenty-one pages and already contained a suggestion for the song "Some Day My Prince Will Come." The dwarfs were Disney's primary obsession from the start. He considered them the "strongest lure" of the story and insisted from the beginning that each have a distinct personality tied to a name. The first pool of possibilities exceeded fifty names, including Sleepy, Hoppy, Bashful, Happy, Sneezy-Wheezy, Biggo-Ego, and Awful. By October 9th of that year, weekly story meetings had narrowed the roster to Wheezy, Jumpy, Baldy, Grumpy, Happy, Doc, and Sleepy, with alternates still circulating: Hickey, Sniffy, Stuffy, Burpy, Tubby, Dizzy, and Dopey. Dopey arrived in an outline from November 16th and ultimately became the most successful characterization in the film. He had originally been written as very talkative. No suitable voice actor could be found. Mel Blanc was tried without success. The solution was to make him mute, communicating only through sounds and pantomime. Disney was so strict about the dwarfs' treatment that he insisted throughout production that writers refer to them only as "seven little men." Several fully animated sequences featuring them were cut before release because they slowed the story, including a scene of the dwarfs eating soup messily and an elaborate bed-building sequence. Animator Ward Kimball, who had animated both scenes, was so discouraged he considered leaving the studio; Disney kept him by promising he would supervise Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio (1940).

• 5. Casting and the Art of the Voice

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  Adriana Caselotti became Snow White almost by accident. Disney's casting director Roy Scott telephoned her father - a vocal coach in Los Angeles - searching for voice talent. Caselotti overheard the call and recommended herself. Disney was impressed but still auditioned roughly 150 other actresses and singers, including Deanna Durbin, whom he rejected for sounding too mature. Virginia Davis was nearly hired for the speaking voice before she found the contract unacceptable. Caselotti was finally cast in September 1935, exactly one year after her first audition. She recorded her first tracks on the 20th of January, 1936, was called in for forty-four days of recording over two years, and was paid $20 per day - a total of $970. For the Queen, the studio auditioned over a dozen actresses before settling on Lucille La Verne, who had played similar characters in Orphans of the Storm and A Tale of Two Cities. Some on Disney's staff felt she sounded "a little old," but she silenced doubts in the audition for the Witch role by removing her false teeth, transforming her voice into something rough enough to satisfy the animators. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was La Verne's final film before her death in 1942. Billy Gilbert, who was cast as Sneezy, heard about the production through a Variety article, telephoned Disney directly, and was hired on the spot after performing his signature sneezing routine for the studio.

• 6. European Eyes, American Pencils

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  Three European artists shaped the visual world of Snow White in ways that American-trained animators alone could not have managed. By 1936, Albert Hurter, who had academic art training, was supervising all art direction on the film. Every character costume, layout, and background had to meet his approval before being finalized. His influence gave the film its Germanic look, weaving in European illustration and painting techniques. Ferdinand Horvath had been at the studio since 1934 and worked as an inspirational sketch artist, generating darker concepts that proved harder to translate into animation than Hurter's designs. Horvath did not receive a credit on the finished film. Gustaf Tenggren arrived in the spring of 1936 as the color stylist, determining the atmosphere of entire scenes. His style drew from Arthur Rackham and John Bauer, and he also designed the film's theatrical posters. The challenge of animating Snow White herself fell to Grim Natwick, who had trained in Europe and had designed Betty Boop for Fleischer Studios. Earlier attempts to animate a realistic human female - specifically Persephone in the Silly Symphony short The Goddess of Spring - had failed to convince. Natwick's work in Cookie Carnival showed enough promise that he was assigned Snow White. Adding color to Snow White's and the Queen's faces presented its own technical crisis. The solution involved a red dye applied with a small piece of cotton wrapped around a tipple pencil on each individual cel. Helen Ogger, an ink department employee, developed and executed the method. It was so labor-intensive that it was never replicated on the same scale again after Ogger left the studio in 1941.

• 7. Opening Night and Its Aftermath

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  On the 21st of December, 1937, the Carthay Circle Theatre premiere gave Snow White a standing ovation. Three weeks later the film opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York City and at a Miami theater in January 1938, with strong box office sales prompting RKO Radio Pictures to move the film into general release on the 4th of February. It displaced Al Jolson's The Singing Fool from the record of the most successful sound film ever made. That record stood until December 1939, when Gone with the Wind overtook it. The film premiered in London on the 24th of February, 1938 - the same night Charles Laughton opened his own first film as producer, Vessel of Wrath, and drew a poor turnout as audiences chose Snow White. By the end of its original theatrical run, international box office receipts reached $7,846,000 according to RKO, earning the distributor a profit of $380,000. Film directors Sergei Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin publicly praised the film; Eisenstein called it the greatest film ever made. The following year, at the 11th Academy Awards, Disney received a unique honorary Oscar - one full-size statuette and seven miniature ones - presented by ten-year-old Shirley Temple. The honor recognized Snow White as "a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field." Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, responding directly to the film's success, moved ahead with its own fantasy production, The Wizard of Oz, released in 1939.

• 8. Preservation and Permanence

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  In 1989, the United States Library of Congress named Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it among the first twenty-five films preserved in the National Film Registry. Four years later, in 1993, Snow White became the first film in history to be entirely scanned to digital files, manipulated, and recorded back to film - a restoration carried out at 4K resolution and 10-bit color depth using the Cineon system. The American Film Institute placed it at number 34 on its 100 greatest American films list and named it the greatest American animated film of all time in 2008. On the 28th of October, 1994, the film became the inaugural release in the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection on home video; by 1995 it had sold 24 million VHS and LaserDisc units. Its DVD release on the 9th of October, 2001 sold one million copies within twenty-four hours. A new 4K restoration, scanned from the original 35mm Technicolor negative, was released on the 10th of October, 2023, making Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the oldest feature-length animated film ever released in the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray format. The film's copyright will expire in the United States on the 1st of January, 2033, when it will enter the public domain.