In the spring of 1934, Walt Disney made a decision that nearly bankrupted his studio and earned him the derisive nickname Disney's Folly from Hollywood insiders. He committed to producing the first full-length animated feature film in American history, a project that would cost over $1.4 million to complete, a sum that was ten times the budget of his average Silly Symphony short. At the time, the film industry believed that audiences would not sit through an hour and a half of cartoons, arguing that the medium was limited to six or seven minutes of entertainment. Disney ignored the warnings of his own brother Roy and his wife Lillian, who both tried to dissuade him from the gamble. He mortgaged his personal home to secure the necessary funds, betting his entire future on the idea that a solid story could sustain an audience's attention for ninety minutes. The film was originally conceived as a Silly Symphony short, but Disney realized the Brothers Grimm fairy tale had enough depth for a feature, and he formally announced the project to The New York Times in June 1934. The industry laughed, but Disney pressed on, assembling a small unit of writers to develop the story while the rest of the studio remained skeptical about the viability of the undertaking.
The Long Road To Story
The development of the script was a chaotic and iterative process that spanned over a year, during which the story underwent radical transformations. The earliest known outline, titled Manuscript, featured a Snow White who was tomboyish and a Queen who was stately and beautiful in the manner of a Benda mask. The original plot included Snow White traveling through enchanted sites like the Morass of Monsters and the Valley of the Dragons before reaching the dwarfs' cottage. In these early drafts, the Queen imprisoned the Prince in a dungeon, and he fought his way out using tricks that Doug Fairbanks would have admired. The dwarfs were originally envisioned as seven little men with over fifty potential names, including Sleepy, Hoppy, Bashful, Happy, Sneezy-Wheezy, Biggo-Ego, and Awful. Disney held weekly story meetings with writers like Richard Creedon and Larry Morey, where they debated everything from the Queen's appearance to the dwarfs' personalities. By November 1934, Disney decided to discard the comical approach that had dominated the early drafts, fearing it would lessen the plausibility of the characters. He focused the story exclusively on the relationship between the Queen and Snow White, cutting sequences that had already been animated, including a scene where the dwarfs ate soup noisily and another where they built a bed for the princess. The character of Dopey was introduced in November 1934, but he was originally very talkative until no suitable voice actor could be found, leading to the decision to make him mute. The final script emerged from this long period of reworking, where the focus shifted from the dwarfs to the Queen's jealousy and the tragic romance of the princess.