Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Walt Disney (DVD)
When Walt Disney’s Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs won the New York Film Critics Circle Award in 1937
(followed by an honorary Oscar) it announced a milestone in motion picture
animation. The immensely popular film also became immensely influential, which
is something that cannot be claimed for the routinely praised animated films of
our era such as The Lion King, Finding Nemo and Wall-E. Remember how Roger Ebert rang the heavens for Beauty and the Beast? Snow White’s
significance holds up well in Disney’s newly—vividly—restored new DVD.
And though this classic is often dramatically inert, its artful
stylization remains impressive. Instead of compartmentalizing Disney’s
signature animated features (the three masterworks Fantasia, Pinocchio and
Dumbo) as an outmoded approach, Snow White brings back the beginning
of a classical style and the reason why it mattered. On the DVD commentary,
animator John Canemaker pays homage by comparing the film to Birth of a
Nation and then Citizen Kane “for staging ideas” (Canemaker doesn’t
say, but he surely means the presentation of Xanadu) and the programming of
musical numbers and fantasy in The Wizard of Oz.
More precisely, Snow White set the template for animating
universal fantasy, the western visionary heritage. This would even apply to
such Japanese animation as Miyazaki but Snow White shows the reason
people rarely go back to those films. Here is the foundation of how the modern
world mentally interpreted those old folktales. It isn’t simply that Disney
dominated the animation mainstream; his house-style of figuration and his
formula for style was a translation of the Brothers Grim. (The Little
Mermaid was a bowdlerization of Hans Christian Andersen.)
Chief artist Hamilton Luske explained the rule: “Our [humans]
uninteresting progression from one situation to another must be skipped. We
want to make things more interesting than ordinary life. So the characters
flow—dreamlike. This works best with non-human figures—as in the dwarf
caricatures, the evil queen but especially the animals.” It’s the human Snow
White who is so chinless, neck-less and amorphous that her “goodness” is
off-putting. And the Prince also moves like a zombie. This proves it’s not the
Ideal that Disney animation perfects but the opposite—the stylized vision.
Snow White triumphantly established the way film could visualize
the imagination—as when trees and frogs metamorphose into crocodiles, ghouls
and skeletons. Lavish details of nature, woodland creatures proceed from the
animal spiritual metaphors of Griffith’s silent era into ecstatic symbolism.
Note the bluebird singing to Snow White in the house cleaning sequence—a vision
that eventually influenced Happy Feet but was also distorted into ugly
absurdity in Disney’s own Enchantment. Obviously, these lessons need to
be relearned.
