The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Animation, musical

DIRECTOR

David Hand

WRITERS

Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Rickard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De Maris, Dorothy Ann Blank, Webb Smith (screenplay); Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm (fairy tale)

STARS

Adriana Caselotti, Lucille La Verne, Moroni Olsen

BEFORE

1928 Disney releases the Mickey Mouse short Steamboat Willie, its first sound cartoon.

AFTER

1950 Disney revisits Grimms’ fairy tales with Cinderella.

2013 Disney’s Frozen, loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, is an enormous hit.

Released in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first full-length movie made by the Walt Disney Company. Disney sought to combine the slapstick tone of its successful short movies with an injection of the macabre by turning to one of the Grimm Brothers’ most famous fairy tales, the story of an evil queen hunting an innocent girl who is declared “the fairest of all” by a magic mirror. This set the template for Disney movies for the next 80 years, from Cinderella to Frozen.

Adding jeopardy

One of the challenges for filmmakers making children’s movies is to keep the material appropriate for the audience, while at the same time investing it with enough jeopardy to create tension. Snow White deliberately terrifies its young viewers, from the sequence where Snow White panics in the woods as the trees come alive, to the scenes in which the malevolent Queen gleefully plots the girl’s death. By the time the prince awakens the heroine with a kiss, evil has been vanquished, and fear conquered. Disney realized that, without the authenticity of conflict, the happy resolution at the end would never be heartfelt.

Snow White hides from the wicked Queen in the dwarfs’ home. She cooks and cleans for them, and also makes them wash their hands.

What else to watch: Fantasia (1940) ✵ Pinocchio (1940) ✵ Dumbo (1941) ✵ Cinderella (1950) ✵ Beauty and the Beast (1991) ✵ Frozen (2013)