Ah yes! Another major animation anniversary that I was waiting all 2017 for (second to Cartoon Network’s very underwhelming 25th birthday)! 80 years ago, 20 years away from an entire CENTURY, Walt Disney unleased his terrific way of saying, “Ha! I told you pretentious naysayers I could make an hour-and-a-half-long cartoon picture! It’s a ‘folly’ no more! I’M KING OF THE CARTOON BIZ!! Well, I technically already was king of animation thanks to the mouse, but NOW I’M SUPER KING!! CHOKE ON THAT, YA JERKS!! Now excuse me as I try to figure out how to make this bratty wooden puppet as likable as that bug who crawls around him.”
That’s right! The one that started it all (for the Disney Animated Canon at least), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs! A perfect way introducing of the stereotypical Disney movie formula. The climax of Walt and his brilliant crew making a name out of themselves in the 1930s animation industry. Whether you find it a purely fun experience (‘specially on an artistic standpoint), or a dull, obnoxious sack of sugar that’s nothing more than an extended Silly Symphony due to its lack of a complex story, this film was nonetheless highly important to keeping the Disney name alive. As someone who considers this my favorite of the “Golden Age” Disney animated movies (consisting of Walt’s first five features), I could see how folks of 1937 and 1938 were left amazed by these 83 minutes of hard work. The titular dwarfs were all adorable, the Queen/Witch was…well…WICKED, the Magic Mirror was quick to pointing out that the Queen was holding a pig’s heart instead of Snow White’s, the Huntsman was a charming sissy, and just all the lively animation, beautiful artwork, and striking emotions it displayed. Overall, you couldn’t ask for a better graduation from the experimental school of Silly Symphonies.
Speaking of graduation, for the rest of this paragraph, I’m going to metaphorically describe how Snow White turned out to be a landmark in Disney’s history, by taking inspiration from the speech Ginger gave at the end of the amazing As Told by Ginger TV movie “Butterflies Are Free”. Laugh-O-Grams and Alice Comedies were the little eggs that Walt laid using his pen. Eventually, these eggs were able to hatch out two caterpillars, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (before he fell under the torturous hands of some jerk named Charles Mintz) and that delightful rodent, Mickey Mouse. Then, Mickey split into a bunch of smaller caterpillars with big plans on their minds, otherwise known as Silly Symphonies. Out of these shorts came the cocoons, a.k.a. key elements such as individual characterization, three-strip Technicolor, and nailing the multiplane camera. Finally, a flock of big, beautiful butterflies burst out of those cocoons bringing smiles to millions of theatre goers with how grand it was! And that flock of butterflies spawned other flocks for the next 80 years!
And that’s what should be respected the most about Snow White. Not the absolutely obnoxious misconception about it being “the first feature-length animated film ever” (more on that later), but how it is a great story in animation history on how Walt’s ambitious goal of creating a moving piece of art that rivals any of Mickey’s best shorts came to fruition despite skeptics in and out of Disney Studios. More than five decades later, this type of story was repeated when John Lasseter, an animator fired from Disney after pitching an all-CGI film, wanted to make an all-CGI film about toys, eventually resulting into a movie that may be even more revolutionary than Snow White, the masterpiece known as Toy Story!
Alright, now as much as I enjoy Snow White, both as its own thing and as a cherished piece of film history, I would like to politely get this little problem regarding this film of my way…
WILL YOU PEOPLE STOP CLAIMING THAT SNOW WHITE IS THE WORLD’S FIRST FEATURE-LENGTH ANIMATED MOVIE EVER MADE?!?
Hon! Est! Ly!
Look, I know that 1917’s Argentine El Apostol has been lost for DECADES (possibly forever, I’m afraid), and that the oldest-surviving animated feature, Germany’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is just plain obscure (even if it apparently made a huge impact on Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar), but you shouldn’t have to be a professional animation buff like Jerry Beck in order to believe that there were at least EIGHT animated features from various foreign countries made within TWO DECADES before Snow White. Ah-ah-ah! I see you reaching for the keyboard in order to type, “uh, but is it at least the first animated movie with sound and color?”! Wrong, and double wrong! 1931’s Peludopolis, another Argentine movie, had a synchronized soundtrack provided by Vitaphone, and Prince Achmed had its film soaked in blue dye.
“Okay, well isn’t at the VERY least the first animated feature from Disney specifically?” you might ask. Well, to be honest, that’s where things get tricky. From what I discovered this year (or maybe last year), there was a 41-minute…thing, titled Academy Award Review of Walt Disney Cartoons, a compilation of Oscar-winning Silly Symphonies (with no bridging segments as far as I can tell) produced to promote Snow White seven months before its premiere. But considering its short length, it isn’t considered a true feature film by institutes like AFI (yet the one-minute-longer Saludos Amigos is). Heck, not even the official Disney encyclopedia by Dave Smith included it as an entry! So…in other words, if you want to believe Snow White was Disney’s first movie, that’s perfectly fine. I’m certainly with you on that. But still, remember that other thing exists, too? (tilts head like Dr. Hutchinson from Rocko’s Modern Life) ‘Kay?
If you want to visit an article that does a better job at debunking that myth, I highly recommend you visit the Big Cartoon DataBase. Not only did they prove Snow White wasn’t the first animated film, but they also debunked other misconceptions, including Steamboat Willie being the first sound cartoon, Flowers and Trees as the first color cartoon ever, and even Disney being the first to use a multiplane camera. And if you don’t feel like reading (if so, then how the hell did you made it this far into THIS article you’re on right now, genius?), then I highly recommend you watch this video made by a creator named Pop Arena, who is also doing an in-depth, program-by-program history series on Nickelodeon.
So, Disney is a phenomenal provider of animation, there’s no doubt about that. But occasionally, I can’t help but interpret them as the one kid in class who gets all the credit for a big school project that others had worked on, too. Walt himself gets too much credit as well; technically speaking, he wasn’t even that much of a legit animator than he was a film producer. By the time he hired people like Ub Iwerks and Friz Freleng in the mid-20s, Walt gave up on hand-animating his own shorts. Also, he never directed any of his animated features, especially not after he failed to direct one Silly Symphony titled The Golden Touch, which apparently turned out to be a disaster. I’ve seen the short two years ago, but it wasn’t that bad.
In short, when it comes to making the products that he had the most success with during his lifetime, Walt barely did jack crap. Almost all of the credit belong to the many hard-working artists who worked at Disney during the Golden and Silver Ages, including Ub, the Nine Old Men, Joe Grant, Bill Tytla, Grim Gatwick, Art Babbitt, and my man, Floyd Norman.
Misconceptions aside, Snow White, and Disney feature animation in general, turning 80 truly is an important animation milestone to acknowledge this year. And what more can I say about Disney’s significance in keeping animation alive? They may not have always been first, but if there is one thing they DO deserve credit for, it’s perfection! Perfection of the slightly overlooked medium of animation! And that’s why, eight months before this anniversary, I put a lot of heart and soul into this massive beauty of a collage:
Originally, I wanted screenshots of each film to make up the collage, before deciding that digitally-painting the characters on FireAlpaca in a style reminiscent of the Disney Golden Books was a much more special execution. Outside of the big #80, we got the birthday girl, Snow White herself, centered in between the ‘8’ and ‘0’. I would bad if Mickey was excluded, so there he is in his famous apprentice outfit on the bottom left corner. Besides, he does appear at the beginning of several VHS tapes of Disney movies, right? Tinker Bell was also a mandatory inclusion to the picture, since she’s the company’s second mascot after Mickey. Finally, I’ll address the inclusions of the Reluctant Dragon, a Mary Poppins penguin, Roger Rabbit, Jack and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the one and only Buzz Lightyear. They’re honorable mentions, essentially. Walt Disney Animation Studios did take part in development and/or production of those films, whether they’d be fully animating the characters of Roger and co., or collaborating a little bit with Pixar in conceiving Toy Story. And like I said earlier, the story of Toy Story is quite reminiscent of that of Snow White.
Oh, and I managed to blend the man himself into the starry sky, and have the iconic 1985-2006 castle on the bottom right! All of this make up a magic tribute!
Well, that does it for 2017, everyone! It’s been a crazy year for me, in terms of my art improving and becoming semi-popular on Twitter. Here’s an artistic lookback on my year:
D.J. Berry 