110. Snow White (1937)

Produced By Walt Disney

Synopsis

Come on! Orphan girl gets taken in by bunch o'freaks. Gets poisoned by frustrated beauty queen. Necrophiliac takes her away to his palace.

Review

I am sure that if not all of you have watched this, probably most of you have. My first memory of watching it was as a little child, about 3 years old in a cinema on some kind of re-release. I was freaked by the evil queen. Really freaked.

Watching it later you watch it with other eyes, Dopey is most likely suffering from cretinism for example, Snow White is slightly annoying, and it is never explained why the prince would want to lean onto a coffin and snog a corpse. All of this just makes the story even creepier but makes you side with the Queen's plan to get rid of the lot.

One major quibble with the film is the fact that it is probably 20 minutes too short, there's so much time wasted on the admittedly great songs that there is not enough space for plot development. The events from Snow White's poisoning until the end are just unashamedly rushed.

This said, no one can take one thing away from the film: the fact that it is an amazing achievement in animation even today. The characters' movements, the lighting, the water, everything is perfect, albeit in a very 30's style. Another great plus of this film is its soundtrack, the way the images go with the sound is really good, and this doesn't just apply to the set pieces. The instrumental parts during a chase or when White runs away after the hunter tries to kill her work perfectly with what is going on on film. In the end it is a film a lot more about style than content, but what style!

There's no way to get a good version of this on DVD, there was a limited version released some years ago which goes for about 50 pounds, 100 dollars now. I got my version from Korea, it comes in a lovely box stating that it is "Latinum Edition", with the tag line "Still The Fairest Of The Mall". Which is just priceless, it is also marked PG 13 for martial arts violence and sexual content. It also states it has bucket loads of special features, which is a lie, there's none. My CD also came with some scratches which really impaired a couple of scenes in the film. Still, it cost me 2 pounds instead of 50. If this is how Disney wants their films to be watched good on them.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Walt Disney had to fight to get the film produced. Both his brother Roy Disney and his wife Lillian attempted to talk him out of it, and the Hollywood movie industry mockingly referred to the film as "Disney's Folly" while it was in production. He even had to mortgage his house to help finance the film's production, which eventually ran up a total cost of just over $1.5 million, a whopping sum for a feature film in 1937.

Snow White, which spent three years in production, was the end result of Walt Disney's plan to improve the production quality of his studio's output, and also to find a source of income other than short subjects. Many animation techniques which later became standards were developed or improved for the film, including the animation of realistic humans (with and without the help of the rotoscope), effective character animation (taking characters that look similar — the dwarves, in this case — and making them distinct characters through their body acting and movement), elaborate effects animation to depict rain, lightning, water, reflections, sparkles, magic, and other objects and phenomena, and the use of the multiplane camera. Snow White is also looked upon as a triumph of storytelling skill in animation.


Snow White as She should be NSFW(somehow Americans got a disgraced tabloid editor as a talent contest judge, good on them... were all other Brits busy?):



And here's a deleted scene from the film, The Soup Song:



LESS SONGS, MORE PLOT! (was my girlfriend's cry at the end of the film).