Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Year: 1937
Rating: Approved
Length: 83 minutes / 1.38 hours
The more classic Disney movies I watch with my kids, the more I pick up on the animation breakthroughs each film brought forth. They’re mostly hidden to the untrained eye, but realizing things like how colorful Sleeping Beauty (1959) looks or noticing early CGI use in The Little Mermaid (1989) highlights how innovative Disney was in their Golden and Renaissance eras. And the movie that kicked everything off was none other than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
Story-wise, Snow White is your basic Grimm fairy tale put through the Disney filter to make it not quite as terrifying to young kids (although it still has its moments). Nothing extraordinary, but it lends itself to a few interesting animation techniques—some of which I still scratch my head trying to figure out how they pulled it off. Mainly, the human characters look a little weird compared to the more cartoonish ones because they were roto-scoped from prerecorded performances, ensuring the proportions and movements were natural. This leads to a small amount of the uncanny valley, but it’s not so much that you’re turned off by it.
While there are technical marvels I have yet to deduce how Disney pulled off (like the well water effects when Snow White is singing), the simple fact remains that a movie of this scale was also unheard of at the time. Most animation took so long to accomplish that a full-length movie (albeit a short one at 83 minutes) was unheard of. You can tell they went all out in all the little details and massive amounts of movement—just the dancing sequence in the Dwarfs’ home and all the individual animals needing animation just boggles my mind. If any movie in Disney’s filmography most showed off what they could do, Snow White was it.
A technical marvel that still mostly stands up today, I give Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 4.0 stars out of 5.
