OFF TO WORK WE GO!
Bright morning sunrise on the dwarfs’ cottage. The animals sleeping outside the front door, including a deer snoozing on the stoop, are startled awake at the click of the doorhandle’s turn. They scatter. Doc emerges followed by Snow White. He warns her to beware the witchcraft of the Queen. The princess reassures him, lifts his cap and kisses him sweetly on his baldpate. Quickly recovering from his customary befuddlement, Doc summons within, urging his fellow dwarfs onward to their new day’s mining. Bashful is first in line and suffers the expected deep blush after Snow White’s kiss. Inside at the end of the line, Grumpy observes this new ritual and declares it “disgusting”. With her next kiss the princess momentarily suppresses Sneezy’s sneeze, but it comes anyway and blows next-in-line Dopey back into the cottage. He quickly re-emerges, head tilted back, lips in a big pucker. Snow White gently uses his ears as handles to lower his face and kisses him on top of his head. As Sleepy moves into position for his kiss, Dopey dazzled and dizzy dashes back into the cottage through a window and emerges a second time right behind departing Sleepy, again head back lips puckered. Surprised and amused, the princess gives in and kisses him as previously, yet even before she can complete her admonishment “But that’s the last–!” Dopey has departed and returned – this third time accompanied by a “sprong!” – head tilted, lips puckered, tugging on her skirt – but instead of kissing him Snow White gently prods him along after the others. Happy’s kiss is not seen, presumably happening while our attention gets diverted to Grumpy inside. He has removed his hat and examining the reflection of his brow in the bottom of a hanging pan, polishes his forehead for receiving his kiss, thereby betraying an unsuspected softening in his regard for this “woman”. During his grooming, the other dwarfs are heard in the distance singing “Heigh-ho Heigh-ho” and presumed to be marching off to work without their cantankerous colleague.
Grumpy emerges from the cottage and removes his hat, ready for his farewell kiss, but Snow White is facing away waving to the others who have gone on ahead. Marching in place behind her, hat in hand, and after several impatient “ahem!”s, he attracts her attention and starts admonishing her not to let “nobody ’r nothin’ in the house.” Snow White takes his instruction as evidence that he does care for her and grabbing him by the ears against his struggle she plants a big tweak of a kiss on his brow.
There follows a stunning scene of animation by Bill Tytla showing the dwarf’s repeated humiliations as he tries to dismiss this new feeling of affection for Snow White. He pulls away from her and starts stomping angrily off but has not gotten far before the experience of her kiss begins to melt his heart. Tytla manages to show this complicated emotion through a series of revealing expressions on the dwarf’s face.
…Grumpy was an obvious vehicle for Tytla’s animation; and it was through his animation of Grumpy that Tytla was giving shape to his distinctive ideas about cartoon acting.[1]
Michael Barrier in his definitive book Hollywood Cartoons about animation during the Twentieth Century reveals that Tytla was familiar with the new “method” acting championed at Russia’s Moscow Art Theater by Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) and promulgated in Hollywood via a 1933 publication by Richard Boleslavsky (1889-1937) titled Acting: the First Six Lessons. Tytla owned a copy. Basically it recommends that a character’s psychology must be expressed on stage physically – in body movement, facial expression – and becomes memorized and repeatedly performed by an actor through real emotional association with that character’s presumed feelings. In his drawings Tytla succeeded in capturing those physical expressions of Grumpy’s emotions.
Whatever passed through Grumpy’s mind, it seemed, was simultaneously visible in his face and body, through acting of a kind that was possible only with a cartoon character.[2]
Grumpy sighs, smiles and gazes back at the princess, who blows him another kiss along with a little flirtatious wave. He is insulted by her impudence and turns frowning to stride away but promptly crashes into a treetrunk and gets his nose stuck in a knothole. There follows a series of indignities – such as falling into a creek, bumping his head on the bottomside of a small bridge – until he slogs off after the other dwarfs, nose in the air, flaunting whatever self-respect he can muster, his soaked garments squishing water all along the way.
Snow White calls out “good-bye Grumpy” after him. The whole scene is accompanied by variations on the tune of “Heigh-ho Heigh-ho”.
[1] Barrier, Michael: Hollywood Cartoons, Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 1999, p. 203.
[2] Barrier, Michael: op. sit., p. 208.
