QUEEN’S TRANSFORMATION
Here Walt made another excision, a big one, eliminating the “Soup Eating Sequence”, which had been fully brilliantly and painstakingly animated by another superior early Disney artist, Ward Kimball. Along with it another song bit the dust too, Churchill/Morey’s “The Music in Your Soup”. Originally conceived as an “unconscious symphony” of soup-schlurping…
…The sound effects department experimented with slurping sounds that were created by slowing down and reversing recordings of a marimba and a vibraphone.[1]
A pencil test of the entire sequence reveals how delightful the episode might have been. Presented in 1956 during “The Plausible Impossible” episode of Walt’s TV show Disneyland it shows Snow White’s attempts to encourage some dining etiquette in her new family but to no avail. Notified of the cut, resentful Kimball went to Walt’s office intending to resign, but came out re-enthused and elated because Walt offered him the plum assignment of supervising a prime character in their next feature Pinocchio: the puppet’s insect “conscience” Jiminy Cricket. The deleted sequence ends with the dwarfs retrieving a spoon that Dopey accidentally swallows in addition to the soap he ate in the previous sequence. Without Kimball’s sequence in the final film that soap never sees the light of day again…
Instead of this deleted animation there immediately follows another of those “cross-cuts” switching to action happening simultaneously but elsewhere. The image of humiliated Grumpy in the water trough dissolves and in its place – accompanied by a haunting tremolo on violins – the Queen’s distant castle appears silhouetted against a moonlit storm-cloudy sky. The camera trucks toward an upper-story latticed window until its image crossfades into a close-up of the clasp on the Queen’s special container – that dagger piercing a heart. Now the camera trucks back away from this box to reveal its holder, the Queen herself haughtily addressing her Magic Mirror: “Who NOW is fairest of all?”, meaning “now” that she has supposedly disposed of her rival Snow White. Her Mirror quickly disabuses her of this idea, in pseudo-mystical prose advising her that the princess still lives, and not only that, but where she lives as well. When the Queen refutes him by tendering the box in his direction and declaring its contents to be “her heart”, the Mirror tells her it’s the heart of a pig. In early story outlines it is at this point that the Queen smashes the Mirror into shards. But instead she merely concedes she has been “tricked” and immediately resolves to take matters into her own hands. Robes flapping magnificently behind her she descends a long stone spiral staircase from the tower down into the rat-infested bowels of her castle – its dungeon where the skeletons of bygone offenders hang manacled in chains or rotting in open caskets. These gloomy backgrounds are all that remain of Albrecht Hurter’s detailed inspirational sketches for an early-abandoned storyline in which the Queen captures and tortures the Prince then because he refuses to marry her leaves him to drown in these sewers below her castle.
She enters a chamber and slams the thick wooden door behind her, rousing her spindly crow on its perch on the back of a lobotomized human skull. Disgusted with the treachery of her Huntsman the Queen tosses aside her dagger-in-heart-latched box and determines she will undertake the botched murder herself. She will go to the dwarfs’ cottage in a disguise “so complete no one will suspect”. Browsing through her library of Black Arts, she selects a volume titled Disguises, opens it upon a table, locates a page titled “Peddler’s Disguise” and examines its formula. The fanciful list of ingredients – each connected to one facet of the impending transformation – begins with “Mummy Dust” for aging, then “the Black of Night” for cloaking, next “an Old Hag’s Cackle” to provide a voice, followed by a “Scream of Fright” to whiten hair. Each of these elements is produced by elaborate chemical contrivances that surround the Queen on all sides, a setup resembling some sort of hybrid between a chem lab and a whiskey still – bubbling, boiling, belching, hissing – as she adds each element to the brew in a goblet she holds in her hand. She raises the drink to a barred open-air window for a “Blast of Wind” to fan her hate and a “Thunderbolt” – with accompanying lightning – to “mix it well”. Her visage is reflected in the side of the glass, its greenish liquid effervescing within and steaming, as she says “Now begin my Magic Spell…” and then quaffs down the drink.
The transformation starts immediately and arrestingly with a never-before-used effect enabled by Disney’s new multiplane camera: the foreground of bottles, beakers, vials, tubing and other apparatus accelerates in a left-to-right pan while the background of stone chamber wall does the same only right-to-left with a lightening effect thrown in for good measure. The startling result on the screen is a dizzying disorientation as though the entire room has started spinning.
The Queen’s transformation scene is justifiably famous, a marvel of directing and editing as well as animation.[2]
This beginning is quickly followed by a montage – interspersed with a colorful vortex, masses of blue and gold bubbles, more flashes of lightning, sloshing green potion – a series of clips that show the various physical changes to the Queen starting with her hair turning white, then her hands shriveling into ugly swollen-knuckled appendages – their meagre skeleton made visible through the flesh by the flash of a lightning bolt, then her voice cracking, rasping and cackling and finally her whole body shrinking into a hunched-over black-cloaked old crone. The hag’s horrible countenance – first seen only in shadow on the wall, then partly shielded behind a black sleeve – is finally fully disclosed in shocking close-up, frightening her raven to hide inside its skull perch and peek out through the eye sockets. This gross bug-eyed pickle-nosed one-toothed warty visage was designed by Joe Grant (1908-2005) head of Disney’s think-tank, the Model Department. One critic complained that his witch looked a little too much like famous actor Lionel Barrymore(1878-1954) in drag.[3] She was animated by Norm Ferguson (1902-1957), who had provided the break-through personality animation of Mickey’s dog Pluto trying to escape from a sheet of flypaper (Playful Pluto, 1934), and her voice was provided by the same actress who spoke for the Queen, Lucille LaVerne who modified her vocal performance from regal to wretched simply by removing her false teeth.[4]
With her disguise accomplished, the Queen/Witch now turns her attention to the sort of death she can visit upon Snow White, a special curse “for one so fair”. Consulting another of her books of necromancy she focuses on the entry for “Poisoned Apple”, which produces in its victim a “Sleeping Death”. Looking directly into the camera as she pronounces these last words, her face dissolves behind her large round vicious eyes, which linger on, penetrating the darkness as – by means of increasing multiple photographic exposures of each cel – her other facial features begin to fade away.
[1] Bohn, James: Music in Disney’s Animated Features, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 2017, p. 72.
[2] From Maltin, Leonard: The Disney Films, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1973, p. 30
[3] Synard, Neil: The Best of Disney, Portland House – A Division of Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, NY, 1988, p.36.
[4] Kaufman, J.B., The Fairest One of All, Walt Disney Family Association Press, San Francisco, CA, 2012, p. 80.
