SNOW WHITE’S RECEPTION
“The greatest film ever made” declared Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) the revered Russian pioneer film-maker, auteur of Battleship Potemkin. None other than the renowned silent filmstar and comedian Charlie Chaplain pronounced Dopey to be “one of the greatest comedians of all time.”[1]
A total of 750 individuals contributed to the creation of the movie, which took three years and included some two and a half million pieces of art. The cost of the film, $1,488,422.74, was four times that of the average feature of 1937. The last animation was not shot until December 1, only six days before a sneak preview, and less than three weeks before the premiere.[2]
Bank of America, which had bank-rolled “Disney’s Folly”, got very nervous as the film’s budget kept escalating. CFO Roy Disney advised his younger brother that he had better show the bankers what he was up to if he wanted another penny out of them, much less the additional quarter million dollars he actually needed to borrow. Walt balked, vehemently reluctant to show anyone the unfinished product, but in the end money talked and the perfectionist gave in. Bank vice-president Joseph Rosenberg (1881-1971) arrived at the studio for a piecemeal preview narrated by Walt himself from the seat next to his, filling in the copious missing detail. Afterward, Rosenberg kept mum about the movie instead making polite banter about the weather and suchlike until he was seated in his car and about to depart. He rolled down the window, remarked to Disney “You’re going to make a hatful of money on that thing” and drove away. And that’s just what happened! Not only a whole lot of cash but universal accolades…
Otis Ferguson (1907-1943) of The New Republic, whom Richard Schickel identifies as “the most sensitive film critic of the time”, declared Snow White “among the genuine artistic achievements of the country” and in his book The Disney Version Schickel himself assessed it thus:
…the distinction of the film – and for all its imperfections, it is a major cinematic achievement – rests on hundreds of details…, small touches that one scarcely notices on a first viewing but that must finally be seen as the movie’s true subject matter… There is a genuine sunniness of outlook here, a sense that one sometimes gathers from works in the higher arts, of the artist breaking through to a new level of vision and technical proficiency and running joyously, freely before this wind of change, the agony of creation for a moment at least in a state of remission.[3]
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art requested cels from Snow White, specifically those depicting the two vultures which eventually circle down through murky stormclouds to make mincemeat (offscreen of course!) out of the heinous defeated Peddler Woman. Why this, one of the least iconic images from the movie? Who knows…?
Among the few adverse reactions to Walt’s film “too arty” was the notable critique of Max Fleischer, aforementioned pioneer of the animated film, precursor to Disney, whose claim to fame is the Roaring ’Twenties icon Betty Boop the most hideous caricature of womankind ever conceived: a hydrocephalic flapper. Her animator Grim Natwick – as forementioned – was hired away from Fleischer to help animate the princess in Snow White.
The “folly” those Hollywood moguls had anticipated from Disney was perhaps more akin to the forgettable mess Max Fleischer created in Gulliver’s Travels (1939). Motivated by the immediate phenomenal success of “Disney’s Folly” Snow White, not only did Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer initiate production on The Wizard of Oz but Paramount too pulled a quick about-face and greenlighted Fleischer’s project. A comparison of Disney’s work to Fleischer’s reveals how consummately superior the former achievement is to the latter debacle. Reviewing Fleischer’s film for The New York Times, critic Frank S. Nugent wrote:
“By any other standards than those of the juvenile audience the film is so far beneath the level of Mr. Disney’s famous fantasy that, out of charity, we wish we did not have to make the comparisons demanded by professional responsibility.”[4]
Somewhat bewilderingly, upon first release at the end of 1939 Gulliver’s Travels was a big hit. One cannot help but wonder how much of its success was the “wind beneath its wings” that Disney’s magnificent film provided. Fleischer’s animus toward Disney persisted to the end of his days.
A more salient charge against Disney’s version of Snow White was leveled many years later by child psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1975) wherein the author claims that by altering or eliminating the gruesome details of the Grimms’ original, Disney eviscerates the age-old tale:
…empty-minded entertainment… children now meet fairy tales only in prettified and simplified versions which subdue their meaning and rob them of deeper significance…[5]
Bettelheim, who has been discredited on charges of plagiarism and child abuse, applies Freudian psychiatry to the story, defining the relationship between a pubescent Snow White and her stepmother queen as Oedipal and attaches sexual symbolism to events, characters and props.
In the Grimm fairy tale, the dwarfs are not given any individual identities. They are simply meant to represent a “peaceful, pre-adolescent period”… and do not need any more individualism than what is collectively given. Disney provides each dwarf a personality to garner humor, sympathy and human emotion from the audiences, as creating characters with distinct traits creates more of a character dynamic audiences may latch onto.[6]
Nevertheless, Disney’s rendering of the story actually does preserve much visceral terror (cf. earlier in this chapter) – enough mayhem to arouse responsive emotional distress in any red-blooded modern child. However, his ameliorated version omits the cannibalism and torturous retribution which Bettelheim stresses as important to the psychological development of young children.
Snow White was not the culmination, but the beginning of Disney’s career; one which was destined to bring happiness and joy to several generations of children and adults the world over.[7]
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at this writing has passed the 80th anniversary of its 1937 release with no loss in its appeal. Said Bosley Crowther (1904-1981) in the New York Times regarding its re-distribution after only seven years:
There is evidence in this revival [1944] that such a masterwork on the screen has the timeless and universal richness of classic music or lore. Its pleasures are forever diverting; their recapture is a refreshing delight.[8]
The feature’s longevity is perhaps due to what Disney historian Leonard Maltin (1950-) ascribes to it:
…most of all the film exudes a feeling of joy, a radiant glow of happiness that is so persuasive that, at the end of the film, you are ready to believe that somewhere in this world there must be happy endings such as this – they’ve just got to be real.[9]
But if Walt Disney was affected by all this praise, he did not show it. “Walt never had time to take bows or rest on his laurels,” says supervising animator Wilfred Jackson (1906-1988). “By the time a feature came out he was always in the middle of the next one.”[10]
…for Walt Disney, Snow White was little more than an experiment. “We’ve worked hard and spent a lot of money, and by this time we’re all a little tired of it,” he told reporter Paul Harrison just before the film’s release. “I’ve seen so much of Snow White that I am conscious only of the places where it could be improved. You see, we’ve learned such a lot since we started this thing! I wish I could yank it back and do it all over again.”[11]
Instead Walt forged onward with more of the Twentieth Century’s greatest artworks – Fantasia, Bambi – and his magnificent version of Pinocchio, which came along next…
[1] Kaufman, J.B.: op. cit., p. 236.
[2] Bohn, James: op. cit., p. 74.
[3] Shickel, Richard: op. cit., p. 185.
[4] Kaufman, J.B.: Pinocchio, The Making of the Disney Epic, Walt Disney Family Foundation Press, San Francisco, CA, 2015, p. 271.
[5] Bettelheim, Bruno: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Vintage Books (Random House), New York, 1975.
[6] Reynolds, Sam: “Grimm Fairy Tales & Their Successors: A Study on Snow White”, medium.com, September 21, 2017.
[7] Nuhn, Roy: “Fortieth Anniversary of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’”. ???, 12/7/77.
[8] Kaufman, J.B.: op. cit., p. 269.
[9] Maltin, Leonard: The Disney Films, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1973, p. 31.
[10] Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Viking Press, NY, p. 225.
[11] Maltin, Leonard: op. cit., p. 32.
