The Nine Disney Animated Masterpieces
Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty
As noted in Disney historian Leonard Maltin’s 1973 book The Disney Films, there is much “cross-cutting” in subsequent sequences of Snow White. The first of these happens now, as the film “cuts” from the dwarfs’ march home back to their...
After that blackout on Snow White and critters cleaning the cottage, Churchill’s glorious music punctuated with melodic clinking introduces the dwarfs’ song. The film employs effectively what is called in cinematic parlance a “telescoping wipe”, in this case brilliantly modified:...
The screen fades to black and now the film presents a whole new delightful surprise. So far it has established an already powerfully-engrossing storyline involving the romantic or dramatic relationships of four realistically-drawn human characters – the “Snow White half”...
Declaring this dwelling to be “adorable – just like a doll’s house”, Snow White dashes up to it with a little skip in her step and all her new animal buddies follow her, last of all that green-shelled turtle which...
Without a moment’s relief from this attempted murder, the film proceeds into another spectacular sequence of terror, a kaleidoscope of ever more frightening images brilliantly illustrating how the young girl’s panicking mind transforms all surrounding forestry into tormenting demons –...
Crossfade quickly out of the darkness to Queen Grimhilda (her name is never mentioned in the film) seated upon her magnificent throne with peacock feathers splayed behind it. She is addressing someone in front of her with instructions to take...
Well before his exploitation as that nine-year-old newspaper delivery boy in Kansas City Walt Disney’s revision of reality began during his earliest childhood when his family worked a farm in Marceline, Missouri. All those barnyard animals with whom Disney became...
Hours yet until dawn the day after Christmas, 1910, The Kansas City Times must be delivered to seven hundred subscribers before their breakfasts. Your part of the burden slung over your shoulder you trudge away into the blizzard foundering through...
With this new emphasis on exploring and clearly defining personality in animated characters a more primitive “language” of cartooning gradually gave way to greater expressiveness in the drawing. Originally, character animators had done all of the effects in their own...
Although Disney’s creations share with other forms of cinema the telling of stories, the big difference is that originally everything on the screen was drawn or painted by hand, a fact which aligns them more closely with pictorial fine art....
