Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

The film David Hand supervised was first built around the dwarfs. The weight then shifted to the line between the Queen and Snow White, and several dwarf sequences were dropped after being fully animated: a soup eating scene and a bed building scene were both complete. Ward Kimball, who animated them, considered leaving, and Walt Disney kept him by making him supervising animator of Jiminy Cricket on Pinocchio. That pruning is why the middle moves more like a run of songs than a plot. The second issue is tone. The flight through the forest and the Queen’s transformation were made with German expressionist cinema held up to the crew as a model; Disney had his staff watch Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It swings between storybook prettiness and real horror in consecutive scenes, and small children still hit that wall. Snow White was animated chiefly by Grim Natwick, who had designed Betty Boop, and over the animators’ objections some shots were traced from live action. Lucille La Verne satisfied the crew with the witch’s voice only after removing her false teeth. A good fit if you want the dwarfs carrying the comedy while the story is really built between two women. Less so if you expect the song sequences to advance the plot.