How Disney's original Snow White changed cinema forever

Yahoo

11-06-2025

Disney probably thought the decision to remake Snow White was as safe a bet as it's possible for there to be in Hollywood. When the film was announced in 2016, the likes of Alice in Wonderland and The Jungle Book had become massive cash cows — with Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin coming down the pipeline. But, in the years since then, attitudes to Disney's live-action remakes have curdled and Snow White has become a lightning rod for controversy.
But none of this was even a flicker in anybody's eye almost 90 years ago when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs first arrived in cinemas, revolutionising the art form of cinema. It was the first full feature to use cel animation and the first animated feature film made in the United States. Nowadays, it's the first in the series of Disney Animated Classics.
In the 1930s, Walt Disney achieved success with the Silly Symphony series of short films, which included the Oscar-winning 1933 take on Three Little Pigs — a short that earned more than 10 times its production budget. Disney, though, was determined to embrace the financial potential offered by a fully animated feature, considering classic tales like Alice in Wonderland, Babes in Toyland, Bambi, and Rip Van Winkle for adaptation.
Disney introduced the idea of Snow White to his staff in 1934, inspired by the silent film version of the story he'd seen as a teenager. Some staff referred to the project as "Disney's Folly", unsure that the storytelling style that worked in Silly Symphonies could be sustained to feature-length. But the determined boss began to hold story meetings with writers, mainly to avoid us having dwarfs with names like Biggo-Ego, Burpy, and Baldy. A very close escape.
The dwarfs were initially envisaged as the main draw by Disney, who thought they had more comedic potential than any of the other characters. But eventually, the concept drilled down to focusing on the relationship between Snow White and the Queen. Sorry, Biggo-Ego.
Visually, the film was influenced by other major studio movies of the time, as well as the darker and more shadowy edges of German expressionist classics like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. It's an amusing contrast given how far apart the 2025 adaptations of Snow White and Nosferatu have turned out to be — assuming there's not a secret deleted scene from the new Snow White in which Rachel Zegler bites the head off a pigeon.
Disney's animation team was largely made up of newspaper cartoonists, but one of the few animators with more relevant experience was Grim Natwick — responsible for drawing Betty Boop. Natwick was put in charge of animating Snow White herself, with accomplished dancer Marge Champion brought in to film live-action footage as a reference point. At one stage, the animation team encouraged her to dance wearing an American football helmet to simulate the larger heads of animated characters. She nearly fainted as a result.
The process of the animation itself was long and laborious. One cartoonist, Helen Ogger, was tasked with dabbing a red dye on to each individual cel in order to add colour to the characters' faces — a method never used to the same extent again, partly because only Ogger had the skill for it.
With all of this effort and expense, the film was an enormous risk. Disney mortgaged his home and also managed to secure a $250,000 (£193,000) loan. Fortunately for all involved, Snow White quickly became the most successful sound movie of all time — until it was unseated by Gone With the Wind two years later — and earned a substantial profit at the box office.
Snow White's impact was swiftly recognised. Disney was awarded an honorary Oscar — including seven tiny statuettes — as a result of what the Academy felt was "a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field". Cinematic pioneer Sergei Eisenstein called it the greatest film of all time. Snow White remains the only Disney Princess to have her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
But most crucially, Snow White fired the starting pistol on Disney's dominance as a cultural force. The profits from the movie allowed for the development of The Walt Disney Studios location in Burbank, as well as opening the door for a production line of animated features. In the next decade alone, Disney made eight further animated movies, including Pinocchio, Bambi, and Dumbo.
It's no exaggeration to say that cinema would be completely different today without Snow White — one of the most influential creative risks ever taken. It could have easily been a poison apple, but Disney's film ended up as the fairest of them all.
Snow White is streaming on Disney+.