Disney Movie Reviews: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Over the next quite-a-long-span-of-time, I'll be pursuing a project of moderate ambition:  reviewing each and every feature-length animated film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios.  I got the list from here, and I've only excluded movies actually developed by other studios and only released by Disney.  That leaves us with 55 movies as of the beginning of 2015 -- I'm optimistic that I can get through them at a rate faster than Disney can put them out, but only time will tell.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs begins, as so much else will, with a book.  But the book is special -- it's a real-life book, used to introduce the story and acknowledge its fairy-tale origins before being left behind as the film proceeds to its animated essence.

Introducing an animated story with a live-action bit seems a little cliché to us at this point.  But this movie came out in 1937, and it set the stage for all that would follow.  From the opening onward, everything that Disney is doing here is going to seem inevitably old-fashioned to our modern senses, but only because it created the clichés that would be soaked into our cultural memory forever after.

I'm not saying we haven't progressed at all.  Plot-wise, Snow White is firmly rooted in the sensibilities of yestercentury, but it wears its simplicity on its sleeve.  There isn't much of a conflict, really; everyone knows how the Evil Witch Queen Who Is Also A Stepmother tricks Snow White with the apple, and we remember it because she's the antagonist, but the movie itself is less concerned with her villainy than it is with the sleeping habits of various woodland creatures.  She drifts in and out of the story whenever things seem too happy for Snow White, but only lurks in the background, occasionally reminding us that all is not pastoral frolicking, until she finally strikes.  Once Snow White bites that apple, the movie seems in a hurry to end (it actually lasts only seven more minutes).

The end is almost disturbingly abrupt.  The dwarfs weep for a few seconds before The Prince shows up, he kisses her, they hop on a horse, and it's over.  We know that Snow White dreams of living with the Prince in his castle, but we've never seen them discuss it.  In fact, within the frame of the movie, Snow White and the Prince never really talk to each other at all.  They briefly sing about how happy they are to have found each other at the end of "Someday My Prince Will Come," but Snow White runs off and hides from him before they can have a real conversation.  The next time she sees him is when she wakes up in her glass coffin, but they don't need to say a word to one another to know what comes next.  I'm willing to give Disney some creative license in the presentation of the ending, but the character beats between Snow White and the Dwarfs are so detailed and full that her relationship with The Prince seems one-dimensional in comparison.

And the Dwarfs are really the heart and soul of this film.  Snow White might get top billing, but her carefully rotoscoped movements, though hyper-realistic and gorgeous in their meticulous depiction of human motion, carry more gravitas than joy.  Snow White, the Prince, and the Queen are dry and theatrical, but the Dwarfs are full of life.  This is a movie that heralded a new age of animation, and it did it by filling nearly every cel to the brim with exciting, exploding movement.  The Dwarfs embody all that fully.  Their over-expressive faces, hats, beards, and robes guarantee that the slightest motion will ripple through their entire persons.

It'd be a waste of words to discuss the Dwarfs too much.  Suffice to say that they are hilarious.  Every second of their presence on screen is suffused with comedy.  They aren't much more than a happy joke, but there's nothing wrong with that.

Before I move on from discussing the non-aesthetic aspects of this movie, I do want to give special mention to the Queen.  She doesn't do much in the movie, spending most of it menacing quietly from the background, but her every appearance is arresting.  Her scenes carry a tone wholly absent from the rest of the work, and the dissonance of her creepy torture dungeon is enthralling.  This happy children's movie isn't afraid to tell gruesome little stories in its scenery, either:

And while her guise as the Witch is gross and unsettling, the Queen is the perfect counterpoint:  grim, austere, and brimming with determination.  This is a woman who is going to be the fairest if she has to murder every last damsel in her pathetic little kingdom.  She doesn't care.  She'll stop at no lengths to secure her primacy in the beauty contest, and there's something to be admired in dedication like that, no matter how evil an ambition it's tied to.

There's little to the Queen's character, but the few scenes she gets burn brightly, outsized morsels of self-satisfied villainy that bring us back to the somber stakes.  Monstrous as she is, she's nevertheless gorgeous, covered in lush fabrics, surrounded by elegance, and absolutely committed to a passionate cause.  My goodness.

Take a close look at the pictures in the Queen's dungeon.  Look at the bubbles in her potion, rising up and popping, hundreds at a time.  Look at the torch's flame, blown back together with her cape by a powerful gust of wind.  Look at the skeleton, and imagine it breaking into little pieces, each bouncing off others as she kicks it aside.  The images must exist so vividly in your mind, but in practice, they're even more realistic and mind-blowing.  The level of detail and intricacy, both to the sets and animations, is astonishing.  There is a realism to the light and shadow that raises the art to the next level.

The light is masterful, but so many other visual flourishes will enthrall you.  Water in this movie is a revelation, and the distortion effects visible on reflections in water seem impossible for 1937.  Dozens of tiny animals move on screen together, and nothing seems out of place.  There are no shortcuts, tricks, or cut corners.  Everything is immaculate, and fully realized.

One final special mention goes out to the direction for Snow White's flight through the dark forest.  It starts out a little jump-scary, but by the end of the scene, it's established a whole new visual language for demonstrating characters in stark mental distress, and it's awesome.  I want to call it Brechtian.  It isn't, but I want to.

All that's left is the music.  It's...good, I suppose.  Snow White's voice is very nice, but much too shrill and warbly to the modern ear.  The Prince seems to think he's in an opera, and he's pretty hard to listen to, as well.  The Dwarfs are fun, but their songs are utterly without consequence.  The songs, like the plot, primarily serve to provide a setting for perfect animation; in this, they succeed.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is an incredible movie.  It spends most of its time playing with the Dwarfs, who have no real importance to the story, but that doesn't matter, because we're so distracted by the sheer genius on display in every frame.  Disney is showing us a new world in every shot, and he knows it, and he delights in pulling the curtain back further and further until we begin to suspect that he might even be drawing us.  At the end of this movie, it feels like nothing is out of reach.  With the fairy tale conquered, what glorious worlds might he explore -- nay, create -- from here?

Having created the world, Disney knows what comes next.  He must create Man.  Join me next time for the second part of my Disney Movie Reviews:  Pinocchio.

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS
1937
RATING:  A
REASONING:  A perfect and revolutionary work of animated art, but not a perfect movie.  There are greater things in store.

sui geniorum

I intended to write a grand post for the new year, looking back on my new year's post from last year and commenting on how things have and haven't gone according to my expectations.  On a tour of my archives, however, I found a tremendous gap between October and March...no new year post was given in 2014!  Which is not to say I didn't write one; I just didn't feel that the one I wrote was worth sharing.  I still don't, so you have to deal with mere echoes of reflections on an unpublished document.

2014 went almost exactly as I expected it to, and it was awful.  I don't usually anticipate to have a terrible time, but all the pieces were in place, and I expended a tremendous amount of energy to find myself in fundamentally the same circumstances from winter to winter.  Or was it to keep myself in the same circumstances?  But, you know, we move forward.

The process of maturing comes in fits and starts, but at last, I can feel it happening.  For the first time in my life, I can know a fact, hear someone utter something contradictory, and not feel compelled to engage them in discussion.  Well, I call it maturity, but maybe it's just weariness.  At least, I've lost the sense that I bear an ounce of persuasion in my character.  The fastest way to convince others of a point, I'm learning, is for me to take the opposite stance.  Agreement does not agree with me, but it's an endless cycle of acrimonious argument, and I'm starting to prefer to keep my mouth shut.

There are some fundamental questions I want to tackle in 2015.  They primarily revolve around freedom, but there are collateral concerns over friendship, novelty, love, and education.  Freedom is the most interesting to me, however.  This was the most memorable passage, to me, in all of Herman Melville's Moby Dick:

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.

Who ain't a slave, indeed?  But there are more sources of compulsion than the commands of others.  There are the quirks of our own personalities, anchors, albatrosses that bear us down one particular path no matter how dreary the outcome may seem.  What's more, our upbringings and mindsets conspire to convince us that these were our only and best options.  How do we overcome ourselves?

Well, first we need to come to understand what really drives us.  So if there's an ultimate goal for this year, for me, it's to break my personality down into its component parts, and really grasp hold of why I do what I do.  WHO AM I, etc.  I just hope it won't be too annoying.

Here's to a magical year.