Cinema
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
William Cottrell, David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce and Ben Sharpsteen · 1937
Synopsis
A jealous queen consults a mirror every day, which answers that she is the fairest. The day it names her stepdaughter, Blanche-Neige, she orders a huntsman to kill her in the forest and bring back her heart in a casket. The man spares her and lets her flee. Deep in the woods, the girl finds an untidy little cottage that she believes is inhabited by children, cleans it with the animals of the forest and falls asleep; seven dwarfs, who work in the mine, come home in the evening and suspect an intruder. The queen learns that she is still alive.
Context
Walt Disney mortgaged his house to finance the film, which was called Disney's folly in Hollywood. The roughly 250,000 drawings of the finished film were chosen from more than a million. The multiplane camera, developed by William Garity and first tried out on a short film, layers sets on top of one another to give depth. Other animated films of this length had preceded it elsewhere: an Argentine film of 1917, now lost, and a German film in cut-out silhouettes of 1926.
Who it is for
An animated film of one hour twenty-three minutes, in colour, with French soundtracks on the 2016 Blu-ray. The names of the dwarfs are specific to the film.
Prizes and reception
It cost nearly a million and a half dollars and earned about eight million; honorary Oscar in 1939, and added to the National Film Registry in 1989.
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