Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 1937

 Is there anything left to say about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a film Sergei Eisenstein called "the greatest film ever made"?  Yes, including giving credit to the hundreds of people who worked on it and pointing out the superior beauty of its hand-drawn animation compared to today's mechanical computer animation.

Yesterday The New York Times published the obituary of Ruthie Tompson, written by Megalit Fox.  She was 111 years old and had worked on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of many uncredited women who did so, and was in the "Ink and Paint" Department, tranferring drawings (that were all done by men, a policy at Disney) to animation cels.  Walt Disney seldom gave much credit to anyone but himself, but David Hand was the "supervising director" of Snow White while William Cottrel, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Pearce Pearce and Ben Sharpsteen directed individual sequences.

Readers of this blog know my distaste for most current computer-animated feature films, a combination of too realistic in some ways but not in others, excessive details in some cases and abbreviated details in others.  The success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs depends on stylization, necessary to keep the number of drawings limited by running the film at fifteen frames per second (as opposed to the standard 24 frames a second of sound films).  I was somewhat astonished at the beauty of the film, beauty that comes not only from the hand-drawn animation but from the fairy-tale limited story, from the original by the Brothers Grimm.  Disney and his team follow the original story quite closely with some interesting additions and changes: the dwarfs do not have individual names in the original story, the prince has not met Snow White before her death, the Queen is not a stepmother but Snow White's actual mother, the forest creatures do not exist in the original story.  I do think giving the dwarfs names and personalities made the film more effective, i.e., funnier before Snow White's "death" and sadder after it.

The multi-plane beauty of Snow White has a warmth not found in computer-animated films, in the same way that the digital restoration of Citizen Kane substitutes convenience for the warmth of 35 mm. film and in the way that the replacement of nitrate film with acetate, for convenience as well as safety, also decreased the beauty of films.