Seven decades after charming audiences around the globe in 1937, this Disney masterpiece remains just as fabulous.

With no official directorial credit, Walt himself was deeply immersed in the production, making it his film all the way. He instituted a 'five dollars a gag' policy so his animators would come up with original ideas -- for example, animator Ward Kimball was a beneficiary when he suggested that the dwarfs' noses should pop up one by one over the foot of the bed while peeking at Snow White.

Walt loved the name Dopey, the last to be finalised. Several key animators objected, calling the word too modern for a timeless fairy tale. Disney argued that Shakespeare used the word in a play. This silenced the crew and work proceeded, though anything close to the term 'dopey' is yet to be found in Shakespeare's work.

Timeless Snow White remains on every level, a bewitching tale with magnificently visionary use of animation technique, like the camera movement marking the scene with the wicked witch's transformation.

The genuinely frightening witch and the enchanted forest, in fact, originally earned the film an A rating in the UK, and its US premiere in New York's Radio City Music Hall proved fatal to the auditorium's velvet upholstery -- young 'uns wet their pants at each and every showing of the film whenever Snow White got lost in the forest.

Legendary director Sergei Eisenstein declared it 'the greatest film ever made.' He wasn't kidding. A universal saga of love, loss, innocence, vanity, fear and friendship, Snow White is as special as films get. The Academy recognised this, giving the film an Honorary Oscar in 1939 -- one full-grown Oscar for Uncle Walt and seven smaller sized statuettes.

Back

|

Begin