Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs (not "Dwarves," as I keep wanting to type) is an animated retelling of the Grimm fairy tale, starring Adriana Caselotti, Harry Stockwell, Lucille La Verne, Roy Atwell, Pinto Colvig, Billy Gilbert, Otis Harlan, Scotty Mattraw, and Stuart Buchanan. It's the first full-length animated film and Disney's first animated movie, so it's a hella trendsetter.
You know the story: Snow White (Caselotti) is a princess forced to actually work (ew) by her evil stepmother (La Verne). Said queen is obsessed with being the "fairest" in the land, and so when Snow White actually gets prettier than her, as decided by a magic mirror (Moroni Olsen), she sends her Huntsman (Buchanan) to straight-up murder the girl and bring her Snow White's heart.
(Just in case you think old-timey cartoons didn't have an edge to them. I mean, it's nowhere near as bloody as the source material, but still.)
Snow White pulls a Simba and flees into the woods, eventually winding up at the home of the titular seven dwarfs (Atwell, Colvig, Gilbert, Halrlan, and Mattraw in various combination, plus James MacDonald for some yodeling), odd little men that mine gems all day. She agrees to keep house for them in exchange for asylum, but then the next day immediately loses her damn mind and invites an obviously evil witch into her house and bites an apple that sends her into a "sleeping death." The dwarfs chase the witch to her death (like I said, kinda dark), Prince Charming (Stockwell) rocks up and smooches the dead girl, happily ever after.
Snow White, like a lot of early Disney stuff, gets flak nowadays, but it gets flak for tropes of fairy tails, which is a silly thing to fixate on. It's weird that the prince kisses a (supposed) corpse, but it's weird that Snow White can command the loyalty of forest creatures and that's never remarked on, either. It's a children's story, sanitized somewhat from the source material, yes, and with a bunch of very marketable characters included, but it's actually a lot closer to the source material than, say, Frozen.
Watching the movie now, I'm struck by how well the animation holds up. Sure, Snow White and the Prince both look like they're in different movies than the Queen and the Dwarfs, but maybe that's deliberate, as magical creatures just read differently? Also, the early sequence with Snow White running through the woods and seeing branches grab her and logs turn into gators would have been fucking horrifying in 1937, and it's fun to imagine the people of that era who'd never seen a full-length animated movie marveling at it (my father saw Fantasia when it opened in 1942 and used to tell us how the "Night on Bald Mountain" scared the hell out of him).
The songs are kind of insipid, unfortunately, and likewise this was before villains had to have motivation or character traits beyond "villain." It's simplistic, but it's supposed to be, and it's always interesting to watch foundational media and see what it's influenced and how it's regarded after nearly a century.
My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: Snowpiercer
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