Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

By Richard Corliss | June 23, 2011 | +

Everett

Director: David Hand

Year Released: 1937

Cast: Adriana Caselotti, Lucille La Verne, Harry Stockwell, Pinto Colvig, Roy Atwell

The classic Disney style is sometimes dismissed as cutesy-poo. That wasn’t the reaction when Walt Disney released this, his first feature, following a decade of cartoon shorts that pioneered the imaginative use and sound and color. As they watched Snow White succumb to the poison apple proffered by the witch who was also her stepmother, children literally wet the seats of movie palaces, such was the primal anguish that stabbed their young years. Disney features were often the first films kids saw — and the first that forced them to confront the loss of home, parent, life. (Bambi’s mother is what?) These were horror movies with songs, Greek tragedies with a hummable chorus. They offered shock therapy to 4-year-olds, and that psychic jolt could last a lifetime.

Making an animated feature might have been the next logical step after the studio’s Oscar-winning shorts Flowers and Trees, The Three Little Pigs and The Tortoise and the Hare. But in 1934, when the project took real shape, Snow White was called “Walt’s folly”: a gamble of $1.5 million, one of the highest production budgets of the ’30s. The movie took three years to make, with David Hand as supervising director and Perce Pearce, Larry Morey, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson and Ben Sharpsteen in charge of individual sequences. When Walt’s wife Lillian Disney saw it, she told him, “No one’s ever gonna pay a dime to see a dwarf picture.” She underestimated the universal yearning for a fairy tale that was both grim and grand, not to mention the appeal of the Frank Churchill–Leigh Harline songs (“Some Day My Prince Will Come,” “Heigh-Ho,” “Whistle While You Work”) that would crawl into 100 million memories and stay there as the best of friends.

The movie was a smash: the top-grossing film of 1938 and, in real dollars, the 10th biggest money earner of all time. Much of that loot was earned in reissues, every seven years for the next half-century, with zillions more in home-video revenue. Parents don’t buy Snow White as a relic of antique animation; they want their kids to experience the wonder and terror they once felt — the elemental emotions that all movies should aspire to evoke.

Next: Toy Story

Related Topics: Disney, Family, Fantasy, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Toy Story

By Richard Corliss | June 23, 2011 | +

Everett

Director: John Lasseter

Year Released: 1995

Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Annie Potts, John Morris, Erik von Detten, Laurie Metcalf, R. Lee Ermey, Sarah Freeman

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The revolution began here. In the mid-1980s, John Lasseter, a Disney alumnus, joined the Marin County, California, computer lab Pixar and, to demonstrate the narrative and plastic potential of computer-generated animation, made three terrific shorts (Luxo Jr., Red’s Dream and Tin Toy) that invested metal objects such as lamps, unicycles and drummer-boy toys with life and heart. They showed that things have wills and wits of their own and exist in intimate relation to their human masters — and are funnier too. Whence sprang Toy Story, the first full-length film created wholly on computers and one of the most inventive comedies of its decade. For when a genius like Lasseter sits at his computer, the machine becomes more than just a supple paintbrush. Like the creatures he dreamed up, it’s alive!

In Andy’s bedroom, the toys are alive. They and their leader, the cloth cowboy Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), are working stiffs with the fear, every time a birthday approaches, that they will be replaced by more sophisticated gewgaws. One arrives in the form of an action figure called Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen). Buzz’s power is that he seduces the old toys, and presumably Andy, with his space-age gadgetry. His problem is that he thinks he’s human. So here, recognizably and delightfully, are two weird dudes: a political boss stripped of his moral authority and taking it with a lack of good grace, and a hero who is deeply delusional.

Like a Bosch painting or a Mad comic book, Toy Story created a world bustling with strange creatures and furtive, furry humor. What even Lasseter couldn’t predict was that audiences would instantly fall in love with the shiny surfaces and supple movements of the CGI technique — or that within a few years, it would consign the hand-drawn format, which had prevailed for nearly a century, to history’s dump truck. The traditional Disney style was suddenly like old-cloth Woody, and Pixar became the Buzz Lightyear of 21st-century animation.