Commentary &Disney &Frame Grabs 05 Jan 2009 09:02 am
Snow White amusements
- There’s a lot of material, much of it very amusing, on the Snow White dvd. On disc 1 of the two disc set, there’s a documentary about the hostory and making of the film. In it the images make a lot of sense as they detail the history of the first Hollywood feature-length cartoon, but some of those images are just too precious for me to allow them to slip by without my singling them out and giving my two cents.
_____(Click any image to enlarge.) ________Here are frame grabs from this documentary.
.
Walt is presented as a bumpkin in the early days.
I suppose he was directing if not filming this material,
so that’s the image he sought to create as well.
This has got to be one of the wackiest pictures in their archives.
The popularity of Mickey Mouse in the early 30′s.
Snow White brings a change to the studio,
which you can well understand.
Though there’s still the problem about what to do with Mickey.
Disney was supposedly inspired by a silent filmed version
of Snow White he saw in his younger days.
One wonders if there was also an eerie creepiness to the performance
that Walt gave to all of his animators one night as he acted out the film.
I’m curious about the pose of Snow White with her head back
and her hands behind the head.
Here, Walt tries to get his animators to bite into an invisible apple -
the future of animation – as they thoughtfully smoke their pipes.
The bed building and the soup eating scenes weren’t the only ones that were
excised from the finished film. It seems the prince, initially had a larger role.
The path into the castle was a bit more difficult. First you had to
get past the moat with the help of your horse. Here the prince looks
a bit like Robert Benchley.
“Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”
Getting caught. Obviously, the Queen and Snow White didn’t live in that
castle by themselves. There were henchmen we didn’t know about.
This almost looks like an early version of the seven dwarfs
carried the prince to prison.
They had big rats in that prison. Scary.
This is an obvious precursor of Malificent going to visit Prince Phillip some
20 years later in Sleeping Beauty. Both wicked Queens got more attractive.
Lots of stars showed up to the grand premiere.
These actors in costume were there, too.
In all seriousness, the film was a masterpiece. I’m still studying it some
70 years later. Walt had reason to be proud and happy. He also had enough
money to move onto other challenging films, and he took the challenge as
opposed to making Snow White 2 or 3 (as they probably would do today.)
on 05 Jan 2009 at 9:52 am 1.Tim Rauch said …
Enjoyed your color commentary quite a bit, thanks! May I suggest for the final shot: “Snow White inspired Walt to contemplate bigger things, robust expansion for himself and his studio, as he looks out the window at a massive phallic symbol.”
on 05 Jan 2009 at 10:19 am 2.Kellie Strøm said …
I get the funniest feeling when I look at Mickey in the third last photo…
on 05 Jan 2009 at 10:38 am 3.Tim Hodge said …
I have always gotten a kick out of the footage of Walt at his desk (photo #2). It looks like they built a single wall set outside so they wouldn’t have low-light issues. Notice the shadow of the cameraman, too.
on 05 Jan 2009 at 12:20 pm 4.George Taylor said …
Michael,
Great captures!
I love the shot of Walt with Mickey and Minnie at the premiere. Va-va-voom!
on 08 Jan 2009 at 4:37 am 5.Jenny said …
“You can’t top pigs with pigs”-Walt Disney, on why he didn’t do sequels.*
*Or was that “dwarves with dwarves”? I mean, he did do a sequel to “Pigs”, didn’t he?
on 08 Jan 2009 at 8:58 am 6.Michael said …
The studio did at least three sequels with Pigs and at least one, that I can think of, with Dwarves.