The first feature-length Disney film still frightens and still charms, and its Queen is one of the great screen villains. Its heroine is barely there and its prince less so. See it anyway; nearly everything animated that followed is standing on it somewhere.
Walt Disney’s studio had spent years on short cartoons when it tried a feature, and the question when this reached British cinemas on 24 February 1938 was whether anyone would sit through 83 minutes of drawings. Six directors share the credit, eight writers worked on the script, and the story is the Grimms’ tale with the cruelties trimmed and the dwarfs given names. It is still worth an evening. The surprise is not that it holds up but how strange and how dark it remains.
The Queen is the reason. Lucille La Verne voices her low and level, a woman who has never had to repeat herself, and the animators draw her in long straight lines and hold her still while everything else in the film bounces. She stands before the Magic Mirror (Moroni Olsen), a face that surfaces in smoke and tells her the one thing she does not want to hear, and the film’s coldest moments are hers. La Verne also voices the crone the Queen later becomes, and we will not describe how or where that goes, except to say that the cellar is the best-drawn room in the film and the one we thought about on the way home.
We were frightened, and we are a long way past five. Snow White (Adriana Caselotti) runs from the huntsman into the forest and the forest turns on her: trunks grow faces, branches become hands, a floating log opens its jaws, and dozens of eyes come on in the dark. Bill Melendez cuts it faster and faster until she falls, and then the light comes up and the eyes are rabbits and deer. The relief is as well judged as the terror. We had forgotten how long the film is prepared to keep a child in the dark before it lets her out.
Then the dwarfs come home and it becomes a comedy. Doc (Roy Atwell) leads and tangles every sentence he starts. Grumpy (Pinto Colvig) refuses to be won over and is, slowly, which is the film’s one properly written change of heart. Dopey (Eddie Collins) never speaks and steals most scenes he is in; we laughed out loud when he rearranged his ears and again when he tried to swallow a bar of soap. Happy (Otis Harlan), Bashful (Scotty Mattraw), Sneezy (Billy Gilbert) and Sleepy (Colvig again) make up the seven, and the washing scene, in which seven small men are made to face a tub of water, is the funniest thing in it.
What does not work is the middle of the story, which is Snow White herself. Caselotti’s soprano is thin and the character is thinner: she cooks, cleans, scolds and waits, and she wants nothing of her own beyond a man she has met once. That man, the Prince (Harry Stockwell), appears at a well, sings, and is then largely absent. The dwarf business, good as much of it is, also stalls the plot for the better part of half an hour. One critic has called the whole film insipid and badly paced. On the middle stretch we see the point; on the rest we think they are wrong.
The songs are the other reason it survives. Frank Churchill, Paul Smith, Leigh Harline and Edward H. Plumb are credited with the music, and Whistle While You Work and Heigh-Ho are the ones people still know, but the score is at its best when it stops being songs: the low strings under the Queen, the woodwind that follows each animal down the stairs. The music moves when the drawings move, beat for beat. That habit sounds mechanical and is what gives the film its rhythm.
Set against what came after it, from Pinocchio (1940) on, this is the roughest and the boldest. Later features are smoother, better plotted and kinder to their heroines, and none of them is as afraid of the dark.
Watch it with a child of five, sit them where you can see them, and count how long the forest takes to work. Certificate U, 83 minutes, and a knife drawn well inside the first quarter of an hour.
