I got the new Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs DVD the other day, and I just now watched it.
Wow! What a brilliant work of art! I hadn’t seen the complete movie since I was a child, and it’s a shame as children really are of no age to truly appreciate how amazing it is!
Okay, the story is not too taxing, and the ending makes no logical sense, but the character work, the animation, the backgrounds, they are fantastic! And then taking into account the era it was made in, 1937, and that it was the first feature-length animated movie made, and I stand awestruck!
Animation basically didn’t improve any since then until the more recent onslaught of movies like Lion King and Tarzan. It really set a standard that was never reached again for so long! 50 years!
The DVD has a great collection of extras, too. I can’t wait to see some of the more recent Disney movies done this way (Tarzan’s DVD extras are excellent, Emperor’s New Groove’s are not really that good) and some of the earlier ones like Pinocchio.
[sub]aside You know, I wish Disney hadn’t already done that cheesy Robin Hood animated movie. They could do a really kick-ass version now if they put their mind to it. Shame.[/sub]
I read somewhere that the cost of making that movie, and also that other one with dancing mushrooms and stuff done to classical music, was so great that it took years to show a profit.
Which is why that standard, which was so expensive to create, took so long to be equalled.
ya mean Fantasia? i have that on video, and i have Fantasia 2000 on dvd… those little mushroom guys are so CUTE! especially that teeny little one that’s always tagging behind. awwwwww…
wanders off to watch Fantasia with kid sister again, for the ten millionth time
Actually, it was mostly that it was ahead of its time. Fantasia was first released in 1940. To critical acclaim, but not much popular success. In the late 60’s, in keeping with the zeitgeist, it made money. It was after seeing Fantasia that “Night on Bald Mountain” became one of my favorite pieces of classical music.
Of course, I also remember seeing the thing with some geology types who criticized the inaccuracies in the “Rite of Spring” sequence vociferously. Sheesh. There’s a place for expecting scientific accuracy, and a place to allow artistic license. I LIKED the dino’s in Fantasia, no matter how inaccurately they went extinct.
I much prefer the early Disney cartoons to the modern ones. One reason for this is because I find the stories generally more appealing, but mainly because I find the obvious craft of the hand-drawn animations so much more entertaining than the computer-generated stuff.
I’ll admit that the first time I saw Beauty and the Beast, for instance, I was impressed by the flashy camera work. There’s no way you could use hand drawn techniques to keep the background true in the ballroom scenes with the rotating point of view etc. Similarly you couldn’t accurately render the magic carpet in Aladdin or the wildebeest scenes in The Lion King without machine assistance, but frankly the novelty has worn off by now.
Creating a convincing sense of mass moving under gravity, and the texture and flow of objects you get in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Fantasia by human skill alone is more satisfying than the cold certainty of an algorithm. Unaffordable these days I expect, and of course SW&tSD famously nearly bankrupted Disney at the time.
They were talking about the Snow White DVD on talk radio just a week or so ago. Snow White was a huge hit and made a profit the year it was released. Fantasia and Pinocchio however were commercial flops.
The cost of SW&tSD was very expensive. They ran out of money and had to try to raise more to continue shooting. According to the guy on the radio (I forget his name, but he was there promoting the DVD and a book about Disney) Walt Disney showed what they had filmed to bankers in hopes of getting a loan so they could finish. When the screening ended, Disney stood in front of the group and said, “Here’s what happens next…” and began acting out the rest of the film. Had Snow White not been a hit, Disney would’ve have quite possibly gone bankrupt and unable to pay back the loans (which IIRC was more than $1 million to make Snow White - a huge amount for the time).
I completely agree with you, everton. Thanks to having several very young female cousins, I’ve seen Cinderella probably about a dozen times in the past few years and the utter gorgeousness of it still stuns me every time. OTOH watching the modern Disney films I feel a cold appreciation for the technological achievements, but nothing more.
Yeah, Cinderella is another classic. The songs were always better in those old ones too – cheesy, but in a good way.
After I posted before I remembered that story Giorgio Vasari told of how the Pope (Boniface VIII?) was trying to find the right artist for an important fresco he had planned. He sent a messenger to various artists asking for samples of their work. When Giotto was asked, he painted a perfect circle with one continuous stroke, and told the messenger that would be good enough to prove his worth. Needless to say he got the gig.
Now, if I’d have drawn round my coffee cup would the pope have been impressed? I think not.
I hadn’t read that threadGuanoLad, but it doesn’t surprise me. A lot of Vasari’s stories are hard to verify (like the one about Ucello living on nothing but cheese for weeks because he was too shy to ask his boss for a change of diet).
Anyhow, I’m sticking to my opinion that hand-drawn is generally best for animation.
I also agree with the footnote in your OP about Robin Hood. The story didn’t impress me much, and I didn’t like the use of hard black outlines around everything. It’s much slower to draw outlines in different colours, or to paint without any outline, but the effect is better.
The thing that impresses me is the way that they went out of their way to produce extremely impressive effects, when much less taxing things would have done. The scenes of Snow White singing into the well are accompanied by wavering of the water’s surface, and truly impressive ripples spreading in circles from unseen drops. All of that was no mean feat. Add to this the fact that you could have done this scene only in a cartoon, or with high-powered effects, since you can’t simply point a camera down a well and shoot – you’d get a picture of the camera, even if you could capture the weak reflected image on film.
(For someone who used camera tricks for an “impossible” in-the-mirror shot, see Rouben Mamoulian’s version of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. For someone else who went to unnecessary but wonderful lengths for the sake of the film, see the original 1933 King Kong. Those special effects shots are [layered, with tons of details you don’t notice until someone points them out.)
Crunchy Frog the story about the getting additional funding is on the DVD told by Walt himself. This DVD has a great commentary track with a animation historian and Walt Disney. They collected interview tapes he made over the years and they are interspersed through out the movie.
Some of the interesting things I learned from the DVD…
The Prince has such a small part because they had real difficulty animating him. Plus they wanted to keep the story a simple as possible so the story is about the Snow White and the Queen and the romance is toned down.
They were really worried about the scene with the huntsman because they weren’t sure if they could make the audience believe that Snow White was in mortal peril. (how do you kill a cartoon?)
Grumpy is a very important character because he allows cynical people a way to buy into the movie. He makes fun of the action in the film just as they would.
The Beatles song Listen used the first lines from I’m Wishing.
