Brian Sibley tells the story behind the making of Walt Disney’s first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, fifty years ago this year (1987).
The trouble with Walt Disney was he was never satisfied: no sooner had he achieved one thing than he was striving to achieve something else. “By nature,” he once admitted, “I am an experimenter.” He had scarcely created Mickey Mouse and made two movies with him (Plane Crazy and Gallopin’ Gaucho) than he decided cartoons would only have a future if they had sound and promptly made the world’s first animated talkie, Steamboat Willie (1928); and he hardly had time to savour the success of that picture and the fame which it brought his star, before he decided to make a cartoon “to get… away from the cut-and-dried little stock type of character”, and produced his first Silly Symphony, Skeleton Dance (1929).
The moment the Silly Symphonies had established the animated film as possessing greater cinematic potential than had ever been realised, he began fretting about the inadequacies of black-and-white film, in consequence of which he added colour to the series with Flowers and Trees (1932) and won an Oscar. Small wonder then that he should have eventually decided to extend the cartoon film beyond the confines of the seven minute short.
However, when Disney announced that he was intending to make a feature-length animated film, several critics, many of his contemporaries in the animation industry and even his own brother and business manager, Roy Disney, told him he was crazy and dubbed the project “Disney’s Folly”.
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