Altho a full-length animated film was unheard of in the mid-1930s, this didn't deter young Walt Disney from embarking on a project that was to take three years of concentrated effort. Christopher Finch explores the development of "Snow White" in the second excerpt from his book "The Art of Walt Disney."
THE INITIAL success of Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies [cartoon shorts] did not satisfy Walt Disney for long, and as early as 1934 he began to think seriously about making a feature-length animated film.
Two important considerations prompted him to this line of thought. One was a question of simple economics, namely that no matter how successful the short cartoons were, they could never make very much money. They might share billing with the main feature – they often did – but film rental was determined by running time, not popularity, so the revenue from these shorts would always be limited.
Beyond this, Disney was anxious for an opportunity to work within an expanded format – a structure that would allow for more elaborate and leisurely character development, that would give him a chance to evolve more complex plot ideas and greater naturalism. As everyone knows, the story Disney chose for his first feature was "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" [we may recall here that the first movie he had ever seen, on a newsboys' outing in Kansas City, was a silent version of "Snow White"]. No one can say just when Disney began to think about "Snow White," but by the summer of 1934 his ideas were beginning to take concrete form.
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