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Disney's Cartoon Masterpiece
We take you behind the scenes of the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,[…]
We take you behind the scenes of the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney's first full length cartoon feature in Technicolor, and show you the difficulties that had to be overcome. On the left you see Doc, Snow White, Happy and Sneezy, and on the right, Grumpy, Bashful, Sleepy and Dopey. THERE were a number of reasons why Walt Disney decided on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for his first full-length production. It was a folk tale known and beloved in practically every country in the world. The seven dwarfs were natural Disney characters. In them he could put all the piquant humour for which he is famous. With most of the action taking place in and around the dwarfs' cottage in the woods, there was plenty of opportunity for the introduction of appealing little bird and animal characters. Lastly, the human characters were fanciful enough for Walt's taste. The idea crystallised in 1933 although no one — least of all Walt himself — can quite say how long the seed of the plan to make Snow White had been planted in his mind. Some of his co-workers believe that the overwhelming success of The Three Little Pigs was what convinced him that the time was ripe to embark upon his first feature. He didn't call his staff together and announce, "Boys, we're going to make a feature." He introduced the idea by the method of slow infiltration. He dropped it on everyone individually in the midst of casual conversations. Most of his staff were a little afraid of the venture but were finally won over, not only by Walt's magnificent enthusiasm, but because they had to admit that he had always been right in the past. As a matter of fact, none of his staff liked the idea of The Three Little Pigs. It was Walt who battled for it and put it across. By 1934 Walt's writers had worked out a fairly complete adaptation of the fairy tale — except for detailed action — and thousands of preliminary sketches, gags, backgrounds, character models, and stage settings had been drawn. Most of them were discarded. The staff's ultimate decisions as to how the feature should be done were arrived at by the long and frequently discouraging trial and error method, for they had no previous experience upon which to draw. They were pioneering in every sense of the word. […]

Source

Title
Source type Magazine
Volume 344.7
Published
Language en
Document type Feature
Media type text
Page count 2
Pages pp. 8-9

Metadata

Id 2939
Availability Free
Inserted 2016-11-15