Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Movie
German title	Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Original title	Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Country of production	United States
original language	English
Publishing year	1937
length	83 minutes
Age rating	FSK 0
Rod
Director	David D. Hand
script	Ted Sears , Richard Creedon
production	Walt Disney
music	Leigh Harline , Paul J. Smith , Frank Churchill , Orchestration Oliver Wallace
camera	Maxwell Morgan
synchronization

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (original title: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ) is the first full-length animated film from the Walt Disney Studios and was released in 1937. The film is based on the fairy tale Snow White by the Brothers Grimm . Due to its great success, this fairy tale film formed the basis for a large number of other family cartoons from Disney.

According to the American Film Institute , the film is one of the 100 best US films of all time . It is also named as the most important cartoon. On the inflation-adjusted list of the most successful films, the film also ranks tenth with grossing over 1.7 billion US dollars.

action

The beautiful, young Snow White grows up as a maid at the court of her father and her envious stepmother. She cannot bear the thought that her stepdaughter will always be more beautiful than her and assigns a hunter to take the girl into the forest and kill her there. He does as he is told, but does not have the heart to murder the innocent beauty and lets her flee into the darkness of the forest.

Snow White wanders through the night full of fear and finally falls asleep. She wakes up the next morning in the company of the forest animals, who lead her to a small house. Here she finds references to seven dwarfs who, however, have neglected order and housekeeping for a long time. She eagerly gets to work with the animals and brings the house into shape. In the Grimm version, however, the dwarfs are fairly neat - Snow White doesn't have to take care of the housework.

A little later, the seven dwarfs finish their work in their gemstone mine in the nearby mountains and go home singing happily. They are amazed to find their house in the forest clean and tidy, even the food is on the table. Snow White is sleeping across her beds, frightened when the dwarfs wake her up. However, you quickly become friends and decide that the young beauty can stay with the dwarfs and, in return, run the household.

However, the wicked stepmother learned through her magic mirror that Snow White is still alive. She creates a different appearance through magic, poisons an apple and makes her way to the dwarf hut, where her unsuspecting stepdaughter welcomes her kindly and accepts the apple.

The dwarfs find Snow White lifeless and pursue the stepmother, who flees through the mountains in the middle of a thunderstorm. She dies when the slope on which the dwarfs place her is struck by lightning and torn into the depths. The grieving dwarfs return and bury Snow White in a glass coffin, when suddenly a young prince appears and kisses the beautiful woman, who then comes back to life. She affectionately says goodbye to the dwarfs and sets off with her admirer into her new life.

Production history

The production history of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is very well documented despite the old age of this film, which underlines the importance of Disney's first full-length film in the history of the film. The main argument for the decision to produce a long cartoon was the reactions to Disney's previous works and above all Walt Disney's enthusiasm, which withstood the ridicule of his Hollywood colleagues .

The idea for a full-length cartoon

Walt Disney decided to produce a full-length cartoon for several reasons. First, it was due to his constant pursuit of perfection. Disney always wanted to try out and overcome new and bigger challenges, that was part of its character. Second, it was because the Disney studio could only survive if it increased its bandwidth. At that time, the studio only made money from short cartoons that were only used as a support act in theaters in the States, merchandising and a few comics, although these can only be considered merchandising at the time, as Disney only made quick money and a Hoped to increase the popularity of his characters. They were not yet a real mainstay of the company.

The situation of the studio, which has achieved a very high reputation in recent years, is shown very well in the following example: Walt Disney Productions received 60% of the income from each film and an advance of 20,000 US dollars on each cartoon . While this is a great achievement for a studio that to date has only produced short cartoons and no feature films at all, it should be noted that each cartoon cost $ 50,000 to produce, not least because of Disney's high quality standards. But a premiere cinema only paid 150 US dollars per week and cartoon for a short film. For full-length films, on the other hand, the cinemas paid 3,000 US dollars, which should have been clear to Disney. In addition, the figures mentioned apply to 1935, at the time when Disney signed a new contract with United Artists , and just a year after Walt Disney came up with the idea for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . Before the new contract was signed, these key data were even more unfavorable for Disney.

As a third reason for the decision to produce a long cartoon, Disney's success with its cartoons and, above all, the resulting respect can be cited. The first cinema to have an entire program with a compilation of around eight short films from the Disney studios was in Stockholm in 1934. This affair apparently confirmed Walt Disney's assumption that animated films can entertain adults for an entire evening and not just in the opening act of a subsequent feature film.

In 1935 Walt and his brother Roy Oliver Disney toured Europe, stopping in Paris where Walt received a League of Nations medal . On the same day, the main program in a cinema in Paris was L'Heure joyeuse de Mickey avec Les Trois Petits Cochons , a compilation of Mickey Mouse cartoons and the cartoon The Three Little Pigs . Disney was able to convince itself once more on site that its already mature plans could work. At this point he had already chosen the fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a template.

Walt Disney's enthusiasm

Walt Disney was heavily criticized, especially in later years, for putting his name in front of his studio's productions , even though he was neither a screenwriter nor an illustrator in the films. This happened because Walt Disney was involved in the production of his films. He had a creative influence on everything in the movie. As with other films, he brought together the work of all the artists and combined them with his own imagination.

Walt Disney's influence on the film began with the decision on what would become the basis for the film. On the one hand, he wanted to fulfill a childhood dream, because at the age of fifteen he saw a silent film showing this subject, which was projected slightly asynchronously onto four screens with four projectors - since then he wanted to film the fairy tale himself. On the other hand, he found this fairy tale particularly suitable for an animated film, as the representation of the dwarfs in the feature film production was particularly problematic. Thus, the cartoon was superior to the feature film in this respect.

Despite criticism from some Hollywood celebrities and his siblings, Walt Disney was convinced of his idea. Disney put a mortgage on his house and went to various banks to raise the money. The estimated US $ 250,000 with a production time of eighteen months increased to US $ 1,500,000 costs and three years of production time - a relatively large sum for the time.

In 1936 Disney showed the director of Radio City Music Hall his unfinished film, which he then booked. Under an arrangement by his brother Roy, Disney met a banker for a $ 250,000 loan, which he eventually achieved. Another banker lent him money for this film and for Pinocchio .

Disney motivated its employees to such an extent that many volunteered to work overtime and contribute their own ideas to perfect the project. Together with Walt Disney, who was present at every story conference, they discussed the possibilities of the film. Disney, many employees, some bankers and Roy have said over the years that the film would never have been completed had it not been for pressure from the financially interested people - mainly Roy Disney and the bankers. Because every time the technology advanced, Walt Disney wanted to re-shoot everything with the new technology. Namely, this refers to the Multiplan camera , which was completed in 1937 and tested in the Oscar-winning cartoon The Old Mill . Walt Disney then wanted to re-shoot all the scenes in which this camera could have been used effectively, but they talked him out of it, which is why there are only a few multiplan scenes in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs .

In search of perfection, Disney also decided to delete several scenes, partly during production, but also from the finished film. On the one hand the scene at the beginning in which Snow White's mother dies, on the other hand two scenes of Ward Kimball , who drew the dwarfs eating soup and building a bed for Snow White. Disney itself regretted this decision to Kimball. Disney also had the power to decide on the selection of songs. From the 25 songs written for the film, he selected the eight that will appear in the final film.

The production

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became a comparatively costly undertaking for the relatively small studio, whose previous films did not reach double-digit running times. At its peak, 750 artists were working on the film, including 32 main draftsmen, 102 assistant draftsmen , 167  inbetweeners , 20 layouters, 25 background painters, 65 special effects draftsmen and 158 exclusively female inkers and colorists. What is unknown is the number of sound engineers and the technicians who researched in the laboratory which method is the perfect one to bring the colors onto the canvas in the desired form. At that time, the color tones still changed a lot during the transfer from the actual drawing to projection in the cinema. The experimental Silly Symphonies were useful in this research , in which darker, more natural colors were tried out after the start of Snow White production to test which colors were more pleasant for the audience. Disney was warned that no one could stand the harsh cartoon colors for 80 minutes.

Another problem was the large number of special effects . In a cartoon, anything that moves but isn't a character is considered a special effect. Smoke, water, clouds, dust and the like had to be handled by the special effects department - everything is in abundance in the film. Every camera movement, every camera angle, every placement of the lighting and every snippet of action was discussed personally by the layout artists, chief draftsmen, the story team and Disney.

They found inspiration in contemporary films, for example the chase between the dwarfs and the witch is based on David Wark Griffith's feature film Intolerance . When designing the figures, certain celebrities were also kept in mind. So the prince should look like the young Douglas Fairbanks , Snow White like the then star Janet Gaynor and the prince's horse like the horse of the western star Tom Mix . The Queen's outbursts were based on Charles Laughton's study in The Barretts of Wimpole Street , while Harpo Marx served as the basis for the character of the dwarf Seppl.

One of the first common ideas was about the plot of the film. It was decided very early on to pay more attention to the dwarves than the Brothers Grimm did. The past had shown that minor characters like Goofy and Donald Duck were necessary in the Mickey Mouse comics.

In order to improve the creativity of the artists and the atmosphere in the studio, Walt Disney decided not to put the artists under any time pressure. The drawings did not have to be made in a certain period of time, nor was a minimum number of drawings per day required. Walt Disney rewarded the overtime that was voluntarily worked with bonuses. The artists invested a lot of work, especially in the realism of the drawings and the movements in the film, because Snow White was supposed to be a feature film , not a cartoon. So it came to realistic backgrounds and the real looking house of the dwarfs and also to the first use of rotoscopy at the Disney studios. This means that previously recorded movements by actors are overdrawn in order to come as close as possible to reality. This method was used for the Prince and Snow White, among others. The later famous actress and dancer Marge Champion served as the dance model for Snow White, for example , who, according to her own statements, prevailed against around 200 applicants.

background

• Only Hollywood celebrities were invited to the premiere on December 21, 1937 at the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles .
• The film was used literarily by John Steinbeck in his novel Wonniger Thursday .
• With a grossing of around eight million US dollars at the time, it was the world's most successful sound film at the time. In the USA, “ Snow White ” had 109 million visitors.
• After 74 years, the film celebrated its German free TV premiere on April 22, 2011 on Sat.1 .

German synchronization

In contrast to later Disney films, great importance was attached to being able to market the film internationally during production. That is why the Disney studio used different backgrounds during production, for example to adapt inscriptions, book texts and names of the dwarfs into different languages.

There are three different German dubbed versions of the film. Since it was not possible to buy the film despite negotiations between Germany and Disney, the first German-language dubbing for Switzerland and Austria was done in Amsterdam in spring 1938 . In this German version, several actors who fled Germany lent the characters their voices, as Hortense Raky spoke and sang the Snow White. The magic mirror was spoken by Aribert Wäscher and the evil queen by Dora Gerson , who was murdered with her entire family in Auschwitz in 1943 . The dwarf "Chef" was spoken in this version by the actor Otto Wallburg , who fled Germany in 1933 and was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 . It is unclear whether the dubbed version was shown publicly in Austria before the war. On June 25, 1948, the film ran for the first time after the war, through Atlantik-Filmverleih, in Vienna . The German premiere took place on October 24, 1950 in Cologne in the distribution of the German RKO , Frankfurt am Main - in the synchronization from 1938. In December 1957 the first synchronization was performed again for the last time in the distribution of the Herzog Filmverleih München in the Federal Republic of Germany.

For the re-performance at Walt Disney Filmverleih, Frankfurt am Main, in November 1966, Simoton Film GmbH, Berlin produced the second dubbing (script, dialogue direction and lyrics: Eberhard Cronshagen ; musical direction: Heinrich Riethmüller ). In this version, Uschi Wolff was the speaking voice, Susanne Tremper the singing voice of Snow White. The second version was significantly modernized, smoothed and made more “child-friendly” compared to the first synchronization.

The third synchronization was created in 1994 as "Direct-to-Video-Synchro" for the first release of the film on VHS video at Berliner Synchron GmbH Wenzel Lüdecke (direction, book and text editing: Lutz Riedel). Snow White's role was spoken by Manja Doering and sung by Alexandra Wilcke . The third synchronization in the song texts is partly a mixture of the German texts from 1938 and 1966. The text of the song of the prince was taken almost verbatim from the text book of 1938 (“Singen, always just singing” instead of “I want a song Sing to you ”, 1966). For technical reasons, parts of the original version were used in the 1994 adaptation, e.g. the fountain echo in the second scene.

The old synchronizations have now been taken out of circulation and are officially no longer allowed to be used.

role	Original speaker	German speaker (1938)	German speaker (1966)	German speaker (1994)
Snow white	Adriana Caselotti	Hortense raky	Uschi Wolff	Manja Doering
Snow White (vocals)			Susanne Tremper	Alexandra Wilcke
The wicked queen	Lucille La Verne	Dora Gerson	Gisela Reissmann	Gisela Fritsch
witch		unknown		Kerstin Sanders-Dornseif
The prince	Harry Stockwell		René Kollo	Rolf Dieter Heinrich
boss	Roy Atwell	Otto Wallburg	Klaus W. Krause	Manfred Lichtenfeld
Growl	Pinto Colvig	Ernst Legal	Karl Hellmer	Roland Hemmo
Happy	Otis Harlan	unknown	Eduard Wandrey	Gerry Wolff
Sleepyhead	Pinto Colvig	Aribert Washer	Herbert Weissbach	Horst Kempe
Pimple	Scotty Mattraw		Erich Fiedler	Heinz Fabian
Atchoo	Billy Gilbert	Ernst Legal	Walter Bluhm	Fritz Decho
Seppl	Eddie Collins
The magic mirror	Moroni Olsen	Aribert Washer	Klaus Miedel	Hermann Ebeling
Hunter	Stuart Buchanan	unknown	Arnold Marquis	Klaus Sunshine
teller	unavailable		Heinz Petruo	Friedrich Schoenfelder

reception

Reviews

“Disney created its first full-length cartoon based on Grimm's fairy tale, interpreting the original as a romantic melodrama that is full of magical comedy and bizarre at the same time: each of the seven dwarfs was given an extremely distinctive character. The use of the 'Multiplan camera', which made the painted picture spaces vividly tangible, had an innovative effect at the time. Instead of 'Americanizing' the material, Disney involved well-known European illustrators in the conception, with some dark (not necessarily child-friendly) passages looking for the tradition of German Romanticism. "

- Lexicon of international film

“This cartoon from Walt Disney's artful workshop gives one of our most beautiful fairy tales a colorful American life. Particularly loving animal drawings. Worth seeing."

- 6000 films. Critical notes from the cinema years 1945 to 1958.

“Cartoon by Walt Disney, who turned the Grimm Brothers' fairy tale into an American-style operetta. Well suited for unbiased friends of Disney characters (ages 8 and up). "

- Protestant film observer

The Wiesbaden film evaluation agency awarded the production the title valuable .

Awards

• 1938: Grand Biennale Great Art Trophy of the Film Festival in Venice for Walt Disney
• 1939: Special Oscar (a normal-sized Oscar statue plus seven symbolic miniature Oscars) for Walt Disney
• 1939: New York Film Critics Circle Award for Walt Disney
• 1987: Special award from the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Guild on the occasion of the film's 50th birthday
• 1989: Entry into the National Film Registry

Publications

Home movie

• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , 65 m Super 8 - version Piccolo Film, Munich 1976
• A dwarf in distress , 45 m Super 8 - excerpt from Revue Film
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , Walt Disney Masterpieces - VHS, Walt Disney Home Entertainment 1994
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , Platinum Edition - VHS, Buena Vista Home Entertainment 2001
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Platinum Edition - DVD, Buena Vista Home Entertainment 2001
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 2-Disc Edition -DVD, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment 2009
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Diamond Edition -Blu-Ray, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment 2009
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Diamond Edition -Blu-Ray / DVD, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment 2014
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Disney Classics Collection -Blu-Ray / DVD, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment 2017

Soundtrack

• Frank Churchill , Larry Morey , Paul J. Smith , Leigh Harline : Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Original motion picture soundtrack . Classic Soundtrack Series. Walt Disney Records , Burbank 1998, audio carrier no. 60959-7 - digitally restored, complete original recording of the film music as well as some unused pieces of music, recorded under the direction of Frank Churchill
• Frank Churchill, Larry Morey, Paul J. Smith, Leigh Harline, Eberhard Cronshagen : Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Original German film soundtrack . WEA International 2001, sound carrier no. 0927-42516-2 - Film soundtrack with the German dubbed songs
• Frank Churchill, Larry Morey, Paul J. Smith, Leigh Harline: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Songs from the Original Soundtrack. Pickwick, London 1989, audio carrier no. DSMCD 456 - incomplete version with original film dialogues and narrator voice; however, does contain some interesting interviews with Walt Disney, Adriana Caselotti, and Ward Kimball

Film documentaries

• Still the Fairest of Them All: The Making of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" . Video documentation by Harry Arends. USA 2001, Buena Vista, 45 minutes

literature

• Leonard Maltin : The Disney Films. 3. Edition. Hyperion, New York 1995, ISBN 0-7868-8137-2 .
• Elmar Biebl, Dirk Manthey, Jörg Altendorf and others: The films of Walt Disney. The magical world of animation. 2nd Edition. Milchstraße, Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-89324-117-5 .
• Frank Thomas , Ollie Johnston : Disney Animation. The Illusion of Life. Abbeville Press, New York 1981, ISBN 0-89659-698-2 .
• Christopher Finch : Walt Disney. His life - his art. German by Renate Witting. (Limited exclusive edition.) Ehapa-Verlag, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-7704-0171-9 . (Original title: The Art of Walt Disney. From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms. )
• Christopher Finch : The Art of Walt Disney. From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms. Abrams, New York 2004, ISBN 0-8109-4964-4 .
• Ina van Beesel, arr .: Snow White and the seven dwarfs. Book about the film. Images and text. Parragon, Bath 2013 ISBN 1472347366 (In German)

Web links

Commons : Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the online film database
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs atRotten Tomatoes(English)
• Other sound recordings for film music

Individual evidence

• Reinhold Reitberger : Walt Disney. Represented with testimonials and photo documents. 160 pages, Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek bei Hamburg 1979, 6th edition February 2010, ISBN 3-499-50226-7 .

1. ↑ p. 65
2. ↑ p. 66
3. ↑ ^{a b} p. 67

• Others

1. ↑ hd-filmreviews.de: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) ( Memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
2. ^ Norman Rockwell Museum: Marge Champion, the original "Snow White" - Norman Rockwell Museum interview. June 12, 2013, accessed January 8, 2018 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b} trickfilmstimmen.de The Disney Synchron Archive. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
4. ^ Report in the Österreichische Film-Zeitung, which in its edition of January 7, 1938 announced the German-language premiere in Austria in the RKO distribution for the spring of 1938
5. ↑ Hortense Raky's biography in: Kay Less : 'In life, more is taken from you than given…'. Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. P. 408, ACABUS-Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8
6. ↑ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed December 11, 2016 .  
7. ↑ 6000 films. Critical notes from the cinema years 1945 to 1958. In: Handbook V of the Catholic film criticism . 3. Edition. Verlag Haus Altenberg, Düsseldorf 1963, DNB 451265483 p. 377.
8. ↑ Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 17/1967, p. 26
9. ↑ Image: Disney with the Oscar statuettes
10. ↑ Disney Classics: Complete Movie Box Set. Retrieved February 4, 2019 .