subject: The Film That Sparked An Empire [print this page] Nowadays, Disney is everywhereNowadays, Disney is everywhere. You can take your family on a vacation to Disney World and stay in a Disney-themed hotel close to the gates. The company is absolutely massive, with fingers in so many pies that it can seem like Mickey Mouse actually runs the world. Some people find it tough to reconcile, especially if they grew up watching Disney movies. But most visitors to Orlando's parks may be too young to realize that it wasn't always this way. The Disney company had to start from somewhere?and that start was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length cel-animated film ever made.
Walt Disney, a self-taught artist and passionate early film buff, had started an animation studio in Hollywood in the 1920s; he hoped to make it big by creating the cartoons he adored. But while he was a passionate producer, Disney was notorious for having no business sense; The introduction of Mickey Mouse and his Silly Symphonies shorts, were a godsend to him, because he had lost the rights (and had nearly crashed his company several times) to his first famous character Oswald.
Then, in 1934, Walt announced his plan to make a full-length animated feature film--an adaptation of the folk tale Snow White. It was a ridiculous notion; cartoons were shorts that played in theaters before the real movies began. An animated feature would be outrageously expensive, and cartoons just weren't meant to be that long--producers didn't think that audiences would bother with it. Disney's business partners tried to talk him out of it, and most of Hollywood began calling the project "Walt's Folly"; absolutely everyone was convinced that it would destroy the studio.
Unmoved, Disney set to work with his animation team in August of 1934. Story development took an unprecedented amount of time as the group pinned down every last detail--the personalities of each of the seven dwarfs, the gleam of the poisoned apple, the design of the witch's facial warts. The story outline reached eighteen pages or more, as Walt struggled to find the right balance of plot elements and characterization. Experiments in creating fluid and distinctive effects were the playground for studio animators, while they also learned how to create realistic animated humans.
Production continued on through to 1937, when Disney ran out of money. The budget, which had originally been set at $250,000 (ten times the budget for a standard Silly Symphonies short), had ballooned way beyond that. Disney was forced to show a rough cut of the film to prospective backers. It was a risky gamble, but it paid off: the audience erupted into a standing ovation. With the final financial push, the Disney studio released the finished Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in February of 1938. The final budget clocked in at nearly $1.5 million--in 1930s dollars!
Fortunately, a major comeback was the result of his expensive gamble. Disney's dictatorial attention to detail resulted in a gorgeously animated, well-written story that took the world by storm. The film was a massive hit, recouping its investment in no time and starting a brand new trend in filmmaking. No one had ever made a full-length animated movie before--Snow White was the first, and it set the bar. When theater distribution rules changed, Animated shorts were now longer profitable; however, animated films are now a standard in every multiplex on the planet. While other animators may have done something similar, it was Disney's folly that made the world realize what animation could do. It changed filmmaking forever, and without Snow White, the world would be a very different place today.
