Snow White and the Seventh Art: Sound, Song, and Respectability in Disney's First Feature

Abstract

Historians tend to gravitate toward beginnings. Accordingly, the sizeable body of literature surrounding the Walt Disney Studios’ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) offers scholars a tantalizing collection of “firsts” that indicate the film’s momentous achievements in the history of cinema with little uncertainty.1 While Snow White was not the world’s first feature-length animated film, it was the first with sound, the first with color, and the first created using the technique of cel animation, requiring studio workers to hand-paint and individually photograph hundreds of thousands of celluloid panes. More broadly, Snow White also stands as the first animated feature to find lasting critical and popular success. The film received near unanimously glowing reviews in the American press, suggesting that the Walt Disney Studios’ herculean effort to create a movie without recourse to a direct predecessor had paid off handsomely. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s W. Ward Marsh, for example, was not alone when he claimed that Snow White “is the greatest cartoon ever made. In many respects it is the greatest film ever produced.”2 Yet too concerted a focus on the film’s technical and critical achievements can blind us to the contemporary historical and cultural events that surrounded its creation. With a few noteworthy exceptions, film histories have tended to overlook a significant facet of Snow White’s many accomplishments: its status as the world’s first feature-length animated