Making the First Animated Feature

The animated movie shown above premiered at the long-gone Carthay Circle on December 21 in 1937 Los Angeles. How the time flies.

In the second decade of the 21st century, the movie industry knows only two types of sure-fire, high-profit theatrical motion pictures. The first is a movie starring comic-book super heroes. The second is an animated feature that highlights animals, comical humans, despicable villains, and occasionally (surprise!) super heroes.

It was not always so. For decades, animated features were the province of Walt Disney Productions and a handful of small independent studios which released the occasional low-budget cartoon feature. Profits were thin. Most major movie studios avoided long-form animation as though it was a dumpster generating strange aromas. “Disney can make money with animated features,” went the refrain, “but nobody else can”. Entanglements with eighty-five minute cartoons were carefully avoided.

But with the advent of “The Little Mermaid”, “The Lion King”, “Toy Story”, “Ice Age” and several other features, movie executives reassessed their positions. Today, animated CG blockbusters are regular commercial occurrences. And what all of them have in common, each and every one, is direct lineage from the first American animated feature titled “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. Like that first long-form cartoon, the descendants are labor intensive, take years to prepare and produce, and feature animals, comical humans, and diabolical villains.

“Snow White”, however, was not the first feature film that Walt Disney considered making. That honor falls to a live-action/animation hybrid feature based on Lewis Carroll’s “Alice In Wonderland”. The plan was to make a Technicolor film with Mary Pickford as Alice, and cartoon characters as everybody else. Pickford, of course, was a co-owner of Disney’s distributor United Artists, and as Disney explained to a reporter years after the fact:

“Mary was going to put up the money. I can still remember how awed we were when we figured it would take four to five hundred thousand dollars to do a good job. I worked out a plan, and we shot some test live-action footage.”

Test footage, however, was as far as “Alice” got. The project was cancelled when Paramount Pictures obtained rights to the Carroll books and produced its own version of “Alice in Wonderland” with its roster of stars in featured roles. (Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle? Really?) A short while later, development on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” got underway.

“What interested Walt was striving for new things,” remembered Disney art director Ken Anderson. “He was always aiming at exceeding the limitations of the medium, though we never heard it addressed in so many words.”

And what better way to burst through those limitations than to change the very nature of animated cartoons? To transform them from eight-minute program fillers to the main event?

“When you analyze Mickey Mouse,” said Disney director and animator Ward Kimball, “he was two circles connected with two lines … what we call ‘rubber hose animation’ because Mickey’s and Minnie’s legs both look like black rubber hoses. As we got into more realistic approaches, beginning with the little fairy in ‘The Flying Mouse’ [1934], those were the beginnings and we learned how difficult they could be.”

Disney began early story work on “Snow White” in 1934. He knew he had to move past the crudities of his early shorts if he was to hold an audience’s attention for eighty-plus minutes, especially with a story that involved a beautiful girl escaping from a wicked queen, that girl’s discovery of a forest cottage and gang of short, unruly men, and finally those men’s epic failure to protect her from harm. Ideas were explored and discarded: a fat, more comical female monarch was discussed and ruled out; opening the film with Snow White discovering the dwarfs' cottage was determined not to work; a sequence with the evil queen capturing the prince was found to be a dead end.

Another early obstacle? The quality of the animation.

“No one had ever animated a realistic girl,” said Wolfgang Reitherman, then a young animator but later a producer-director in charge of Disney Feature Animation. “Cartoons had always been flat, with caricatures rather than real-looking people in them.”

“Snow White” sequence director Wilfred Jackson remembered the studio’s early attempts animating females as failures:

“When the animators tried moving the female figure [in “The Goddess of Spring” - 1934], the only thing they had to rely on was their experience with broad, cartoon action. They’d never had to animate in a realistic way before, and the result was a girl who moved stiffly and awkwardly. She was unconvincing as a human figure.”

Story work on “Snow White” went on hiatus for part of 1935, then Walt pushed the feature back into development. His working methods became the template for the animated features that followed: Story and gag ideas were spit-balled by board artists. Characters were fleshed out, then changed, then tossed away as plot strands that didn’t mesh with the main thrust of the film’s narrative morphed into something else, or were dropped altogether. With “Snow White”, the look of the wicked queen became beautiful, her personality sinister and evil; the names and personalities of the dwarfs changed. And the first act of the picture — Snow White discovering the dwarf’s cottage — was replaced with the introduction of the queen, and Snow White’s escape from the castle.

By 1936, much of the continuity for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was nailed down. Work on the usual output of shorts continued, but late one night, key staff came back after dinner for a story presentation from the boss regarding the studio’s major new project:

“Walt called forty of us onto the small recording stage,” art director Ken Anderson recalled. “We all sat in folding chairs, the lights went down, and Walt spent the next four hours telling us the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’. He didn’t just tell the story, he acted out each character, and when he got done he told us that was going to be our first feature.”

Key animators commenced working on character designs and exploratory animation. Employee art classes were expanded, and a push for new personnel with art backgrounds stepped up. (The studio had earlier hired seasoned animators Art Babbitt and Bill Tytla, both of whom hailed from studios on the east coast. Grim Natwick, an illustrator, animator and creator of Betty Boop, came aboard a little while later.)

Story work went on as animation ramped up. Wilfred Jackson, who’d been with the studio almost ten years, noted how Disney kept refining the plot and adding gags:

“He would tell the story to anyone who’d listen. … He’d pick the brains of animators, story men, and janitors, not always to get their ideas, but to see how they’d react to a new twist he’d thought up. He’d watch their reactions and store it away in that marvelous brain of his, revise the story, and try it out again on somebody else. I don’t think he ever forgot anything.”

Eric Larson, an animator on “Snow White” (and known as “the animal specialist”), remembered: “We all had egos, but Walt had a way of taking those egos and making them work together as a team. … This guy had the ability to take you into a story meeting, or three or four animators into a sweat box [a small projection room] with a reel of film, with a thing they’d been working on, and in ten minutes he could tear the whole damn thing apart. And in another forty minutes he could completely rebuild it so you had something concrete and solid.”

The bulk of “Snow White’s” production occurred in 1937, the year of the film's release. Like every cartoon feature that came after it, the picture was broken into sequences of five to eight minutes each. Animation was overseen by five sequence directors and supervising director Dave Hand, all of whom reported to Disney:

“Absolutely nothing happened without Walt being in on it,” Wilfred Jackson remembered. “All the color models he saw before they got okayed. All the rough animation. We ran it for him before anything moved into cleanup, and ink and paint.”

Live-action reference was shot to help artists with the animation of the human characters. Individual frames of film were enlarged onto hole-punched photostats for ease of use by animators: “With the queen they used rotoscope for starters, rotoscoping a play called ‘The Drunkard’ as sort of inspiration for the witch,” Ward Kimball said. “But we never did trace them like we did for Snow White. There we actually went over [the girl] with rotoscope prints. We changed the head and the proportions.”

Walt Disney assigned key animators to various characters as carefully as any studio mogul cast actors in movie roles. The young animator Frank Thomas joined supervising animators Fred Moore and Bill Tytla in animating the dwarfs. Eric Larson, Milt Kahl and Jim Algar brought the forest animals to life. Norm Ferguson supervised the witch. And studio veteran Hamilton Luske teamed with Grim Natwick (at 46 the senior citizen of the animation crew) on Snow White.

“Animating the dwarfs represented the first time we’d ever had to delineate seven distinct individuals at one time,” recalled Thomas. “If you had to do even a simple thing like backing the dwarfs up, you had to do each one differently. And how many ways are there of backing up? You do the first four … then you get to Sneezy and you’ve run out of ideas. It got to be a problem.”

Dwarfs aside, if Snow White hadn’t been believable, the feature wouldn’t have worked. And everybody knew it. “One of the reasons Ham [Luske] was so successful [with the character] was that he had great powers of analysis,” Wolfgang Reitherman related. “He knew what poses to hit and to hold. Snow White had a china-doll look to her, but in many ways I think she’s the most successful girl we ever animated at the studio.”

Forty-five years after the picture wrapped, Grim Natwick remembered: “You couldn’t take any liberty [with Snow White]. You had to make her interesting, but you couldn’t open her eyes too wide. You couldn’t distort her physical form. You had to keep her straight and yet try to make her move enough so she was still animated. With the dwarfs, you could tie the eyes to the bulbous nose, you could stretch them out and bring them back, and it all worked. You couldn’t do that with Snow White. But it was a lot of fun drawing her.”

The boss’s inexhaustible quest for perfection resulted in elaborate preproduction work with thousands of inspirational sketches, many of them supplied by artists Albert Hurter and Gustaf Tenggren. The two men visualized castle interiors and forest glades, exteriors and interiors of the dwarf’s cottage, and the shadowy depths of the dwarfs’ diamond mine. “Snow White” had more complex backgrounds, visual effects, and characters than the studio had ever before attempted. Animator Reitherman, the principle talent working on the queen’s magic mirror scenes, related:

“I spent months on that mirror character, folding the animation paper in half to get an elliptical face, going over and over the animation. I was pretty proud of what I came up with, but then the mirror scene comes back in color and I see that they’ve put a damn distortion glass over my animation. I wasn’t happy.”

Extensive use of a photographic platform known as the multiplane camera, designed to provide Disney’s shorts and first feature with three-dimensional depth, was hugely expensive to operate. It took a three-man crew days and often weeks to photograph a scene. The added costs, however, didn’t phase Disney.

“It was always my ambition to have a swell camera,” Walt enthused to Time magazine, “and now I’ve got one. I get a kick just watching the boys operating it, and remembering how I used to make ‘em out of baling wire.”

The tempo of production steadily increased throughout 1937. So did the picture’s costs. “Snow White’s” initial five hundred thousand dollar budget increased to seven hundred and fifty thousand, then rose to well over a million. Walt’s brother and business partner Roy Disney told his younger sibling that an additional quarter million dollars would be needed to finish the picture. Joseph Rosenberg of Bank of America would have to be shown their closely-held work-in-progress before a loan could be secured.

Walt wasn’t thrilled with the arrangement (industry wags were calling the feature “Disney’s folly”), but the studio had few other options. On the appointed day Disney sat nervously in a projection room with the bank executive, watching the color footage and pencil tests strung together in rough continuity. When the film came to an end, Rosenberg walked out of the projection room, remarked it was a nice day, and yawned. At which point he turned to Walt Disney and said, “That picture will make a pot full of money.”

The studio received the loan. (And the feature’s final cost came in at 1.5 million dollars.)

Getting “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” into theaters before Christmas became not just desirable, but a necessity. As production deadlines loomed up, studio personnel found themselves putting in twelve and fourteen hour days without overtime pay, seven days a week. Additional staff was being hired on a weekly basis.

Animator/director Don Lusk recalled, “Walt wanted me to teach the people they were sending from all over the country, so I was an extension of animator Eric Larson, training people. Eric got me back across the street to [animate] the animals, but the picture got so far behind I was put in charge of in-betweeners. I did cleanup and in-between work [the creation of drawings between key animation poses] just to help get the picture finished in time.”

“For months about all we did was wake up and go to the studio, work all day and go home to bed,” remembered animator Ollie Johnston. “Studio wives got together for company. They were ‘Disney widows’ the way some wives today are golf or football widows.”

After multiple internal screenings, Disney made the decision to cut two partially completed sequences: one in which the dwarfs eat soup; another where they build a bed for Snow White. Both sequences slowed the narrative drive of the film, and including them would have entailed additional costs from a company that was near the end of its financial tether. (Twenty years later, cleaned up animation of soup-eating dwarfs made its national debut on Disney’s hour-long anthology show on ABC.)

As Thanksgiving approached, the last few scenes of “Snow White” were pushed through ink-and-paint and photographed in color. A few staffers complained that the prince moved stiffly, that live-action photostats had been relied on too heavily. But the reality was, Walt Disney Productions had run out of time and resources to make the character any better.

The first week of December 1937, Technicolor delivered an answer print of the feature into the studio’s hands. Film cans and key employees were then loaded onto a bus and driven to the agricultural town of Pomona, where a surprise screening took place.

“That first preview was unsettling,” Wilfred Jackson said. “The audience seemed to be enjoying the film, but three quarters of the way through, one third of them walked out. … Later we found out they were local college kids who had to get back for their ten o’clock dormitory curfew.”

Two-and-a-half weeks later, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater in West Los Angeles, The opening night attracted a wide swath of Hollywood royalty that included Charlie Chaplin, Shirley Temple, Marlene Dietrich, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, among numerous other stars. Almost everyone laughed and applauded throughout the screening.

“They even applauded backgrounds and layouts when no animation was on the screen,” said art director Kendall O’Connor. “I was sitting near John Barrymore when the shot of the queen’s castle above the mist came on, with the queen poling across the marsh in a little boat. He was bouncing up and down in his seat, he was so excited. Barrymore was an artist as well as an actor. And he hew the kind of work that went into something like that.”

For Disney artists who were in attendance, opening night was nerve-wracking. “All I could see was the mistakes in our animation,” animator Ollie Johnston remembered. “But the audience was caught up by Snow White and the birds right away, and I relaxed.”

Frank Thomas added: “Some of the first animation of the girl … never looked good to me. Her eyes squeegee all over her face … she moves badly. But by the time we did the last stuff, for instance where she’s baking the pie at the dwarfs’ cottage, the animation’s great.”

But the luminaries in attendance that first night saw none of the flaws of Walt Disney’s first feature. For them, the film was an entertainment that worked, and an unalloyed triumph.

“Snow White” rolled into general release on February 4, 1938. From the get-go, it was a critical and box office smash: “A classic, as important cinematically as “The Birth of a Nation” or the birth of Mickey Mouse …” (New York Times) “… absorbingly interesting and, at times, thrilling entertainment…” (Daily Variety) “… as charming as it is novel in conception…” (New York Daily News).

At the end of its first domestic release, the film had earned $3.5 million in the U.S. and Canada, and performed spectacularly overseas, taking in almost twice what it earned domestically. It was the highest grossing motion picture in film history until “Gone With the Wind” assumed the mantle two years later. (Film historians believe the aforementioned “Birth of a Nation”, a Civil War epic of the silent era, grossed more money than “Snow White” did in 1938. But since “Birth” was released during the Bronze Age of motion picture distribution, reliable records are non-existent.)

And its first release was just the beginning. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" was re-released in 1944 and again in 1952, 1958, 1967, 1975, 1983, 1987 and 1993. As of 2019, Disney's first animated feature has theatrically grossed $985,178,333, adjusted for inflation. Added to which, it sold 25.1 million home video units from 1994 to 2002, taking in more than half a billion dollars.

For Walt Disney, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was the vehicle that powered the company toward wider horizons: a new modern studio, more elaborate animated features, amusement parks, and ultimately a media empire. But “Snow White” is important for more than just establishing the name Disney as a global brand. The picture set the artistic mold for almost every mainstream animated feature that followed it, from “Gulliver’s Travels” to “Toy Story” to “Despicable Me”.

In its presentation of characters, its heady mix of comedy, drama and action, “Snow White” became the tap root from which all other long-form cartoons spring.

Want MORE insidey stuff on the Mouse Factory from the people who lived it? Try Mouse in Transition and Mouse In Orbit ...