Lillian Disney said Walt was obsessed with being first. He had made the first animated film with sound, and the first in color. On the heels of his greatest success, he decided to try something more challenging and more costly than anything before in animation: a feature-length movie. Walt and Roy came up with an estimate of $500,000.
The estimate was low.
But Disney had tremendous resources at his disposal. His studio employed almost 200 people. Mickey Mouse had become a brand unto himself. Herman Kamen, who had joined the studio in 1933 as a promoter and merchandise developer, licensed Mickey’s image to some of the country’s largest and most prestigious companies and helped create and sell a flood of Mickey Mouse products, including the famous eared cap. In 1934, the studio took in $35 million in merchandise sales, plus another $200,000 in licensing fees. The next year, the animated mouse appeared plumper on screen and also more refined – his movements were sleeker; his eyes wider, and more soulful.
Disney got lots of encouragement when he started thinking about a full-length animated feature. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were suggested, as well as Gulliver’s Travels. Mary Pickford at United Artists lobbied for a version of Alice in Wonderland that would combine live-action with animation and even offered to put up the money to make it happen. But Disney had made up his mind to go with Snow White.
Snow White was a German folk story published in 1812 in Grimms’ Fairy Tales . The original story is macabre and unsettling. It begins with blood: A queen accidentally pricks her finger with a needle while sewing near an open window and her blood drips onto fresh snow on the windowsill. Fascinated by this stark tableau, the queen tells herself, “Oh how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony.” Later, she does, and names the girl Snow White. But the gentle queen dies, and the king remarries a new queen obsessed with being the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. She owns a magic mirror that she consults about this regularly. Always, the mirror informs her that she is the “fairest in the land.” But when Snow White grows up, the mirror delivers the shocking news that while the queen remains the “fairest in the land,” Snow White has become “a thousand times more beautiful than you.”
Enraged, the wicked queen orders a huntsman to take Snow White into the forest, kill her, and return with the girl’s liver and lungs. But the huntsman cannot bring himself to kill Snow White, who flees deeper into the woods. Instead, he kills a boar and brings its liver and lungs to the queen. She has them cooked for her dinner. Snow White, meanwhile, is taken in by a band of dwarfs.
The queen takes matters into her own hands when the magic mirror reveals that Snow White still lives. She disguises herself, finds Snow White and makes several attempts on her life. She dresses as a peddler, and offers Snow White a lace bodice. She cinches it so tightly that Snow White faints. Snow White is saved at the last minute by the dwarfs. The queen then persuades Snow White to take a bite from a poisoned apple. Snow White falls into a deep sleep, and this time, the dwarfs cannot wake her. Thinking she is dead, the dwarfs place her in a glass coffin, where they can still gaze upon her eternal beauty.
Snow White remains in her coffin until a handsome prince happens by and falls in love with her. He begs the dwarfs to let him take her coffin away. When he does, a piece of apple is dislodged from Snow White’s throat, and she awakens. In time they plan their wedding, and the wicked queen is among the invited guests, unaware the bride-to-be is Snow White. When the queen is discovered, she is thrust into a pair of iron shoes, heated to glowing red and is forced dance as the flesh is seared from her feet. In agony, she falls dead.
Much of this, of course, would have to
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