30 Movies In 30 Days. Day 14 – Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs
True story: I wrote my Batchelor’s degree dissertation about Disney’s influence on fairy tales because I was bored. After submitting half-a-dozen flawless essays on Lynch, Scorsese, Ford and Hitchcock, I arrogantly decided that I’d pick a random subject I had no interest in for my final assignment. Just to prove how good I was. What a dick.
I spent six months immersed in everything Walt had ever had a hand in and beyond. And slowly, I became a convert.
Snow White has a purity to it that hasn’t been seen in American movies for years. It’s not loaded with action scenes for teens or filled with knowing jokes for parents or overblown with wacky characters for toddlers.
What it does instead is play. Snow White was produced when Disney animators loved the medium itself. Disney first saw cartoons as the successor to vaudeville, and so his first feature is loaded with playful moments where the characters essentially put on a show. Gags are crammed in where-ever they can – not jokes, but gags; imaginative moments that make you smile with joy, but not necessarily laugh.
It’s not cynical, cover-all-bases, gotta’ catch-them-all scriptwriting that Pixar are only now moving away from. It’s just entertainment, founded on the idea that everyone finds it funny when a man dries his beard out using a mangler, or a tortoise ‘plays’ his shell as if it were an instrument.
Tags: 30_days
