I recently re-viewed the early Disney films and fo...

2009-08-07T13:07:05.966-04:00

I recently re-viewed the early Disney films and found all of my opinions on them flip-flopping. Previously, I had considered Fantasia Disney's masterpiece with Dumbo a personal favorite and Bambi the studio's most impressive narrative feature. However, on re-viewing Bambi didn't really do it for me and much of Fantasia seemed pretentious. Dumbo, meanwhile, has some of Disney's greatest sequences - the pink elephants and the hipster crows who sing the brilliant "When I See an Elephant Fly" (though racial stereotypes, the crows are portrayed quite sympathetically - much more so than actual black actors were in most movies of the time). Overall though, the movie feels alternately slight and belabored, while the animation - except for the brilliant surrealism when Dumbo gets drunk - is not quite up to Disney's standards. I had noticed this on previous viewings, and this one confirmed my hunch that it will remain a personal favorite but I cannot truly call it one of the great Disneys.

The big surprise was Pinnochio - I had sort of written it off a classic, but an easy critic's choice; the one they always pick in lieu of a bolder and messier work like Fantasia or a more compellingly complex tale like Bambi. Maybe so; but what astonished me now was how well the damn thing worked! There isn't a missed moment, the screen is stuffed with gags and details, the animation is superb and the narrative is gripping from start to finish. I can no longer get around the fact that it IS Disney's masterpiece.

This leaves Snow White. Watching it again, it felt like...a beginning. Which is to say much of what excited and intrigued me was connected to the notion that it was the first of its kind, that it was the most rooted in fairy tale and fable, that it was a kind of golden primer for the possibilities of animated features. The intellectual, historical elements in other words - as you point out in your piece. But something about it has stuck with me (it was probably the Disney film I'd gone the longest without seeing before this recent re-viewing) and I want to revisit it. It reminds me of what I wrote about Three Little Pigs vs. the Warner Brothers' fairy tale spoofs: as satisfying as a more adult, unpretentious, unsentimental take on storytelling can be there is something to be said for that primal, mythical, elemental, unadultered tale. Of course Snow White has comedy and sophistication in the animation, but it one of the more element, almost pure Disney movies.

Comments on Screen Savour: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

I recently re-viewed the early Disney films and fo...