This is the first full length animated feature film ever made. It hadn’t been thought that animation could sustain anything more that a few minutes of madcap merriment involving mice and chases. Walt Disney was convinced that a really well made film with strong characters and a good plot could work as well, if not better, than any live action picture.
Disney's inspiration was not in creating Snow White but in creating her world. At a time when animation was a painstaking frame-by-frame activity and every additional movement detail took an artist days or weeks to draw, Disney imagined a film in which every corner and dimension would contain something that was alive and moving. From the top to the bottom, from the front to the back, he filled the frame. So complex were his frames, indeed, that Disney and his team of animators found that the cels they used for their short cartoons were not large enough to contain all the details he wanted, and larger cels were needed. The film's earliest audiences may not have known the technical reasons for the film's impact, but in the early scene where Snow White runs through the forest, they were thrilled by the way the branches reached out to snatch at her, and how the sinister eyes in the darkness were revealed to belong to friendly woodland animals. The trees didn't just sit there within the frame. Nothing like the techniques in ''Snow White'' had been seen before. Disney demonstrated how animation could release a movie from its trap of space and time; how gravity, dimension, physical limitations and the rules of movement itself could be transcended by the imaginations of the animators.
Ironically it’s only today, through the wonders of High Definition Digital projection, that we can see the film as Disney wanted it to be seen. No worn projectors, scratches, dust or colour fade - just rock solid, pin sharp animation - every frame (or field in modern technospeak) is a work of art in its own right.
- The film took 750 artists four years to make.
- From many who auditioned for the voice of Snow White (Walt turned down Deanna Durbin), he chose the young singer Adriana Caselotti. Harry Stockwell, the father of Dean Stockwell, did the voice of the prince.
- For a while after its release the film was the highest-grossing motion picture of all time, until it was finally surpassed by "Gone With the Wind" a couple of years later.
- In England, the film was deemed too scary for children, and those under 16 had to be accompanied by a parent.
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