That Old Magic: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
It's old magic, perhaps slightly dated, but still pure.
Grade: A
There’s a beautiful princess, a fiendish villain, adorable magical sidekicks and a trek across a fantasy wonderland. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was Disney’s first animated feature film and set the mould for all the rest to follow and break. The film’s old magic, perhaps slightly dated, but still pure.
When you go back to watch the films you loved as a kid, they can seem so naive. I first saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on DVD and I re-watched it on Disney+. The Evil Queen orders the Huntsman to take Snow White into the woods, kill her and cut out her heart and bring it back to the Queen in a little box. She sems to have had the box custom made for the purpose. The lock’s shaped like a heart. I thought: “Really?” I know she’s the ‘Evil Queen’ but the box seems like over doing it. Likewise, I get the Seven Dwarfs are meant to be funny little chumps but when they find Snow White sleeping under their blankets and think she’s a dragon and storm the bedroom to slay the ‘dragon’, their reaction smells a bit hammy.
Yet you should remember that this is the world you inhabited as a kid. It’s a world of pure evil and pure good, where the Evil Queens transforms from a chalk-faced ice sculpture into a wrinkled old hag in a vortex of witchcraft, and all the people and animals are animated, Rembrandt-like blots of ink the colour of every shade in the rainbow. It’s not meant to be reality. It’s fantasy.
That’s why Snow White could seem like innocence incarnate to you even though now she can look like a simpering twit. The princesses of the Classic Disney films were ludicrously passive but Snow White set the tone. While the Queen plots to murder her, she spends her days picking flowers and singing “Someday my prince will come.” I prefer the heroines of the Disney Renaissance, Mulan, Jasmine, and Belle, who went after what they wanted, but I find it impossible to hate Snow White.
As cliche as it may sound, she really does have skin as white as snow. Thanks to the incandescent animation, she glows like an angel. She speaks with the sweetly, childish voice of Shirley Temple. When she enters the dwarfs’ home, finds their tiny beds, concludes the house’s occupants are children and that they must be orphans, she says “That’s too bad.” Nothing’s ever terrible for this girl. She’s like an alien from another planet where they haven’t invented pain.
She and the whole film may seem saccharine but go back and try any of the sweets you liked when you were a kid and you’ll probably react the same. Maybe it’s because you’ve forgotten what sweetness lies beyond reality and in that land of princesses, princes and fairytale endings where golden castles can rise out of the clouds.