"A perfect disguise!"

Rating: 10/10 (22 December 2015)

In the name of Christmas, I dare to tackle Disney once again! Watching this
recently, I was struck by how simple and straightforward a watch it is. It really is the most simple fairytale you can get, and it seemed so much bigger when I was little. But nonetheless it still tells a great story of good and evil, wonder, and of course the happy ending, that's such a joy to get into. It looks like a storybook come to life and has such a charming quaintness to it that gets right in your heart and stays there! I can't help but marvel at all the endless rich small details there are in everything, there's such magnificent artistry on display here. The lush outdoor scenes, and the incredible realistic use of light and shadows. The animators took everything they learned from the wonderful training ground that was the Silly Symphonies and poured all of the best elements and techniques into this, and you can feel the spirit of what they were trying to express in animated form and it's beautiful and quite amazing. It's simplistic but it was their very first film. The next one though has a great complexity of emotions and dark undertones to it. Not by any means that this doesn't have its grim touches. Words such as dead kill death and blood are spoken, the excellent early scene where Snow White gets overwhelmed by her own fear and sees the woods as monstrous faces feels like a bit of a homage to the early more twisted animations of the Fleisher Brothers to me. There's the macabre prospect of an actual heart the Queen holds in an ornate box that's left to the imagination, and the climactic scene where the Dwarfs charge after the Queen - my goodness, they clearly mean to kill her! And finally when through her own doing she falls to her death very ominously. Snow White herself is so impossibly lovely and adorable that it's like she represents happiness and innocence. She's just a sweet singing girl in the woods with apparently a superpower to command the animals! You ask me if a person can watch "Whistle While You Work" without smiling or feeling lightened at all then they ain't got no heart... She has the voice of an angel and children have loved her for generations. Not to criticise too harshly, but I noticed that apart from supplying many cute and funny sight gags, the animals also serve the purpose of making Snow White seem larger as a character. And when it's not them it's the Dwarfs. And in my opinion it's actually the Prince who's the real cardboard cutout character, but that's not his fault! And ah, the Queen, if nothing else you couldn't say that she's not a proactive woman! I love her, she's so ice cold and commanding. Her malicious intentions to Snow White alone make her one of the scariest Disney villains ever, for she plain old wants her dead, simply for being too pretty! My favourite scene is the exquisitely animated sequence that skillfully builds the malevolence where the evil Queen concocts a potion comprised of the most menacing of ingredients to transform into a cackling old crone. Her disorienting transformation from second fairest in the land to hideous hag is like a formula created by Alfred Hitchcock. And as she turns around and reveals her new face, every child in the theatre was compelled to jump in horror. Very witch-like, right down to the wart on the nose. From an adult's perspective however, the before and after makeover is truly a trick and a treat. It makes me laugh every time when the crow is in the skull! The Dwarfs are what most people always remembered. It's in the collective consciousness because of them. In Gremlins, everybody knows what "Hi-Ho!" is! My favourite one is Grumpy because he pretends not to care, but he cares very much. It means something to me when he secretly blushes at Snow White's kiss, when he warns her not to let anyone in the cottage, when he cries out "We gotta save her!", and at that sad scene that's like a wake he sobs more than any of them at her supposed death. Good character, gruff and mean on the outside, kind on the inside. At the time before it came out they said that a feature length 'cartoon' couldn't work, that no one could emotionally connect to a character that was hand-drawn. How wrong they were. This film's true impact on popular culture is untold, I mean for one thing there wouldn't have been a Wizard of Oz movie without it, and that picture is a whole phenomenon in itself, nor would there have been a Disney legacy as we know it without the success of this film. It's certainly archaic, but to me it doesn't particularly feel like something that's pushing one hundred years, which is something that truly makes it, as Disney would say, timeless. The "greatest folly", ended up being the greatest triumph. I always love watching this, I feel the same way about it that I do about all the Disney films that I love, watching them is like 'going home...'