Snow White Premieres: Animation Becomes Serious Art

Hollywood insiders called it "Disney Folly" while it was in production, betting that no audience would sit through a feature-length cartoon. On December 21, 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles to a standing ovation from an audience that included Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, and most of the major studio heads who had predicted its failure. Walt Disney had staked his entire company on the project, which ballooned from a planned budget of $250,000 to nearly $1.5 million, an astronomical sum during the Great Depression. The film required over 750 artists, 2 million individual drawings, and pioneered the multiplane camera, which created an illusion of depth by photographing animated cels at varying distances from the lens. Disney mortgaged his house to finance the production when costs spiraled, and his wife Lillian and brother Roy both pleaded with him to abandon it. Snow White was not merely the first full-length cel-animated feature in American cinema history; it was a proof of concept that animation could deliver the same emotional complexity as live-action drama. The dwarfs funeral scene for Snow White reportedly made hardened critics weep at the premiere. The film earned $8 million during its initial release, equivalent to roughly $170 million today, making it the highest-grossing sound film at that time. The commercial success gave Disney the capital to build his Burbank studio and launch an unprecedented run of animated features including Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi within the next five years. The American Film Institute ranked Snow White as the greatest American animated film ever made. Every feature-length animated film that followed owes its existence to the gamble Disney placed on a fairy tale during the Depression.