David Hand
Biancaneve e i sette nani

The Silly Symphonies (short animated films where characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck made their debut) were a testing ground for Walt Disney in creating the first animated feature film.

By the mid-1930s, Walt Disney Inc. had a considerable number of creatives (artists, writers, directors) at its disposal, including Art Babbitt. In 1932 he joined the Disney studio and set up an art course at his home. In reality, more than a true art course (there was no teacher present), it was almost a navel-gazing exercise seemingly for its own sake: a model posed for some artists, and they, depicting her, specialized in creating female figures on paper. Walt Disney, intrigued by the project, decided to personally fund the supplies, workspaces, and necessary models. Hardie Gramatky, a Disney animator, decided to recruit Don Graham, an art teacher at the Chouinard Institute, for these drawing exercises. The lessons became a real battlefield of opinions and ideas: Disney insisted that the drawing should be as close to reality as possible, serving as an emotional and representational extension of the truth. Considering that many, if not the majority, of Disney's artists came from the comic world, the idea of a more real drawing than the real thing seemed almost like conceptual heresy. One of the few artists not from the comic world (he worked in Europe for several years) was Grim Natwick. He had collaborated on the creation of Betty Boop and was capable of drawing a female body with almost absolute perfection without overloading it with unnecessary frills.

When, in 1934, Walt Disney decided that the Snow White project had to succeed, for the protagonist's creation and some supporting characters of purely human nature (see the queen and the prince), he decided to rely on Natwick. In Hollywood, it was called "Disney's Folly." An animated feature was considered tantamount to madness from the vainglorious, possibly even more so, a way to declare bankruptcy. Animated films, although appreciated by much of the critics and not opposed even by the most demanding audience, were seen as a lesser form of entertainment, a sort of poor cousin to live-action films. Moreover, an animated feature would require at least some cornerstones that couldn't be avoided: the use of color (very expensive at the time), a series of countless drawings (not to mention potential rough drafts), the employment of a decent number of voice actors, and the use of completely innovative and, for the time, unexplored techniques. A wholly senseless leap into the dark, according to many Hollywood producers. A ruinous folly according to others. Some of Walt Disney's closest relatives even opposed the project, worried about the possibility of failure that would have incalculable effects on Disney and themselves.

On August 9, 1934, the first draft of what would later be the definitive screenplay of the work, titled "Suggestions for Snow White" penned by Richard Creedon, appeared on Walt Disney's desk. Twenty-one pages where the comedic aspect tended to prevail over the dramatic one. One of the major controversies during the film's production was the role to be assigned to the seven dwarfs. It initially seemed disproportionate, too many gags that tended to suffocate the film's fairy tale structure, almost as if, out of fear of a massive public discontent, they wanted to give more space to entertainment compared to everything else. Characterizing the seven dwarfs was an arduous and complex undertaking: each had to have very precise characteristics, caricatural but not exaggerated, comic but not ridiculous. And then all the other characters: according to Creedon's work, the queen should have been depicted as an old fat and vile woman, and the prince should have come across as a sort of clown. Worried about this approach, Disney strongly reiterated the concept of reality as the only possible lens of observation and set aside the entire project for a few months.

During a meeting dated November 16, Disney Inc.'s writers made some changes to the work. In particular, they created the character of Dopey, initially not foreseen or widely replaceable. The definitive development of the work was solely due to Walt Disney, who emerged victorious in the fall of 1935 after a year of more or less troubled gestation. The characters, finally complete and no longer just sketched (with the intuition of the queen no longer being fat but haughty and regal), appeared ready to be translated onto paper and subsequently onto film, although the dilemma over the weight to be given to the seven dwarfs within the movie persisted. The problem lingered even during the actual film's production, and many scenes featuring the dwarfs were cut or simply aborted from the start.

The creation of the work lasted two years, from 1935 to 1937, and was mainly entrusted to Albert Hurter. Everything that was drawn, animated, or just thought of had to have, according to Walt Disney's orders, Hurter's approval. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" still stands as one of the most complex and best-realized works of Disney studios. The famous fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm finds new life and vigor precisely in what Walt Disney saw as the most complex: the characterization of the seven dwarfs, capable of counterbalancing, without any kind of smudges, the dramatic moments of the struggle between Snow White and the witch with humor and a profusion of gags. The use of the multiplane camera gives an unusual depth (unseen at the time) to the settings, almost a three-dimensional depth given the use of depth of field present throughout the work (studies of this type were later practiced even by Orson Welles in 1942 in the film "The Magnificent Ambersons," considered today a cornerstone of experimental cinema). And everything that will become, from here on, the Disney hallmark is already widely present: the charm with which non-human characters are described, the triumph of morality as a necessary event in the nature of things, the verisimilitude of the plastic space and the drawing as the supreme form of any potential imaginative thrust, colors meant to color reality to transport the latter into the world of fantasy, the contamination of genres.

The premiere took place on December 21, 1937, at the Carthay Circle Theatre. At the end of the screening, a standing ovation put to rest any concerns over a failure that many had unwisely predicted. Among the audience that night were not only common viewers or simple industry insiders but also international stars like Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable, Ed Sullivan, Marlene Dietrich, and Judy Garland. The popular success was phenomenal, with crowds filling cinemas worldwide to witness what many saw as, more than a film, a miracle. In Italy, it was distributed with an elegant, almost macabre dubbing ("I feel strange" was translated to "I feel cold in my heart"). Fascism did not oppose the release of the work in Italian theaters; after all, the friendship between Walt Disney and Benito Mussolini was evident to everyone. Already in 1935, the two had met for a conversation of mutual esteem at Villa Torlonia in Rome. The Duce's passion for comics was well known, and he gladly engaged in talks about Minnie, Mickey, and Donald with Disney. Rumors that have never been denied also claim that "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" was Mussolini's favorite film, to the point that he had it projected several times for personal viewings at his private Roman residence.

Disney had taken the big step into a wholly unexplored world; it had dared where no one until then had had the courage to dare. From here on, animated cinema would no longer be considered a minor cinema or a poor relative of other genres. And it's no coincidence that a committed and complex director like Sergei M. Eisenstein (author of the famous "Battleship Potemkin") went on to define "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" as the best film ever made.