Snow White in 1930s Britain

Abstract

The film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had its world premiere at the Carthay Circle theatre in Los Angeles on 21 December 1937. Based on a folktale collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm and first published in 1812 in their collection Kinder und Hausmarchen, this was the first ever feature-length animation film. Its 84 minutes or so of running time was the fruit of several years of costly (and highprofile) planning and execution at Walt Disney’s Burbank studio.1 The production, involving hundreds of artists and other personnel, as well as innovative animation techniques and specially developed film-making equipment, cost a reported $1.5 million. This was an enormous budget for the time, and the project was regarded as a huge gamble on Disney’s part. But Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs confounded the doubters and proved an immediate international hit: according to film trade figures it was the world’s best-selling film of 1938, and by 1940 it had grossed an all-time record of $8 million. The film’s early awards included the Special Biennale Art Trophy at the 1938 Venice Film Festival, the New York Film Critics’ Special Award in 1939 and, also in 1939, an Honorary Academy Award for Walt Disney. Over the following five decades, in a carefully orchestrated programme of international theatrical re-releases (in 1943, 1952, 1958, 1967, 1975 and 1983), Snow White was introduced to a series of new generations of cinemagoers. A ‘fully restored’ video version, which included a ‘Making of Snow White’ featurette, appeared in 1994, and the film is currently available as a digitally remastered DVD that comes with an additional disk containing more than three hours of supplementary material. This essay explores the circumstances surrounding Snow White’s initial release in Britain, and considers how the peculiarities of the film’s British reception context interacted with some of its