Snow White and the Seventh Art: Sound, Song, and Respectability in Disney’s First Feature

Batchelder examines Walt Disney Studios' 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the first feature-length animated musical. Historians tend to gravitate toward beginnings. Accordingly, the sizeable body of literature surrounding Snow White offers scholars a tantalizing collection of "firsts" that indicate the film's momentous achievements in the history of cinema with little uncertainty. While Snow White was not the world's first feature-length animated film, it was the first with sound, the first with color, and the first created using the technique of cel animation, requiring studio workers to hand-paint and individually photograph hundreds of thousands of celluloid panes. More broadly, Snow White also stands as the first animated feature to find lasting critical and popular success. Yet too concerted a focus on the film's technical and critical achievements can blind to the contemporary historical and cultural events that surrounded its creation.