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The creatures of the wood rush to the dwarfs. After an awful chase through gloomy mountain chasms the dwarfs force the Queen to the edge of a precipice and a thunderbolt tumbles her over. Snow White seems dead, but the dwarfs cannot bear to part from her. They let her sleep in a glass coffin. One day the Prince, wandering far and wide, hears of the girl who lies asleep in a glass box and when he sees her, kisses her. Snow White awakes and there is gaiety in the hut.
Few changes have been made in the Grimm story. The dwarfs have been developed until each has a character of his own—that of Dopey so unexpectedly heart-winning that Disney may use the mute, youngest dwarf in a series of his own. Wood creatures have been animated with the same type of clever personalities that birds and animals acquire in the Disney shorts. Songs, dialogue in verse, dialogue in prose and silent sequences with incidental sound and music have been worked into a harmonious pattern. Catchiest tune: Hi-Ho, as the dwarfs trudge home from work. Tunesmiths: Frank Churchill (Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf) and Larry Morey. Technicolor is used with simpler and stronger effects than ever before in motion pictures, giving a vital, indelible reality to the fairyland locales.
Skeptical Hollywood, that had wondered whether a fairy story could have enough suspense to hold an audience through seven reels, and whether, even if the plot held up, an audience would care about the fate of characters who were just drawings, was convinced that Walt Disney had done it again. Snow White is as exciting as a Western, as funny as a haywire comedy. It combines the classic idiom of folklore drama with rollicking comic-strip humor. A combination of Hollywood, the Grimm Brothers, and the sad, searching fantasy of universal childhood, it is an authentic masterpiece, to be shown in theatres and beloved by new generations long after the current crop of Hollywood stars, writers and directors are sleeping where no Prince's kiss can wake them.
Process. Although it took a large part of the Disney staff three years to draw and photograph Snow White's 250,000 pictures, the process of making Snow White was exactly the same as used in making any recent Disney cartoon.
Few visitors get past the tiny reception office of the Disney studios. But if a privileged investigator could stay around for the six months it takes to complete a typical cartoon short, he would find it a highly efficient, if occasionally cockeyed, procedure. First step in the making of any Disney picture is the story conference, at which the Disney story staff gathers to sort out ideas that may have grown out of their half-dozen minds, or may have been plucked out of the studio gag library, a sort of omnibus of humor and situations from Aesop to Captain Billy's Whiz Bang. Before any script is written, it is discussed and pantomimed by the eager gagsters, who solemnly simulate Donald Duck squawking his rage when trapped under a theatre curtain, or frozen Pluto, slinking down an Alpine slope like a hunk of ice sliding off a tin roof.