Prod.2001-Snow White&the Seven Dwarfs(XXIII)

Seq. 15-A "Snow White Dead"
- Dwarfs by Frank Thomas, animals by Milt Kahl
Seq. 15-B "Titles"
- Three titles by the effects dept.
Seq. 16-A "S.W. in Coffin - Back to Life - Away with Prince"
- Snow White by Ham Luske, Grim Natwick and Jack Campbell, dwarfs by Frank Thomas, Dick Lundy and Fred Spencer, animals by Jim Algar and Bernard Garbutt.

Frank Thomas' famous sequence of crying dwarfs - the sequence that had hardened moguls crying at the premiere - is so well described in The Illusion of Life that I will suffice to refer to that most important of all books on animation. If you do not have it, GET IT! It is still in print! Then look it up on pages 173ff. and 475ff...

This concludes the draft for Snow White: it is no secret that they lived happily ever after...
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was Walt Disney's BIG gamble, which grew bigger as it went along. At first it was thought that it would cost about the same as ten short films, since its length would be similar. But then costs ballooned, and it ended around a million and a half dollars. When the L.A. liaison of Bank of America, Joe Rosenberg said to Walt "That thing is going to make a hatful of money," he wasn't kidding! (By the way, I saw a documentary recently that spoke of "the evil banker." If Rosenberg, under orders from A.P. Giannini, really was an evil banker, there would NOT have been a Snow White!) Currently, IMDb has its Domestic gross as $184,925,485. Adjusted for inflation it ranks as the number two film after Gone With The Wind with $2.36 billion!!!

The eight million the film made in its initial release was quickly plowed back into the studio, with new films (Pinocchio, Fantasia) lined up and a whole new studio to be built. Eventually this led to a darker period, as well, as the money got spent so quickly that the bonuses that were promised during the production of Snow White were left unpaid. This became one of the breeding grounds of the unrest that fostered the 1941 strike. But let's not get too much into that - let us instead return to the tranquil beauty of the first successful Technicolor animated feature film Snow White. It was Walt's first, the film that took up all his attention. It will stand forever as a touchstone for all further success and advances in the field of animation!

Here is a line of trivia that I swiped from IMDb: "Publicity material relates that production employed 32 animators, 102 assistant, 167 "in-betweeners", 20 layout artists, 25 artists doing water color backgrounds, 65 effects animators, and 158 female inkers and painters. 2,000,000 illustrations were made using 1500 shades of paint."

For those of you who followed the last 23 postings and would like to be able to browse the Snow White draft more freely, you can find all 110 pages that are available on this blog in this handy 3.42MB .zip file! Just please remember where you saw it first! Note that if you haven't read the postings from the start, you are not invited to download the .zip file yet, go back and read them all first!

By the way, I am on a small trip, back some time next week! Please do not let that keep you from commenting on my Snow White postings, and remember to look at John V.'s blog for more of his thoughts on character casting etc.

Remember to check out the archives (see labels in the right column!), where you can find eighty (80) short film drafts, six other complete features and parts of others, as well as some twenty Action Analysis Classes, twelve patent descriptions and a lot of other documents, clippings and videos, and most importantly, information about my own studio, A. Film!

Happy Friday the 13th!