Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Movie Poster # 4 FRAMED Evil Queen

Description

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a 1937 American animated film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures. Based on the German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, it is the first full-length cel animated feature film and the earliest in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series. The story was adapted by storyboard artists Dorothy Ann Blank, Richard Creedon, Merrill De Maris, Otto Englander, Earl Hurd, Dick Rickard, Ted Sears and Webb Smith. David Hand was the supervising director, while William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, and Ben Sharpsteen directed the film’s individual sequences.

Snow White premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937, followed by a nationwide release on February 4, 1938, and with international earnings of $8 million during its initial release briefly assumed the record of highest grossing sound film at the time. The popularity of the film has led to it being re-released theatrically many times, until its home video release in the 1990s. Adjusted for inflation, it is one of the top ten performers at the North American box office.

At the 11th Academy Awards, Walt Disney was awarded an honorary Oscar, and the film was nominated for Best Musical Score. It was added to the United States National Film Registry in 1989 and is ranked in the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American films, who also named the film as the greatest American animated film of all time in 2008. Disney’s take on the fairytale has had a huge cultural impact, resulting in popular theme park attractions, a video game, and a Broadway musical.

Lucille La Verne as the Evil Queen: The Queen is the stepmother of Snow White. Once her magic mirror tells her that Snow White is fairer than she is, she immediately enlists Humbert the huntsman to kill her in the woods. After she discovers that Snow White did not die, she disguises herself as an old hag and uses a poisoned apple to remove Snow White from her path without killing her. It is written in story notes that the Queen has such magical power only in her own domain, the castle.

Snow White is a princess living with her stepmother, a vain and wicked Queen. The Queen fears that Snow White’s beauty surpasses her own, so she forces Snow White to work as a scullery maid and asks her Magic Mirror daily “who is the fairest one of all”. For several years the mirror always answered that the Queen was, pleasing her.

At the film’s opening, the Magic Mirror informs the Queen that Snow White is now the fairest in the land. The jealous Queen orders her huntsman to take Snow White into the forest and kill her. She further demands that the huntsman return with Snow White’s heart in a jeweled box as proof of the deed. However, the huntsman cannot bring himself to kill Snow White. He tearfully begs for her forgiveness, revealing the Queen wants her dead, and urges her to flee into the woods and never come back.

Though live action footage of Snow White, the Prince and the Queen was shot as reference for the animators, the artists animators disapproved of rotoscoping, considering it to hinder the production of effective caricature. None of Babbit’s animation of the Queen was rotoscoped; despite objections.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was to be the first full-length cel animated feature in motion picture history, and as such Walt Disney had to fight to get the film produced. Both his brother and business partner Roy Disney and his wife Lillian attempted to talk him out of it, and the Hollywood movie industry referred to the film derisively as “Disney’s Folly” while it was in production. He had to mortgage his house to help finance the film’s production, which eventually ran up a total cost of $1,488,422.74, a massive sum for a feature film in 1937.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937, to a wildly receptive audience, many of whom were the same naysayers who dubbed the film “Disney’s Folly”. The film received a standing ovation at its completion from an audience that included Judy Garland and Marlene Dietrich. Six days later, Walt Disney and the seven dwarfs appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The New York Times said “Thank you very much, Mr. Disney”. Variety suggested that “so perfect is the illusion, so tender the romance and fantasy, so emotional are certain portions when the acting of the characters strikes a depth comparable to the sincerity of human players, that the film approaches real greatness.”

Following successful exclusive runs at Radio City Music Hall in New York City and a theater in Miami in January 1938, RKO Radio Pictures put the film into general release on February 4. It became a major box-office success, making four times more money than any other motion picture released in 1938. Snow White’s success led to Disney moving ahead with more feature-film productions. Walt Disney used much of the profits from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to finance a new $4.5 million studio in Burbank – the location on which The Walt Disney Studios is located to this day. Within two years, the studio completed Pinocchio and Fantasia, and had begun production on features such as Dumbo, Bambi, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

At the 11th Academy Awards, the film won an Academy Honorary Award for Walt Disney “as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field”. Disney received a full-size Oscar statuette and seven miniature ones, presented to him by 10-year-old child actress Shirley Temple. The film was also nominated for Best Musical Score.

Noted filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin praised Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a notable achievement in cinema; Eisenstein went so far as to call it the greatest film ever made.

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Frame is shrinkwrapped until time of purchase. Ships boxed with packing peanuts.

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