The skeleton key that unlocked Disney’s empire

Disney’s new live-action Snow White, dogged by controversy after controversy, must have been cursed at birth by a wicked fairy (oops, wait, wrong fairy tale). It has to be disconcerting for the studio. The original animated film was such a massive success when it was first released in 1937 that it more or less invented the genre of not just the Disney princess movie, but also the Disney feature-length animated movie, and all the copies thereof that followed. Some of the tropes it innovated are still fundamental to what we think an animated movie should look like, for no better reason than the fact that Snow White did them nearly 90 years ago. Currently, the live-action Snow White is mixed up in at least half a dozen more controversies than Disney would care to have associated with its most reliable moneymaker. A brief overview: Rachel Zegler, who plays Snow White in the new live-action film, has said that the original film was unfeminist, criticized Donald Trump and his supporters and then had to apologize for it, and spoken out in solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza War, all of which enraged conservative audiences. Outright racist commenters were also upset that Zegler, who has Colombian heritage, would be playing a character traditionally known for the pallor of her skin. Meanwhile, Gal Gadot, who plays the Evil Queen, has been vocally supportive of her native Israel in the midst of the war. Finally, actors with dwarfism have taken issue with the movie for its depiction of dwarves. In response, Disney has tamped down its marketing machine, restricting press on the red carpet, sending its leading ladies to exclusively friendly outlets, and offering a reduced window for ticket sales compared to previous live-action releases. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that, for Hollywood insiders, Disney’s attitude screams, “We need to get this thing over with. … We have zero faith.” The controversy offers a strange, queasy fate for Snow White, one of Disney’s most foundational films. In defining the genre, it also shaped childhood for generations of Americans. The Walt Disney Corporation might be the house that Mickey Mouse built, but he did it on Snow White’s dime. How Snow White went from “Disney’s Folly” to Disney’s greatest success [Image: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs advertisement, 1937. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/03/gettyimages-1137254013.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] From the outside, Snow White had all the makings of a boondoggle. No one had ever made a feature-length animated film before it, and looking at the silly, squishy, fluorescent cartoons of the era, it was hard to imagine why anyone would want to sit through one that lasted over an hour. Cartoons are good for a giggle, but who wants one that stretches on forever? Still, Walt Disney was determined to make an animated feature that would be easy to sit through, that would have genuine artistic merit. Getting the medium to that point would prove to be expensive. Throughout the 1930s, Disney turned his animation studio into what was essentially a laboratory for how to make a great animated film. He had long considered his “Silly Symphony” shorts to be the artistic cousin to the slapstick Mickey Mouse shorts, and now he was taking them more seriously than ever. He poured money into figure drawing lessons for his animators, into classes on the art of the great European fairy tale illustrators, into studies on how the play of light should look in animation. He paid for huge and expensive leaps forward in technology, most notoriously the creation of a multi-plane camera that allowed for new levels of depth and perspective within a single frame. In the end, Snow White cost $1.5 million in 1937 dollars, about $34 million today. Newspapers of the time called Snow White “Disney’s folly.” Instead, when Snow White made it to theaters, it became a smash hit. Audiences reportedly burst into tears when they saw Snow White lying in the glass coffin, surrounded by weeping dwarves. The premiere was greeted with a standing ovation. Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet director who invented montage, declared it “the greatest film ever made.” It grossed $66 million at the box office, becoming briefly the highest-grossing sound picture ever until Gone with the Wind premiered two years later. Before Snow White, no one had ever managed to make animation so naturalistic and expressive. The animation in short films up until that point had been silly, vaudeville-inflected; mostly featuring animals because humans were too hard to draw in an appealing way — mostly with static and unchanging expressions, on flat, simplistic backgrounds. But Snow White took place in a deep, rich, painterly world, and Snow White herself was a charming, beautiful human figure who could blush and laugh and cry in ways that made the audience blush and laugh and cry right back at her. It was an entirely new effect, one to which people responded powerfully. --- One surprising thing In the 1937 Snow White, not all the human characters were as naturalistic as Walt Disney would have liked. The Prince’s role was minimized as much as possible because Disney felt they could never quite get his face right. Watch it again and you’ll see what he meant. --- But Snow White also had commercial appeal in a way that seemed to flummox Disney, and that took him a while to figure out how to duplicate. He continued developing Snow White’s animation style over his next two features, 1940’s Pinocchio and Fantasia, both of which arguably surpassed Snow White in artistic accomplishment — but also failed to make money. The massive success of Snow White bought Disney enough credit that he could keep taking out loans to finance his ever-more-expensive films, but after Fantasia, the company was near bankruptcy. Disney made Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942) on the cheap, abandoning the expensive oil painting look of his first three films for a more stylized, pencil-stroke-heavy animation style that could be churned out quickly. The company kept floating through World War II on the strength of a series of military propaganda films, but it wouldn’t achieve a true box office smash again until 1950, when it released Cinderella, a movie that followed carefully in the footsteps of Snow White. In a world where the two highest-grossing Disney films were Snow White and Cinderella, the matter became settled: A successful Disney movie would look like Snow White. Even today, after Pixar, after fully rendered animation, after Frozen, it still does. How Disney learned the Snow White formula [Image: A Snow White character acts in Mickey’s Soundsational Parade at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California, on Friday, May 24, 2013. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/03/gettyimages-169594841.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Disney occasionally messes with the formula, but the great classics of the studio tend to follow this basic template set by Snow White 90 years ago. Snow White was a musical because commercial films in 1937 were musicals. In today’s Hollywood, musicals aren’t commercial guarantees, but we still think of music as being fundamental to the Disney formula. Snow White begins the movie by wishing for her prince to come and the prince singing back to her — now Disney movies tend to give their protagonist an “I want” song and the lovers a duet. Snow White doesn’t have a villain song, but the Evil Queen is so fabulously campy that songs like “Poor Unfortunate Souls” are a natural extension of the legacy she began. Not all Disney animated movies are about princesses or even based on fairy tales, but in unprofitable periods, Disney generally turns to a princess to turn things around. The Little Mermaid in 1989 rocketed the studio out of its so-called dark age and into the Disney Renaissance, and after a slump in the 2000s, Disney leaned hard into the princess formula with The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, and Frozen. Disney fairy tales tend to be gently bowdlerized and made sentimental (Snow White didn’t wake up because of true love’s kiss until Disney got their hands on her), and to this day, the studio loves adding a didactic moral lesson to their tales, like the lesson in Snow White that love conquers all. Snow White had cute animal sidekicks as well as comic magical ones; both would become a staple of Disney storytelling going forward. Snow White’s blue and yellow and red gown would become her signature outfit, an increasingly important piece of Disney’s visual iconography and of the princesses that followed. Snow White even innovated the classic Disney strategy of keeping the hero’s hands clean by having the villain die accidentally, falling from a great height in the middle of a crescendo of evil laughter. What Disney left behind following Snow White were some of its most stylized elements. At moments, the animation plays with the jagged, aggressive lines of German Expressionism: When Snow White runs into the wild forest, the trees loom out of the darkness and the eyes of wild animals flash at her in lurid, vicious cuts. Disney would continue to play with this aesthetic in Pinocchio and Fantasia, which is part of why they are largely considered to be his scariest films, but later animated features would smooth out such frightening scenes into gentler, less thrilling action sequences. Disney would also abandon the part of Snow White that plays most strangely for modern audiences. As critic Caroline Siede has written, Snow White is constructed like a classical opera or a ballet, with static, unchanging characters. You might think of Snow White as a figure like Pamina, the ingenue in The Magic Flute: she’s at the center of the plot, but all she does is fall in love over the course of a single duet, and she never really changes after that. Her funny magic sidekick and villainous mother figure steal the show. In later films, Disney would embrace a more cinematic style of storytelling, with characters who want more than true love and who have to overcome some internal flaw in order to get what they want. The new live-action Snow White plays as an uncanny attempt to retroactively apply this formula to Disney’s oldest and strongest story. In the new film, Snow White wants to protect her kingdom from the selfish Evil Queen, but to save the day, she has to overcome her fear and self-doubt. She still sings “Waiting on a Wish” by the wishing well, but now she sings about how much she wants to be brave. All the updates are so generic that in the end, the whole thing reads as storytelling by committee. Yet as Disney attempts to update its storytelling, it leaves behind the part of Snow White that had those first audiences sobbing in their seats: that ravishing, painterly, glorious hand-drawn animation. The first Snow White was like nothing that anyone had ever seen before. The new Snow White is a cinematic cliché. Snow White invented a genre and a new art form. It was shockingly original, so much so that you could use it to derive the formula for dozens of movies to come. But as Disney tries to lean into Snow White’s legacy, it leans more and more into formula, into a refusal to take risks and make new things. In the end, Disney may have taken the wrong lessons from its greatest success.

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The skeleton key that unlocked Disney’s empire