From 1929 to 1939 Disney ventured into the era of the emerging technology known as “Technicolor”, which allowed him to move beyond the boundaries of black and white cartoons and into the vibrant, bright and more realistic world of colour. Technicolor, a process of saturating film with colour to make it look more real, actually had its genesis way back in 1916, but only became really popular and widely-used from about 1922, becoming the standard for Hollywood studios for about thirty years. It was used in such classic live-action movies as
Gone With the Wind and
The Wizard of Oz, and of course by Disney as soon as he was able to integrate it into his animation process.
This resulted in some of the first colour cartoons, a series of seventy-five mostly unconnected shorts that if anything would be mirrored mostly by the likes of Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies in the 50s and 60s, all going under the umbrella of "Silly Symphonies" (more alliteration, you see?). These shorts were not only important due to being the first actual colour cartoons as we came to know them, but also for introducing, in
The Wise Little Hen, a certain duck, who performed a sailor's hornpipe and danced his way into audience's hearts, later becoming the second favourite Disney character, rivalling (sometimes literally; they had several face-offs) Mickey Mouse himself.
Donald Duck (Created 1934)
I've always preferred Donald personally. Unlike Mickey, he's not a goody two-shoes (or in his case, I guess, two-feet!) and he tends to get into, and cause, the kind of trouble you expect from a cartoon character. He's the disruptive influence, the one who disagrees with most things, the sulker, the complainer, the one who loses his rag most. And yet he's an amazingly sympathetic character. I think it's because he has flaws, and doesn't try to hide them, that we (or at least I) love him so much. His iconic voice, provided by actor Clarence Nash (1934-1985) and later Tony Anselmo, says everything about his personality. He talks like someone with a kazoo in their mouth, and when he loses his temper it's hilarious to watch, not just his voice but also the way he dances in rage.
For whatever reason, Donald was conceived as wearing a sailor's suit, though to my knowledge he has never been to sea nor served in the navy. Donald was introduced to Mickey in "Orphan's Benefit" (1934) in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to sing
Mary Had a Little Lamb and
Little Boy Blue, but is heckled by the orphans and flies into what would become one of his characteristic fits of rage. Donald Duck had arrived! A few years later he was starring in his own film series, premiering with
Don Donald, which, despite its title, was not a gritty expose of Donald's time with the Sicilian Mafia, but instead portrayed him as a Mexican duck, who tries to win his lady love, Donna Duck, soon to be recast as Daisy Duck. Although the movie was tagged as
“Mickey Mouse presents...” it was clear this was a star in the making, and Donald would go on to star in over fifty short and feature-length movies, as well as become a mascot for the armed forces during World War II, and eventually making the leap to the new medium of television. In 1938, only four years after he had been introduced and one since his second appearance on film, Donald was rated more popular with audiences than Mickey.
Destined to change the face of film animation forever, and despite the few other, mostly unknown to the general public, movies that predate it, Walt Disney's
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is – mostly deservedly – accepted as being the first full-length feature animation. Certainly, it was the first to use colour and sound, and unsurprisingly it became a massive hit. With an original budget of just under one and a half million dollars (surely the biggest budget for an animation at that period?) it has so far made back over four hundred times that figure. The movie was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Musical and snagged Disney his first Oscar. It was also the beginning of a, shall we say, more gentle or friendly interpretation of fairy tales and other stories, emphasising the good things about them and encouraging children who went to see the movies to sing along with the many songs that would be written specially for them. This was no retelling of the Brothers Grimm's fairy story, but what would later become known as the Disneyfication of the tale.
With its own specially-written soundtrack – and not just music, but actual songs too, that the characters sung, such as
Heigh Ho,
Some day my Prince will come and
Whistle While You Work – this movie made further history by being the first to have its own soundtrack. Such a thing had not been even considered before. The further anthropomorphisation of animals took a huge leap forward here, where even birds sang and performed human-like tasks (I can't recall, as I was apparently so scared by the Wicked Witch that I had to be taken out of the cinema – hey! Give me a break! I was thirty-four at the time! I mean, like, five. Yeah, five – but I think they tied up Snow White's hair with ribbons?) and forest creatures helping Snow White and the dwarves. Creatures and animals were beginning to be seen, at least in cartoons, as people and not just animals, a trend that would continue, with Disney, Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes among others, all personalising their animal characters.
For the time, the animation was superb, ground-breaking. It was said (though can't be confirmed) that many of the audience, watching the characters for the first time, forgot they were watching an animation. The early days of struggling to match up voice and mouth movements were long gone now, almost in a quantum leap of improvement; what relationship does
Snow White bear to
Steamboat Willie, released less than ten years previous? The animation was completely fluid, everything perfectly synchronised, including the music, and the overall effect was just stunning. As a child, seeing the movie I could not of course appreciate this (also, as I mentioned above, I had to be removed from the cinema before the end: what a wimp!) but looking back on it now I can see how staggeringly real it looks, especially compared to the efforts of the others we just looked at outside of the USA. A true masterpiece, and deserves its place in cinematic and animation history.
Disney took serious liberties and artistic licence with the original story. The Grimm Brothers did not ascribe personalities or even names to their dwarves, yet here each one is named according to his character traits or disposition – Sneezy, Sleepy, Happy etc – or his perceived role, as in Dopey and Doc. In fact, Doc is the one of only two of the Seven Dwarves whose name does not end with a “y”, and the only one whose name is not an adjective. In the tale, three attempts are made by the wicked Queen on Snow White's life, but Disney only used the final – ultimately, essentially successful – one, with the poisoned apple, and the queen's death is handled differently too. Nonetheless, you have to admire and respect the man, who mortaged his house to finance the movie, a chance I'm sure he, and the world, ended up being glad he took.
As this was the first recognised full-length animated film, and it was nominated for (but did not win) an Academy Award, I guess it's safe to infer from that that it was the first animated movie to do so, and therefore has yet another place in history. It was also later added to the Library of Congress, a singular honour. Not bad for a movie many in Hollywood had sneeringly described as “Disney's folly”!
But there was a rival for his crown, and though he never quite made it as big as ol' Walt, Max Fleischer would at least make history himself by creating the first full-length animation outside of Disney, two years later.