Disney's Folly: The Night Animation Grew Up
On December 21, 1937, Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in Hollywood — the first American animated feature film.
Hollywood called it 'Disney's Folly.' By the end of the premiere night, the skeptics were in tears.
On December 21, 1937, Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. It was the first animated feature film produced in the United States and the first cel-animated feature ever made — 83 minutes of hand-drawn storytelling at a time when cartoons were strictly seven-minute shorts shown before the main attraction. The audience, packed with celebrities including Judy Garland and Marlene Dietrich, gave it a standing ovation. Animator Ward Kimball would remember grown adults weeping in the dark.
The gamble had been enormous. Disney had mortgaged his studio on the dream of a feature-length cartoon based on the Brothers Grimm's 1812 fairy tale, an idea planted when he saw a silent film version as a teenager. More than 750 artists labored for three years under supervising director David Hand and five sequence directors. The budget swelled past $1.5 million — a fortune in Depression-era Hollywood — and the industry wisemen were certain audiences would never sit still for an hour of drawings.
They were wrong on a historic scale. After its general release on February 4, 1938, Snow White earned more than $8 million internationally, becoming the highest-grossing film of the year and briefly the highest-grossing sound film of all time. In 1939 the Academy gave Walt Disney an honorary Oscar like no other: one full-size statuette plus seven miniature ones, presented by Shirley Temple. Adjusted for inflation, it remains one of the ten highest-grossing films in North American history — and the highest-grossing animated film ever.
Snow White proved that animation could make audiences laugh, gasp, and cry like any live-action drama. Disney poured the profits into the future: much of the film's earnings financed a new $4.5 million studio lot in Burbank, California — the site of Walt Disney Studios to this day. The film's songs — 'Heigh-Ho,' 'Whistle While You Work,' and 'Someday My Prince Will Come' — became standards overnight, the last of them a jazz standard recorded by artists from Miles Davis onward. The movie returned to theaters again and again over the decades, each re-release finding a new generation of children. It launched the Disney empire, set the template for every animated feature since, and earned a place in the National Film Registry. All from a 'folly' that premiered on a December night in 1937.
Photo: Tichnor Brothers postcard, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).
