How did Disney's Snow White change animation?

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the Disney studio's first feature-length film, and it marked a turning point for Walt Disney, the studio and the art of animation. It was not really the first animated feature, but no earlier feature had shown the full range of animation technique alongside rich color, a memorable score and a carefully developed story. Disney set out to make a film that could compete with live-action features from the major studios on their own terms, rather than an art-house curiosity. [1]

The multiplane camera was among the technical innovations tied to the film. It filmed through several layers of drawings placed at different distances, in the manner of theatrical cutouts, so the lens could focus on one layer and create the appearance of depth. The History website, citing Richard Holliss and Brian Sibley, notes that the studio had already tried the technique in The Old Mill, a Silly Symphony released a month before Snow White premiered. Some popular accounts call Snow White the first film to use the multiplane camera, but that sits uneasily with this earlier short. [2] [3] [4]

Disney also wanted the film shot like a live-action picture, with cross-cutting, fast edits, dissolves, zooms and pans, unlike the cartoon shorts. Scenes with many characters needed a larger field size, which required costly changes to the rostrum camera and other equipment. [5]

Walt Disney recalled that animating the girl was a tough problem, since it was the studio's first attempt at realistic human beings. Animals were easier because audiences did not know their movement closely. Artists filmed live actors, including Marge Belcher, and studied the footage frame by frame. Animator Frank Thomas explained that Disney found strict rotoscoping, which traces footage exactly, too complex and lacking focus, and preferred action analysis, in which animators study footage but add their own timing and poses. A university paper describes this method as still in use at Disney today. The sources differ somewhat in emphasis, since one describes rotoscoping among the film's aids and another stresses that the studio favored analysis over tracing. [5] [6]

One article argues that the sometimes stiff look of the human characters comes from drawing every frame as a static pose, whereas real movement blurs on film, rather than from poor draughtsmanship. That is one writer's explanation, not a settled finding. [5]

The Library of Congress essay argues that the film's other great achievement was personality animation, in which characters move and gesture in ways that express who they are. Walt had urged this almost from the start of his career, and Snow White became its milestone. The seven dwarfs, similar in height and appearance, each had to be instantly distinguishable. Fred Moore and Vladimir Tytla led the group that gave them their traits, from Grumpy's rages to Dopey's innocent silliness. Ham Luske and Grim Natwick took charge of animating Snow White herself. The essay defends the individualized dwarfs against fairy tale purists who see them as a flaw. [1]

Thomas held that believable animated movement must start from real movement, which is why the animators studied vaudeville acts, film, art and action analysis classes. Characters kept natural proportions so the reference material could be used. [6]