Since I don’t have nearly enough on my plate right now, I’m starting up another damn series, and this one, unlike the others, is time sensitive in such a way that I can’t pull any of this “skipping a day” bullshit.
At the request of several readers and friends, I have decided to take a film-by-film look at the films of the Disney Animation Studios official canon: the forty-something feature animated films that for good or ill have largely defined the limits of that art form in American cinema. Each of the 2-D films that the studios have produced since 1937 will get its due, one day at a time, culminating in the 11 December release of The Princess and the Frog the first traditionally animated Disney film since they officially announced the end of their traditional animation division back in 2004.
First up, later today, will be a film that would still be one of the studio’s masterpieces even if it didn’t have the added benefit of being one of the most significant milestones in cinema history. I refer of course to the first cel-animated feature in history, and one of the first Technicolor features ever made: the film that very nearly turned Walt Disney into a laughingstock before it proved that he was a genius, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.