Published between 1982 and 1995
Brian Sibley tells the story behind the making of Walt Disney’s first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, fifty years ago this year (1987). The trouble with Walt Disney was he was never satisfied: no sooner had he achieved one thing than he was striving to achieve something else. “By nature,” he once … Read more
Much of this remarkable atmosphere was generated by Disney himself and his visionary approach to animation. Everyone, as animator Ken Anderson has recalled, was carried along by Walt’s personal enthusiasm for the Snow White project: “We had no concept that we were ever going to do anything else or ever want to do anything else”. … Read more
Finding appropriate voices for the characters was also far from easy, since the studio had only limited experience in this field, most of the shorts having featured song and pantomime rather than extensive dialogue. Disney instinctively turned to film, radio and burlesque comics for the dwarfs, casting Billy Gilbert (who had a celebrated sneezing routine) … Read more
The dwarfs, who began life as earthy, ugly little men, were animated in a rather more endearing style by Fred Moore (who had been responsible for the roly-poly look of the Three Little Pigs), Bill Tytla, Fred Spencer and Frank Thomas. Three of the studio’s youngest animators – Milt Kahl, Eric Larson and Jim Algar … Read more
Much of the original fairy-tale was simplified – the three attempts made by the Queen to destroy Snow White, for example, were reduced to one – and many of Disney’s more extravagant ideas (including the rock crusher and the forge) were abandoned. One deleted sequence, set in the Queen’s dungeons, was to have shown the … Read more
April Spencer looks at the career of David Hand, an American who influenced a generation of British animators. David Hand’s animation career may be divided into two main phases. He held animator and directorial posts at the Walt Disney Studio in Los Angeles from 1930 to 1944. Then he came to England to set up … Read more
Robin Allan gives his reassessment of a rarely shown Disney feature length cartoon that is out on video. It is forty years since the release in 1946 of Disney’s animated feature Make Mine Music. Most of it is forgotten, or confused with material from Melody Time (1948). But it deserves reassessment; as David Rider said … Read more
The four shorts that make up Saludos Amigos (1943) do not reflect much of this new mood, though the freedom of styling in the Brazilian sequence Aquarela do Brasil hints at the imaginative use of animation in The Three Caballeros (1945). Victoiy Through Air Power (also 1943) is a piece of hard-sell propaganda whose message … Read more
Without You follows. This piece was the least popular item with critics. Virginia Wright in the Los Angeles Daily News called it “completely uninspired” and David Rider thought it “glutinous.” With music by Osvaldo Farres and English lyrics by Ray Gilbert it is subtitled “a Ballad in Blue” and is, at three and three quarter … Read more
Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnet must surely be one of the few Disney films with a violent urban background behind its story of two hats in love. It is a fascinating example of magazine art, opening on a moonlit city night with a track down to a shop window. We follow the misfortunes of … Read more