snow white book review essay

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[BOOK REVIEW] ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney’s Classic Animated Film’

It’s been 75 years since the release of Walt Disney’s first feature-length animated film, Snow White.  To celebrate the film’s anniversary, the Walt Disney Family Foundation Press has released a pair of books that commemorate the making of the film: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney’s Classic Animated Film and The Fairest One of All: The Making of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs .

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a “catalogue”, or companion piece, to the Walt Disney Family Museum’s first special exhibition,  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Creation of a Classic . The exhibit runs from November 15, 2012 through April 14, 2013 and showcases original concept sketches, background paintings, production cells from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . This book features over 200 pieces of artwork from the exhibit, providing the reader a mini tour and idea of what the real exhibit is like.

The book was written by J.B. Kaufman with forewards by Walt’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, and the CEO of the Walt Disney Family Museum, Gabriella C. Calicchio. Diane talks about her love for collecting and gifting Disney animation art, which eventually became large enough to host an online “virtual museum.” Apparently, so many people thought it was a real place and kept asking the location of the museum that Diane and the family decided to turn the museum into a reality. It’s very interesting to read her love and passion for her father’s legacy, especially for Snow White .

The book elegantly tells the story of the making of Snow White from concept to the final film, focusing on all the characters, scenes and important elements. The beginning of the book details Snow White’s original concept designs: from a Betty Boop-esque character to even red-heads and blondes versions. The book then organically moves to her final character model, showing model sheets and production cells. What I loved about this early part of the book is how descriptive it is about each step of the process in detailing the animation process (for those who aren’t as familiar with the process).

The book organically moves from one scene of the film to another, which was a great way for it to be structured. It didn’t categorize section by characters, backgrounds, or deleted scenes, but rather told the story and history of each scene while including all the relevant pieces. It felt much like a director’s commentary, but on paper, which was spectacular since such a commentary doesn’t exist. I could relive each scene in sequence.

I loved being able to relive this movie in a very detailed, behind-the-scenes way. Looking at the soft, masterful backgrounds and perfectly on-model Snow White made me appreciate the pioneers and masters who were employed at Disney’s studio. These animators and artists truly were masters of their crafts and this film is their legacy of a near-perfect animated film.

Photos from Weldon Owens

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney’s Classic is a lovely book that is worthy of any Disney fan’s collection. It provides a rare glimpse into one of the most iconic and important films of all time, making this book important to any collector of film memorabilia. It’s really that good. This book is definitely more like your traditional “art and making of” book, while  The Fairest One of All  is more of an expanisve history plus art. I loved this book much more than some other “making of” books I’ve come across and know I will be returning to its pages over and over again.

Published by Weldon Owen. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney’s Classic is available October 16, 2012. Buy the book on Amazon here !

New Release Dates for Loads of Upcoming Disney & Pixar Films including Marvel’s Ant-Man

New art books to celebrate snow white’s 75th anniversary, morgan stradling.

Morgan is an Arizona native who's had a lifelong passion for animation. Her favorite animated films are Aladdin , Beauty & the Beast , and The Iron Giant . She earned an MBA in Marketing from Arizona State University and now runs her own business where she coaches and trains entrepreneurs how to launch, grow & scale successful online businesses.

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Snow white and the darkness within us.

Maria Tatar collects versions of the tale from around the world and explains how they give us a way to think about what we prefer not to

Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite

Harvard Staff Writer

A 1923 illustration of Snow White resting in a glass coffin by Gustaf Tenggren, a Swedish American illustrator who worked as an animator for The Walt Disney Co. in the 1930s.

Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was released as the first feature-length animated film in 1937, and decades later, the musical fantasy based on a Grimm Brothers fairy tale about the complications and conflicts in the mother-daughter relationship is still a cultural touchstone. The story has virtually eclipsed every version of the many told the world over about beautiful girls and their older rivals, often a cruel biological mother or stepmother, but sometimes an aunt or a mother-in-law. In her new book, “ The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters ,” Maria Tatar , the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Folklore and Mythology and Germanic Languages and Literatures and a senior fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, collected tales from a variety of nations, including Egypt, Japan, Switzerland, Armenia, and India. She spoke to the Gazette about her lifelong fascination with the saga and how we can look to fairy tales to navigate uncertain times.

Maria Tatar

GAZETTE: Why did you decide to take up the Snow White story?

TATAR:  While working on my previous book with Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., “ The Annotated African American Folktales ,” I came across a South African story called “The Unnatural Mother and the Girl with a Star on Her Forehead.” It was basically what we call the Snow White story, but in it the “beautiful girl” falls into a catatonic trance after putting on slippers given to her by her jealous mother. That’s when I fell down the rabbit hole of wonder tales and discovered stories from all over the world in which a stunningly attractive young woman arouses the jealousy of a woman who is usually her biological mother. The Brothers Grimm, whose 1812 story inspired Walt Disney to create the animated film, had many vernacular tales available to them, but they chose to publish the one in which the rival is the stepmother, in part because they did not want to violate the sanctity of motherhood. Now, decades later, it is still our cultural story about the many complications and conflicts in the mother-daughter relationship. It has eradicated almost every trace of the many tales told all over the world about beautiful girls and their rivals.

GAZETTE:  Why does this particular story remain so resonant?

TATAR:  All of the tales in this collection are cliffhangers. They begin with the counterfactual “What if?” then leave us asking “What’s next?” and finally challenge us to ask “Why?” These stories were originally told in communal settings, and they got people talking about all the conflicts, pressures, and injustices in real life. How do you create an ending that is not just happily ever after, but also “the fairest of them all”? What do you do when faced with worst-case possible scenarios? What do you need to survive cruelty, abandonment, and assault? In fairy tales, the answer often comes in the form of wits, intelligence, and resourcefulness on the one hand, and courage on the other. With their melodramatic mysteries, they arouse our curiosity and make us care about the characters. They tell us something about the value of seeking knowledge and feeling compassion under the worst of circumstances, and that’s a lesson that makes us pay attention today.

“All of the tales in this collection are cliffhangers. They begin with the counterfactual ‘What if?’ then leave us asking ‘What’s next?’ and finally challenge us to ask ‘Why?’”

GAZETTE: Can you explain the connection between Snow White’s skin color and her innocence and goodness?

TATAR: The red, white, and black color coding in many European versions of this story reminds me of how the Grimms believed that those were the colors of poetry. Their beautiful girl is “white as snow, red as blood, and black as the wood on this window frame.” It was Disney who changed that to “lips red as the rose, hair black as ebony, and skin white as snow.” When you look at other versions of the story, you realize that, generally, the daughter’s skin color is not an issue, though, curiously, there is a Samoan version of the tale with a girl with albinism who is an outcast. The fact that the beautiful girl in a global repertoire of stories about mothers and daughters is stereotyped as having skin white as snow because of the influence of the Grimm and Disney versions limits the global cultural resonance of the story. There’s nothing sacred about the Grimms’ version of that fairy tale or about Disney’s reimagining of it, but we tend to think of Grimm and Disney as the “originals,” and, unfortunately, they have become the “authoritative” versions.

GAZETTE: What are some of the themes or morals that you found across the tales you collected for this volume?

TATAR: Tales about beautiful girls circulated in adult storytelling cultures, in communal settings. They gave parents a way to talk about, think about, and address their own complicated feelings and unacknowledged resentment about raising children only to have them grow up and exceed you in one way or another. Myths and fairy tales enact all the fantasies, fears, anxieties, and terrors stored up in our imaginations that we are ordinarily afraid to talk about. By amplifying and exaggerating real-life conflicts, folktales animated our ancestors, getting them to sit up, listen, and think. In the safe space of “once upon a time,” they could explore taboo subjects and talk about the dark side of human nature. They are the symbolic stories that help us talk about and navigate the real. That’s why a psychologist like Bruno Bettelheim saw in the telling of the stories a form of therapeutic value.

But there is more to these stories than cathartic release. Fairy tales are also a great contact zone for all generations, enabling us to think more and think harder about crisis, resources, and recovery in a whole range of situations: famine, expulsion, abduction, loss, dispossession, enslavement, and so on, all the terrible things that can happen to us.

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GAZETTE: Were there any versions of the story that surprised you in their approach?

TATAR: I think that almost every version of Snow White surprised me in one way or another. There’s a Swiss story called “The Death of the Seven Dwarves” in which you have all the tropes of the Snow White story, but scrambled up. A homeless child finds protection with seven dwarves, and an old woman comes knocking on the door, seeking a bed for herself as well. When the girl refuses to offer shelter, the old woman denounces her as a slut and accuses her of sleeping with all seven of the dwarves. This is pretty heady stuff, and that tale made it clear to me that these stories were never really for children. They were meant to entertain adults while they were spinning, sewing, repairing tools, and doing chores late at night. John Updike tells us that fairy tales were the television and pornography of an earlier age, and a story like that is revelatory about the true uses of enchantment.

GAZETTE: You say that fairy tales are larger than life and can reflect and magnify our fears and anxieties. What do you think fairy tales can provide during this time of uncertainty and fear during the COVID-19 pandemic?

TATAR: One of my favorite fairy tales, “Hansel and Gretel,” starts in a time of famine. How do you manage to stay alive when your parents throw you out? The philosopher Walter Benjamin put it beautifully when he said that fairy tales transmit one big lesson: You need wits and courage to confront the monsters out in the woods.

There’s no practical advice or wisdom to be drawn from the lore of times past. But our ancestors did use these stories to talk with each other about the tools you need to survive, and what is often modeled in fairy tales is an instinct for compassion and collaboration. I think here of all those grateful animals that are not slaughtered and then turn up to help carry out an otherwise impossible task. In the time of a pandemic, something global that affects all of us, the golden network of storytelling reminds us of everything we share, that we are all human, and that solidarity and caring for each other build a path forward to developing the tools and knowledge we need for healing.

Interview was edited for clarity and length.

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Snow White: Beauty Is Power

By Maria Tatar

Fairy tales are good to think with. Compact yet also capacious, with roots in myth, they were engineered to accommodate changes in cultural values and conflicts. “Snow White” is no exception. Rupert Sanders’s film “Snow White and the Huntsman” the latest version of the tale, takes us into a wilderness of environmental depredations and dynastic conflict. Charlize Theron’s fair-haired wicked queen presides over subjects with ravaged faces in landscapes that resemble toxic oil spills; in her shape-shifting magic, she reconstitutes herself at one point from what looks like a flock of crows caught in an oil slick. Her rule has no doubt created the viscous black horrors that Snow White encounters in the denuded woods to which she flees. The film’s raven-haired heroine, by contrast, soothes savage beasts with her compassionate face and, as a digitally miniaturized Bob Hoskins, playing one of the seven dwarfs, proclaims: “she will heal the land.” But she’s no passive, guiltless damsel. Her exquisite beauty, combined with charismatic leadership, enables her to defeat the evil queen and redeem the desolate landscape of the kingdom.

This Snow White is very different from the one we find in the canonical literary version recorded in the early nineteenth century. The Brothers Grimm called their story “Little Snow White,” to emphasize the innocence and vulnerability of a young girl persecuted by her jealous stepmother. Their heroine is precociously stunning—“When she was seven years old she was as beautiful as the light of day, even more beautiful than the queen herself”—and her beauty inspires huntsman, dwarfs, and prince alike to protect her from a less fair, wicked queen. The early tale is also a reflection on children’s fears about the cruelty of stepmothers, at a time when mortality rates for child-bearing women were exceptionally high. The concept of the “blended” family was foreign to the Grimms’ era, and it remains so in new inflections of the tale. Snow White delivers a timely message about survival even when the odds are not in your favor, as they surely are not for the heroine of “Snow White and the Huntsman,” who must now stand up to both a perverse stepmother and a hostile Mother Nature.

A 1912 Broadway musical first gave the story the title by which we know it today: “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The miniature miners of the Grimms’ tale now had whimsical names and personalities—an antidote to the tale’s dark themes. The Disney version (from 1937), too, draws much of its charm from the allegorical vigor of Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey, and, in addition, gives Snow White a new mission. The Grimms’ girl was something of an intruder, a Goldilocks figure who discovers an enviably “neat and clean” cottage, along with seven little beds—one “just right”—covered with white sheets. Disney’s heroine, by contrast, is given a Depression-era work ethic and cleans up a house that appears to be occupied by what she disapprovingly refers to as “seven untidy little children.” Whistling while she works, she is a kindred spirit to the dwarfs, who descend into the mines to carry out their subterranean work “from early morn ’til night,” yet cheerfully intone: “we don’t know / what we dig ’em for.” Something of a “dumb bunny,” as the Anne Sexton calls her in a poem from “Transformations,” Snow White falls victim three times to the camouflaged wicked queen.

Grimm purists regard the Disney version as a sentimental confection, but Disney animators preserved the fairy tale’s powerful engagement with a child’s fears about parental persecution and abandonment, while also capturing adult anxieties about aging and loss. After drinking the magic cocktail she has brewed, the queen’s hair turns white, her hands become gnarled with age (“Look, my hands!”), her voice turns into a throaty cackle (“My voice!”), and finally she emerges from under her dark cloak as a hunchbacked crone. The horror of the queen’s transformation from a beautiful woman into an abject old hag is still potent.

Anne Sexton may well have had Disney’s transformation scene in mind when her wicked queen condemns Snow White to be “hacked” to death after she herself discovers “brown spots on her hand” and “four whiskers over her lip.” Sexton’s emphasis on the stepmother prefigured the nineteen-seventies protests against the Disneyfication of fairy tales, with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar leading the charge in their preface to “The Madwoman in the Attic,” a landmark work of feminist criticism. They proposed calling the story “Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother,” arguing that the queen—inventive, active, and mobile—was far more enthralling than her insipid stepdaughter.

With “Snow White and the Huntsman,” the tale has been reconceived to appeal to an audience partial to high-decibel special effects, monsters and vampires, triangulated teen romance, epic battle scenes, and young warrior women who, like Katniss Everdeen in “The Hunger Games” or Merida in Pixar’s “Brave,” have appropriated not only the wicked queen’s inventive energy but also the huntsman’s proficiency with weapons. The film preserves the central motifs of the Snow White plot: mother-daughter rivalry, magic mirror, compassionate huntsman, seven dwarfs, poisoned apple, and redemptive kiss—with all but the last steroid-enhanced through high-tech cinematic magic. Like all fairy-tale adaptations, it also operates like a magnet, picking up relevant bits and pieces of the culture that is recycling the tale.

Kristen Stewart’s Snow White is nothing like the charmingly goofy princess of Disney’s live-action “Enchanted” or the spunky yet vulnerable Snow White in ABC’s series “Once Upon a Time.” More like a serious cousin to the spirited and radiantly youthful Snow White of Tarsem Singh’s campy recent film, “Mirror Mirror,” she is ready for action. This Snow White becomes a “pure and innocent” warrior princess, an angelic savior who channels Joan of Arc and Tolkien’s Aragorn, as well as the four Pevensie siblings from C. S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia,” to save the kingdom of her late father (stabbed to death by the queen on their wedding night). Everyone is armed, and swords, scimitars, axes, snares, and shields feature as prominently in this film as they do in the Middle Earth of “The Hobbit.” Romance is edged out by the racing energy of horses speeding through dramatic landscapes and by expertly choreographed combat scenes. This is a Snow White designed to appeal to viewers of all ages, and to men and women alike.

“Snow White and the Huntsman” captures deepening anxiety about aging and generational sexual rivalry in clever, self-reflexive ways, with Charlize Theron as a beautiful cougar (and established Hollywood star) threatened by a younger, sylph-like Kristin Stewart. In the world of the film, beauty is the locus of female power, and is thereby fleeting in its effects (men are “enchanted” by women but “use” them until they eventually “tire” of them); it is the source of both fascination and horror. Early on, we learn the wicked queen’s backstory: she was abandoned by her first husband for a younger woman. This is meant to explain why she is so desperate to suck the life force out of local virgins, to dine on the vital organs of birds, and to reap the cosmetic effects of baths in mysterious white fluids.

The queen’s quest for lasting youth is part of the story’s larger exploration (in the tradition of many great myths) of how humans relate to the natural world—whether we are of it or have mastered and moved beyond it. Efforts to remain forever young violate the natural order of generational succession and imperil life itself. The woods have always been terrifying, but never more so than in this new version of the tale, in which a despoiled Mother Nature mirrors and magnifies the wicked queen’s frenzied assaults on humans. “Snow White and the Huntsman” holds a mirror up to our own vanity, narcissism, and recklessness, emphatically reminding us, as Charlize Theron proclaims shortly before her downfall, that every world gets the wicked queen it deserves.

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If Walt Disney 's “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” had been primarily about Snow White, it might have been forgotten soon after its 1937 premiere, and treasured today only for historical reasons, as the first full-length animated feature in color. Snow White is, truth to tell, a bit of a bore, not a character who acts but one whose mere existence inspires others to act. The mistake of most of Disney's countless imitators over the years has been to confuse the titles of his movies with their subjects. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” is not so much about Snow White or Prince Charming as about the Seven Dwarfs and the evil Queen--and the countless creatures of the forest and the skies, from a bluebird that blushes to a turtle who takes forever to climb up a flight of stairs.

Walt Disney's shorter cartoons all centered on one or a few central characters with strongly-defined personalities, starting with Mickey Mouse himself. They lived in simplified landscapes, and occupied stories in which clear objectives were boldly outlined. But when Disney decided in 1934 to make a full-length feature, he instinctively knew that the film would have to grow not only in length but in depth. The story of Snow White as told in his source, the Brothers Grimm, would scarcely occupy his running time, even at a brisk 83 minutes.

Disney's inspiration was not in creating Snow White but in creating her world. At a time when animation was a painstaking frame-by-frame activity and every additional moving detail took an artist days or weeks to draw, Disney imagined a film in which every corner and dimension would contain something that was alive and moving. From the top to the bottom, from the front to the back, he filled the frame (which is why Disney's decision in the 1980s to release a cropped “widescreen” version was so wrong-headed, and quickly retracted).

So complex were his frames, indeed, that Disney and his team of animators found that the cels they used for their short cartoons were not large enough to contain all the details he wanted, and larger cels were needed. The film's earliest audiences may not have known the technical reasons for the film's impact, but in the early scene where Snow White runs through the forest, they were thrilled by the way the branches reached out to snatch at her, and how the sinister eyes in the darkness were revealed to belong to friendly woodland animals. The trees didn't just sit there within the frame.

Disney's other innovation was the “multiplane camera,” which gave the illusion of three dimensions by placing several levels of drawing one behind another and moving them separately--the ones in front faster than the ones behind, so that the background seemed to actually move instead of simply unscrolling. Multiplane cameras were standard in animation until the very recent use of computers, which achieve a similar but more detailed effect--too detailed, purists argue, because too lifelike.

Nothing like the techniques in “Snow White” had been seen before. Animation itself was considered a child's entertainment, six minutes of gags involving mice and ducks, before the newsreel and the main feature. “Snow White” demonstrated how animation could release a movie from its trap of space and time; how gravity, dimension, physical limitations and the rules of movement itself could be transcended by the imaginations of the animators.

Consider another early example, when Snow White is singing “I'm Wishing” while looking down into the well. Disney gives her an audience--a dove that flutters away in momentary fright, and then returns to hear the rest of the song. Then the point of view shifts dramatically, and we are looking straight up at Snow White from beneath the shimmering surface of the water in the well. The drawing is as easy to achieve as any other, but where did the imagination come from, to supply that point of view?

Walt Disney often receives credit for everything done in his name (even sometimes after his death). He was a leader of a large group of dedicated and hard-working collaborators, who are thanked in the first frames of “Snow White,” before the full credits. But he was the visionary who guided them, and it is a little stunning to realize that modern Disney animated features like “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King” and “Aladdin,” as well as the rare hits made outside the Disney shop, like Dreamworks' “ Shrek ” and Pixar's “ Toy Story ,” still use to this day the basic approach that you can see full-blown in “Snow White.”

The most important continuing element is the use of satellite and sidekick characters, minor and major, serious and comic. A frame is not allowed for long to contain only a single character, long speeches are rare, musical and dance numbers are frequent, and the central action is underlined by the bit characters, who mirror it or react to it.

Disney's other insight was to make the characters physically express their personalities. He did that not by giving them funny faces or distinctive clothes (although that was part of it) but studying styles of body language and then exaggerating them. When Snow White first comes across the cottage of the dwarfs, she goes upstairs and sees their beds, each one with a nameplate: Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, and so on. When the dwarfs return home from work (“Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho!”) they are frightened and resentful to find a stranger stretched across their little beds, but she quickly wins them over by calling each one by name. She knows them, of course, because they personify their names. But that similarity alone would soon become boring if they didn't also act out every speech and movement with exaggerated body language, and if their very clothing didn't seem to move in sympathy with their personalities.

Richard Schickel's 1968 book The Disney Version points out Disney's inspiration in providing his heroes and supporting characters with different centers of gravity. A heroine like Snow White will stand upright and tall. But all of the comic characters will make movements centered on and emanating from their posteriors. Rump-butting is commonplace in Disney films, and characters often fall on their behinds and spin around. Schickel; attributed this to some kind of Disney anal fixation, but I think Disney did it because it works: It makes the comic characters rounder, lower, softer, bouncier and funnier, and the personalities of all seven Dwarfs are built from the seat up.

The animals are also divided into body styles throughout Disney. “Real” animals (like Pluto) look more like dogs, comic animals (like Goofy) stand upright and are more bottom-loaded. In the same movie a mouse will be a rodent but Mickey will somehow be other than a mouse; the stars transcend their species. In both versions, non-star animals and other supporting characters provide counterpoint and little parallel stories. Snow White doesn't simply climb up the stairs at the dwarves' house--she's accompanied by a tumult of animals. And they don't simply follow her in one-dimensional movement. The chipmunks hurry so fast they seem to climb over each other's backs, but the turtle takes it one laborious step at a time, and provides a punch line when he tumbles back down again.

What you see in “Snow White” is a canvas always shimmering, palpitating, with movement and invention. To this is linked the central story, which like all good fairy tales is terrifying, involving the evil Queen, the sinister Mirror on the Wall, the poisoned apple, entombment in the glass casket, the lightning storm, the rocky ledge, the Queen's fall to her death. What helps children deal with this material is that the birds and animals are as timid as they are, scurrying away and then returning for another curious look. The little creatures of “Snow White” are like a chorus that feels like the kids in the audience do.

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. (The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein called it the greatest movie ever made.) It remains the jewel in Disney's crown, and although inflated modern grosses have allowed other titles to pass it in dollar totals, it is likely that more people have seen it than any other animated feature. The word genius is easily used and has been cheapened, but when it is used to describe Walt Disney, reflect that he conceived of this film, in all of its length, revolutionary style and invention, when there was no other like it--and that to one degree or another, every animated feature made since owes it something.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Review: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Posted March 11, 2013 by Whitney in Review / 3 Comments

"Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who is the fairest of us all?" repeatedly asks the Queen, Snow White's stepmother. She always gets the answer she wants, until Snow White turns seven, and the mirror must truthfully answer, "Snow White." At the news, the Queen turns yellow and green with envy and commands the huntsman to kill Snow White and bring her "lung and liver as a token." Thus begins another enchanting fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm!

I loved Snow White when I was little, I dressed up as her on a regular basis, held Snow White themed birthday parties and learned how to work a VCR (yes I’m that old) and when I wasn’t watching it, I could recite it word for word.  Okay, so I was obsessed with Snow White like Nikki  Minaj is obsessed with American Idol contestants.  But I had never read the Grimm’s fairy tale.

First I should say that the copy I ordered from the library (not the one shown) turned out to be a “freely translated” Snow White, I was a bit disappointed but soon realized it wasn’t the story he changed but the phrasing for younger readers.  Oh well.  I still loved it.

As the Disney version is so well-known, I thought I’d do a compare/contrast between Disney and Grimm.

So both compare Snow White as beautiful, the fairest in the land and the Wicked Queen’s beauty pales in comparison.  Although, each requests different anatomy to prove her death.  Disney asks only for her heart whereas Grimm wants her liver and lungs “just to make doubly sure”.  She means business.  Both huntsmen get a conscious and allow Snow to flee to the seven dwarfs Disney Snow White merely sleeps in the dwarf’s beds and does a little cleaning; Grimm Snow White eats their food (take a little from each plate so it’s even) and sleeps in their beds and because she’s a beautiful princess doesn’t need to do anything to repay.

Now we get to the part when Snow White is an idiot and after being told by the dwarfs not to let anyone in, she does it anyway, and in the Grimm fairy tale she does it three times.  Some people never learn.  And I’m sure if the apple hadn’t lodged in her throat Queenie would be back again.  So obviously the apple did the trick for Disney but Grimm added stay laces (which if she’s the fairest in the land why would she need one?)  which sucks the breath out of her and the dwarfs have to cut her lose.  She then tries with a poisonous comb which really wasn’t trying at all because it simply had to be pulled out of her hair.  Then, the famous Apple, the forbidden fruit.

I liked Brother’s Grimm ending much better as instead of being awoken by true Love’s first kiss the apple is dislodged while the prince attempts to move the glass coffin.  The Queen is given a much more painful death then falling off a cliff; she is forced to dance in Iron slippers over a hot coal fire until she drops dead.  Now that’s punishment.  The moral of the story; don’t talk or take candy from strangers.

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3 responses to “ Review: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ”

I'm curious about your Grimm translation. Maybe I have my timeline wrong, but I would have thought that both the fairy tale of Snow White AND the timeframe of the Brothers Grimm would have predated the corset…makes me wonder about translations…

Anyway, I enjoyed reading your post. I remember reading Grimm tales when I was in high school for a world lit class and being astonished at the darkness.

Did you happen to watch either of the film versions of Snow White that were in theatres in 2012?

The translation was published in 1974, they are actually described as "stay laces" so is more of a bodice. My bad, I used the wrong term. I'll go back and fix it.

I didn't see either Snow White movies last year, mainly because I'm not a fan of Kristen Stewart or Julia Roberts.

Some fairy tales and nursery rhymes are very gruesome. Interesting comparisons with Disney. Ann

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A Graphic Novel

By Matt Phelan Illustrated by Matt Phelan

Category: children's graphic novels | children's middle grade historical fiction.

Jul 10, 2018 | ISBN 9781536200553 | 6-1/4 x 7-3/4 --> | Middle Grade (10 and up) | ISBN 9781536200553 --> Buy

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About Snow White

“Phelan’s noir-esque adaptation of the classic fairy tale is atmospheric, clever, and touching. . . . A stunning, genre-bending graphic novel.” —  School Library Journal  (starred review) The curtain rises on New York City. The dazzling lights cast shadows that grow ever darker as the glitzy prosperity of the Roaring Twenties screeches to a halt. Enter a cast of familiar characters: a young girl, Samantha White, returning after being sent away by her cruel stepmother, the Queen of the Follies, years earlier; her father, the King of Wall Street, who survives the stock market crash only to suffer a strange and sudden death; seven street urchins, brave protectors for a girl as pure as snow; and a mysterious stock ticker that holds the stepmother in its thrall, churning out ticker tape imprinted with the wicked words: “Another . . . More Beautiful . . . KILL.”

Also by Matt Phelan

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Matt Phelan sets his graphic retelling of “Snow White” in 1920s New York, with both its Ziegfeld Follies glamour and its impoverished Dead End Kids. —The New York Times Book Review The visuals are deeply effective: entire sections are wordless, propelling the reader through dramatic scenes and inviting reflection during quiet, contemplative spots…Pencil, ink, and watercolor illustrations break out of loose panel structuring; sharp lines and shadow heighten tension and expanses of open white space sometimes draw the eye to a specific scene. This graphic novel will find a welcome home with fairy-tale fans who have outgrown the Disney version (or, less likely, the Grimm version) but still find the tale compelling. —Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (starred review) Phelan ( Bluffton ) delivers a spectacular 20th-century update of “Snow White,” transplanting the story to Jazz Age and Depression-era New York City, where themes of jealousy, beauty, and power find a comfortable home…Moody gray and sepia panels carry the story forward, punctuated by splashes of lurid red—for an animal heart, procured at a butcher’s shop, or an apple tainted with a syringe. Snow’s affectionate relationship with “the Seven,” a group of street children, is among this adaptation’s most potent elements. The boys are hesitant to tell Snow their names, but readers will want tissues on hand when they finally do. —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Spanning the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, Phelan’s noir-esque adaption of the classic fairy tale is atmospheric, clever, and touching…Especially resonant are the relationships that the heroine builds with her young protectors. The last few colorful pages will tug at heartstrings as Snow, the Seven, and an intrepid Detective Prince get their happy endings. A stunning, genre-bending graphic novel for all middle grade and middle school collections. —School Library Journal (starred review) Phelan masterfully shifts a tale heavily reliant on magic and fantasy into a realistic and historical setting without compromising plausibility. Creating sweeping and dreamy watercolors that play with emotion and color, Phelan is an exquisite visual storyteller, and he lets expressive, wordless sequences carry a large portion of his interpretation. With a keen historical slant, a bit of action and intrigue, high visual interest, and the fairy-tale leaning, this will awe a wide readership. Brilliant. —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Pencil, ink, and watercolor images (in mostly sepia tones, with occasional spots of color: red for the poisoned apple, for example) move readers’ eyes across each page, providing an appropriately cinematic noir sensibility. This cinematic effect is further enhanced by the feel of constant movement, the varied panel sizes, and a judicious use of text. Some scenes are wordless; for others, Phelan uses varied fonts to enhance the drama. By the final wordless all- color sequence (spoiler: there is a happy ending), it is clear that this is an original and darkly beautiful take on the classic tale. —Horn Book In a series of silent-movie-like vignettes, Phelan puts a Jazz Age spin on the classic tale of Snow White…Readers hungry for graphic adaptations of fairy tales will find their appetites slaked here. —Booklist I don’t think I’ve ever actually enjoyed the story of Snow White until now. Hand this book to graphic novel fans, fairytale fans, and any kid who’s keen on good triumphing over evil. —A Fuse #8 Production (blog) Fans of Snow White will enjoy this new take on the beloved tale—a graphic novel set in Depression-era New York…All of the illustrations are full of emotion, propelling the story forward quickly with minimal dialogue. —School Library Connection How Phelan manages to tell this nail-biter of a story with so few words in comic-strip panels is a testimony to his great talent, and his murky pencil, ink and watercolor artwork elegantly captures the ominous mood. Dark, gorgeous and ultimately heartening. —Shelf Awareness for Readers Phelan’s wonderfully expressive and realistic faces do most of the storytelling, and readers will linger on the dynamic structure of each page, as the artist’s characteristic soft edges contrast with interesting page layouts…Fans of Brian Selznik’s books will enjoy this one. —VOYA With atmospheric, largely monochrome watercolors, Mr. Phelan reworks the old story with chilly elegance but also tenderness of heart: —The Wall Street Journal Film noir and fairy tales each offer their own unique escapes into worlds that dramatize our fears and fantasies. In Snow White: A Graphic Novel , Phelan draws from the best parts of each form to create both a hardcover hideout and an artful homage to be read and revisited panel by panel, frame by frame. —Boing Boing Nowhere is Phelan’s combination of drawing prowess and storytelling ability more on display than in his 2016 graphic novel Snow White , which is sparing in its use of text, conveying most of the story solely through its artwork. —Drawing magazine Featured/recommended in Holiday Gift Guide —Publishers Weekly

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Home Essay Samples Literature Snow White

Snow White: Comparison of the Book and the Disney Film

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Snow white: plot summary, comparison of the book and the movie adaptation.

• Grimm, J., & Grimm, W. (1857). Snow White. In The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales (pp. 205-211). Pantheon Books.
• Zipes, J. (1993). When dreams come true: Classical fairy tales and their tradition (pp. 44-58). Routledge.
• Smoodin, E. (1994). Disney discourse: Producing the magic kingdom (pp. 21-43). Routledge.
• Giroux, H. A. (1999). The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. Rowman & Littlefield.
• Pinsky, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust. Westminster John Knox Press.
• Beckett, S. L. (2014). Disney Discourse: Constructing American Culture. Routledge.
• Wasko, J. (2017). Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. John Libbey Publishing.

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John Banville’s New Murder Mystery Starts Like a Game of Clue

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By William Boyd

• Oct. 5, 2020

SNOW By John Banville

Some years ago I was on a book tour in Dublin. Granted an unexpected night off, I asked the publisher’s representative, who was guiding me around, if he could recommend a good restaurant. He suggested an Italian trattoria not far from Trinity College. And then, lowering his voice confidentially, he said: “John Banville eats there.”

Such is Banville’s renown. Ireland’s greatest living novelist occupies a unique place in the contemporary pantheon. Not only is Banville a prizewinning, much-translated literary novelist, he is also a feisty, formidable critic, former literary editor of The Irish Times, playwright, memoirist, screenwriter and developer of long-form TV series. In other words, a literary polymath — somewhat in the line of Graham Greene.

Like Greene, Banville has a distinguished oeuvre of literary novels — 17, at the current count — and what we might term Greene-style “entertainments.” A series of detective novels written under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, featuring the Dublin pathologist Garret Quirke, has been extremely successful and adapted for television. The John Banville/Benjamin Black co-identity is a fascinating one. Why adopt the disguise of a pseudonym when everyone knows, and always knew, the man behind it? Greene, after all, was happy to sign his name to his own entertainments.

Now we have “Snow,” just to add to the mystery. The novel has Banville’s name on it, but it is also a classic policier in the Benjamin Black mode. It features a young Irish detective — earnest, a bit troubled — called St. John (pronounced “Sinjun”) Strafford. Strafford has appeared before, as a detective in a Benjamin Black novel, “ The Secret Guests ,” set in 1940. In “Snow,” Strafford is 35 (the book is set in December 1957), which would have made him 18 in the earlier novel. Unless there were teenage detectives nosing around midcentury Ireland, perhaps a bit of retrospective chronological adjustment is required.

“Snow” is advertised on the cover as “An Inspector St. John Strafford Novel,” implying that a new series is underway. Is this a third layer to the Banville corpus? John Banville at the top, Benjamin Black a level below and the “John Banville” of “Snow” and its future siblings somewhere in the middle? (The writer himself recently said he had killed off that “rascal” Black.)

The story begins almost like a game of Clue. Just before Christmas, in a ramshackle country house in County Wexford, south of Dublin, a Roman Catholic priest is found murdered in, yes, the library. Detective Strafford is sent to investigate. As in Clue, the various suspects — mostly members of the Osborne family and their staff — were all in the house the night of the murder. So far, so familiar — except for one detail: The priest has also been expertly castrated.

Over the next few days, Strafford endeavors to find the culprit and in the process unearths a snake pit of secrets about the Osbornes and the dark undercurrents in Ireland and its society in the 1950s. Time and again, Banville sets up and then deftly demolishes the Agatha Christie format he seems to be aping. Everything that seems creakingly familiar about the country-house murder turns out to be darker and darker still.

What makes “Snow” even more interesting is its social context. The Osborne family is Anglo-Irish, a colonial class of Protestant landowners who can trace their arrival in Ireland back to the time of Oliver Cromwell and have survived into the 1950s. English in their attitudes and class confidence, they are a stark reminder to the Catholic Irish that for the 5 percent of the population who are Protestant in this Roman Catholic country, nothing much has changed since the 17th century. The Anglo-Irish — the Horse Protestants, or swaddlers, as they are derogatively known — live in their crumbling stately homes, ride to hounds, go to balls and race meetings, speak with a different accent and still own much of the land, managed in a form of benign paternalistic feudalism. This is the society depicted in the novels of Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane and J. G. Farrell. Eccentric, privileged, slowly dying out.

What distinguishes Strafford from almost all of his colleagues in the Garda, the Irish police force, is that he is from the same class as the Osbornes, the family he is investigating, and a Protestant. Banville makes excellent play with this pairing. Strafford confuses the Osbornes; he’s one of them, yet he’s also potentially their enemy. The family is bizarre and riven with mutual antagonisms. Colonel Osborne is a bluff military man, a widower. His second wife is skittish and mentally ill, possibly addicted to morphine. His daughter and son dislike their stepmother intensely. Various retainers help maintain their status.

Strafford enters their world and has to determine which one of them could have committed such a wanton murder. The colonel thinks someone broke into the house. Slowly but surely the family hostilities and fraught back stories point Strafford in a particular direction.

I won’t reveal how the plot thickens. Banville’s depiction of the young republic that Ireland then was (real independence came only in 1937) is fascinating. More telling for Strafford’s investigation is the way the Roman Catholic Church held enormous sway — politically and emotionally — over the country and its people, a sway that has only recently diminished. James Joyce described the Irish at the beginning of the 20th century as “an unfortunate priest-ridden race,” and Banville’s County Wexford assumes this still held true in the 1950s.

There are two strange diversions in the novel where the point of view — Strafford’s — is dramatically broken. One reveals a bizarre and disturbing sexual encounter; the other is a first-person confession that, in effect, gives most of the game away. The alert reader, picking up the clues that Banville drops, would have been very close to divining what the motivation for the murder was without this confession. These swerves in the narrative remind us that we’re reading a novel by John Banville, not an Ed McBain procedural or a Dorothy L. Sayers whodunit. In “Snow,” Banville’s engagement with the genre of crime or detective novels is partial. His ambitions for his novel are more complex.

Banville himself was born in County Wexford in 1945. As an adolescent in the 1950s, he would have known the world of the Osbornes and the local Irish communities in the countryside and how they interacted — or didn’t. The book sings with authenticity and Banvillian tropes. It is full of very precise description of clothes and appearance; the writer concentrates on people’s eyes in particular. Smells preoccupy him. He indulges in anthropomorphism: Bookcases “stare,” books display an attitude of “mute resentment,” trees “press forward with desperate eagerness.” Banville is one of the great stylists of fiction in English and “Snow” allows the limpid cadences of his prose free rein:

“It was as if he had fallen briefly asleep and dropped at once into the midst of a powerful and deeply revelatory dream, all the details of which turned transparent the instant he woke up, though the sense, the afterglow, of their significance remained.”

An entertainment, perhaps, but a superbly rich and sophisticated one.

William Boyd’s new novel, “Trio,” will be published in January.

SNOW By John Banville 297 pp. Hanover Square Press. $27.99.

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Snow White Donald Barthelme

Snow White literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Snow White.

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Snow White Essays

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The Grimm Brothers’ tale of Snow White and The Seven Dwarves uses the duality of hatred and good to deliver the idea that being a person of good morals and mind triumphs over being a person of hatred and the desire to hurt the lives of others....