My DVD of Snow White has a really interesting short documentary about the making of & importance of the film. I think if I go the route of showing this period in my animation this provides a really good basis for a basic narrative I could follow which is really helpful! Here's the main points anyway.
A full feature length animation was something that had never been done before, and everyone in the industry thought it couldn't work, with trade papers discussing it as if it was heading straight for disaster. It was thought that animation was fine for a 7 minute short but you'd run out of funny things to fill a whole hour and a half and that the bright colours would hurt your eyes for that long.
However Walt himself pushed the production forward with determination and passion despite this - he believed in a solid story with not just laughs but pathos & tragedy too.
He wouldn't have been satisfied just making shorts for the rest of his career.
It was a story he loved & that film was truly his more so than any of the later films.
He managed to prove the doubters wrong as they day after the premiere it was hailed as a masterpiece by the press and it continued to serve as a milestone for Disney - without the success of Snow White we would not have the rest of the Walt Disney Productions legacy as it is today.
Ever since he was a kid it was as story Walt loved having originally seen a silent film of it at a special screening for the paper boys of Kansas City, Missouri.
When Walt first arrived in Hollywood he wanted to be a director due to his love of storytelling but when that didn't go well he went back to cartoons. (I also read that later when he tried to direct stuff it was not actually very good much to the amusement of his employees- production was clearly his strong suit)
There was a financial incentive in addition to Walt desiring to achieve a personal dream however. The shorts which had made the shorts famous, although successful, were costing more and more to make and returning far less in comparison - the studio needed Snow White to be a success. It was clear if there was any future in the animation industry at the time, it had to move away from shorts.
Walt's enthusiasm convinced his existing team of animators to be on board with the project, and he had his older brother Roy in charge of finances. Disney wanted perfection and so the prospective cost kept on rising until Roy told him he had to show bankers the unfinished film and convince them of the investment if they were going to have any more funding.
The showing went successfully despite much of the film not being done with sketches in place and Walt doing some of the sound, one banker said to them afterwards - 'By the way that thing is gonna make you a pile of money'.
At this point in time Disney had a group of core animators who worked on the shorts but in order to get this mammoth task done he needed to hire hundreds more.
His job offers were eagerly taken up as due to the Depression there were many unemployed and as he wanted high standards from his artists he also trained them on the job, teaching them to look very carefully at what they were observing in order to get the best animation.
Everyone was working full speed ahead in order to get the film finished, with no idea of the end result as it had not been done before - it was only finished two weeks prior to the premiere on 21st December 1937.
After all the money was spent on making the film there wasn't any left for advertising so the staff themselves had to go posting placards on telephone poles.
This did not have a negative impact however as the premiere was sold out and attended by loads of Hollywood stars. The audience was in tears at the end and gave the film a round of applause.
