Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Continuity Mistake When Bashful Hands Sneezy Flowers

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• Accidental Innuendo:
  • When the dwarfs meet Snow White for the first time, Grumpy tells Doc to "Ask her who she is and what she's a-doin' here!" Given his tendency to get words mixed up, Doc comes out with "What are you and who are you doin'?".
  • That turtle during "Whistle While You Work" looks like he's enjoying the chipmunk scrubbing close to his crotch area a little too much.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Snow White, depending on how she's viewed, is either a naïve teenage girl in over her head who made understandable mistakes, way too polite and altruistic for her own good or just plain Too Dumb to Live. Alternatively, she could be read as being somewhere on the autism spectrum.
  • Dopey might be an Idiot Savant or a Genius Ditz, having difficulty in doing simple things but being a vastly accomplished musician.
  • Humbert's objection to killing Snow White may have an additional reason. Snow White is, by all appearances, the late king's only child and Grimhilde has no children of her own it seems. If Humbert had killed Snow White there would have been a possibility of a succession crisis.
  • Did Snow White and the Prince really have a case of Love at First Sight? Or did they know each other before?
  • Snow White was abused by her step-mother and nearly murdered by her, all before she's even fifteen. Is she The Pollyanna or a Stepford Smiler? Even Disney has toyed with this, such as in the A Tale of... books where she's shown having nightmares about her past into adulthood but prefers to hide her anguish.
  • The Evil Queen has been subject to a lot of this due to her Mysterious Past and her evilness. Is she just naturally a murderous narcissist or did something in her past make her that way? Did the king's assumed death have anything to do with it? Was she always a Wicked Stepmother, or was she a Good Stepmother at one point? The A Tale of... books are an official, Alternate Continuity Disney work that explores these questions.
  • The Queen becomes much hammier and crazier when she disguises herself as a hag. Did the transformation also affect her personality, or did she just feel free to cut loose and drop a persona she adopted now that nobody could recognize her? The Unshaved Mouse interpreted this scene as "darkly liberating" for her. Now no longer having to worry about her appearance, it could even be compared to Elsa's "Let It Go" moment in Frozen (2013) (which was originally a Villain Song).
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Disney had to fight to get the film produced. Both his brother and business partner Roy Disney and his wife Lillian attempted to talk him out of it, telling him that "nobody wants to watch a movie about dwarfs." And the Hollywood movie industry referred to the film derisively as "Disney's Folly" while it was in production.
  • There were plenty of reasons to scoff: At the time, dwarfs were mostly associated with carnival freakshows, the only other feature-length animated film ever made (a German production) had been a tremendous flop, and Snow White was monstrously expensive – the film's cost overran the expected budget by 400% and production incurred debts that were, at the time, higher than the total value of Disney's studio.
• Award Snub: Much to Walt's ire, he was awarded with an Honorary Oscar for this film, instead of the Best Picture award he coveted. After all it was ground-breaking for its time and became the highest-grossing picture for a time (before being dethroned by Gone with the Wind). This would be the first of several animated films to not reach the Best Picture award. At least that honorary Oscar is the most distinctively designed one in the Academy's history. Also, none of the songs were nominated.
• Awesome Music:
• Base-Breaking Character: Snow White is either seen as an adorable Ingenue hailed for her loving heart and ability to stay positive through the tough times, or an unremarkable Vanilla Protagonist panned for her overly cutesy nature and out-of-place Rotoscoped design. There's also the matter of Adriana Caselotti's voice; some find it too cloying and annoying, but others find it sweet. Ironically enough, when Snow White appeared at the 1993 Academy Awards, her voice was deemed too old and out of place, and some lament that Disney could've had Caselotti reprise her role instead as people have been more accustomed to the squeaky, Minnie Mouse-esque opera actress voice Snow is known for. Granted, it could be Hand Waved that Snow isn't "getting any younger" in her own words hence the more mature voice, but more than enough people have seen the film to know it doesn't quite work for her.

• "Common Knowledge": The Prince is often assumed to be 31, based on a viral Tweet. However, the Prince's age actually is never stated.
• Creepy Awesome: The Magic Mirror's sinister, menacing design has become the default source of inspiration for all examples to follow, largely because of how striking it is.
• Draco in Leather Pants: The Queen is getting this due to "progressive" readings that try to blame her murderous grudge against her solely on the Magic Mirror and Values Dissonance. In reality, the Mirror never told Grimhilde to kill Snow White so she'd be the fairest one in the land again, plus in this particular version she forced Snow to be a servant girl in a palace where she had all the right to live comfortably in, solely out of pettiness. Even if "Fairest of All" is included in the canon, it's not exactly enough to sweep her enormous abuse of an innocent teenage girl under the rug.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The monstrous trees Snow White sees during her escape in the woods are still remembered as some of the scariest Disney characters ever created despite them being just hallucinations and thus not even real monsters.
  • The Poison Apple (when resembling a skull) has appeared quite frequently in merchandise involving Snow White, Disney Villains, and Halloween. It's even on Snow White's t-shirt in Ralph Breaks the Internet!
  • The Magic Mirror only has two scenes, but it is extremely popular, being used in a lot of Disney media.
• Evil Is Cool: The Queen is of one the film's main highlights with her cunning scheming, powerful sorcery and crazy hamminess in the second half.
• Evil Is Sexy: The Queen has been described as hauntingly beautiful, at least until she transforms herself into the hag.
• Fair for Its Day: The film is routinely criticized for its lack of depth in the romance. But when the film was made, it was an improvement over the original fairy tale-where the prince only comes in as a Deus ex Machina at the end. At least here the prince appears much earlier in the story and has some reason to look for Snow White. He was meant to have a larger role in the film (being tormented by the Queen) but the Disney animators weren't good at drawing a convincing human male yet (they reused several of their ideas for Snow White's Prince by the time Sleeping Beauty rolled around, giving Phillip a large role in that film).
• First Installment Wins: The film often tops "best Disney film lists" despite Walt Disney himself thinking of Bambi as his Magnum Opus.
• Genius Bonus: When the Dwarfs forcibly wash Grumpy and put a ring of flowers on his head, Sneezy comments that he smells like a petunia. In botany, petunias symbolize anger and resentment, meaningful if your name happens to be Grumpy.
• Genre Turning Point: Up until this film, cartoons were seen as a novelty, not serious works of art or entertainment. The idea that audiences would sit through a feature-length cartoon was considered. This film proved that feature-length animation was viable and that they could easily compete with live-action films.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • In a rather unfortunate case of this, this film was beloved in Nazi Germany (the next time Disney would have a movie ready for international distribution, Europe was kind in the middle of a huge war, so it was more well known in Allied Countries at the time). Even Adolf Hitler was a fan, as he occasionally doodled fan art of the dwarves during war meetings.
  • Snow White is also the second most popular Disney Princess in Japan, only beaten by Ariel, to the point where most Japanese works portraying her draw influence from Disney's adaptation of the story, just like in its' homeland of the United States. This may be because Snow White's distinguishing features — her black hair and pale skin — are considered hallmarks of traditional Japanese beauty.
• Growing the Beard: This marks Disney's change from whimsical cartoons to the full-length, animated film genre capable of telling longer, more complex stories, and the animation quality is a drastic improvement over the previous cartoon shorts.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Snow White wonders if the seven "children" don't know how to clean because they don't have a mother and are orphans. While saying how awful that would be, a fawn nuzzles its mother. This was four films before Bambi and before he loses his mother.
  • The original German dub comes across as quite a bit creepier when you remember that the voice of the Queen died at Auschwitz just five years after the dub was recorded for Swiss audiences. Even sadder, the same fate befell no less than three other voice actors in the dub, including the dub director. Out of all the Jewish cast members for the dub, only Happy's voice actor escaped the Nazis.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • There are references to other Grimm fairy tales throughout the film. Initially, Snow White is forced to wear rags and work as a scullery maid, like Cinderella, and in case you overlooked the reference, she even has a flock of doves helping her like in the Grimm version. Later, the Prince awakens Snow White with a kiss, which was borrowed from the Grimms' retelling of Sleeping Beauty, as in the original Snow White merely coughs up the apple. Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty were respectively the next fairy tales Disney would adapt into animated features (and all three were the only fairy tale films Walt himself was still alive to work on).
  • When the Seven Dwarfs first see that someone's in their cottage, they exclaim, "Jiminy Crickets!" This was actually a common Gosh Dang It to Heck! version of "Jesus Christ!" for the time (Even Dorothy can be heard yelling it at one point during the tornado), which led to Disney using it as the name for the cricket.
  • It is common knowledge that the film is an adaptation of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Coincidentally enough, one of the principal animators who penned Snow went by the name Grim Natwick.
  • The Prince looks strikingly similar to one of Kraftwerk's robot alter egos.
• Hollywood Homely: Many who watch the movie disagree with the Magic Mirror and think that the Queen is much fairer than Snow White. It was even referenced in Annie Hall.
• Ho Yay: The seven dwarves are the source of this in the film even though a lot of them showed attraction to Snow White. First off they all live together in a cottage. All of their name carved beds except Doc's are closer to each other than they should be. The dwarves also bathe together (albeit with their clothes on). Doc and Grumpy also bicker Like an Old Married Couple sometimes, especially in a deleted scene.
• Hype Backlash: While still a respected and beloved film, it gets this for all of Disney's touting it as "the one that started it all." A lot of this is down to "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny too - with Disney perfecting their output since the 1930's.
• Iron Woobie: Snow White has had a tough life. She's been treated terribly by her stepmother, almost killed by a huntsman and is sent away into the forest, where she's lost and scared. Yet her spirit and tenacity are incredible.
• Love to Hate: If the dwarfs didn't steal the show, then the Queen in all her evil hamminess did, especially in her hag form.
• Memetic Loser: Thanks to the low amount of characterization compared to future Disney films, both Snow White and her Prince have the stigma of being boring and bland. Snow is also seen as Too Dumb to Live and weak by many. And while the creators at Disney wanted to do more with the Prince, they didn't have much experience drawing male human characters at the time, and the other characters were already taxing enough for them to do.
• Memetic Mutation:
• Moe:
  • Snow White is very sweet and innocent, and her cuteness is purposefully emphasized nowadays in contrast to some of the more elegant or tough princesses.
  • Dopey is Cute Mute, younger and more naive than the other dwarfs, and has Innocent Blue Eyes.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The Queen definitely crosses it: She wants to kill an innocent girl (who is probably 16 or less ^note The Disney Princess material states that she is the youngest Princess, at 14), and for what?!? Just because she's more beautiful than her. And if that's not enough, she plans to poison her with the Poisoned Apple making her fall into the Sleeping Death hoping the dwarves will bury her alive.
  • And it was also originally planned that she tried to force the Prince - the guy who loved Snow and who Snow pined after - to marry her. And when he refused, she would try to drown him in the dungeon.
  • The Queen crossed it long ago when she hired a huntsman to try and kill Snow White. How? Because she tells the hunter that in order to make sure Snow White's dead, she asks him to cut her heart out and put it in a box to present her with! And remember - this is her stepdaughter we're talking about.
    • Could have been even worse. In the original fairy tale she salts and eats the heart.
    • In the earliest versions of the tale, she was actually the original biological mother of Snow White.
• Narm: The poster used to promote the 1975 and 1983 re-releases seems to show Snow White singing to some bluebirds, but some might think it looks more like her screaming at the not-that-scary sight of them.
• Older Than They Think:
  • This was not the first animated feature film, as many people are led to believe; that title goes to the lost Argentinian political satire El Apóstol, made in 1917 by Quirino Cristiani. Snow White was, however, the first cel-animated feature film, which utterly dominated animation for decades afterwards.
  • Possibly unintentionally, a couple of the elements different from the Grimms' story can be found in Alexander Pushkin's The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights. These include the prince appearing earlier (in the poem, he is actually her fiancee, and the main plot kicks off the day before they are to marry), Snow White cleaning the cottage when she finds it (unlike in the Grimms' version where she eats and drinks from the dwarfs' table, a la Goldilocks), the poisoned apple being the queen's only deadly gift to Snow White (omitting the too-tight bodice and poisoned comb), and the queen's death being unintentional (she falls over dead as soon as she sees the princess alive again).
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The tree hallucination. It only lasts for one scene, but it's one of the most remembered scary moments from Disney's library.
  • The Queen's pet raven perched on a skull appears in two scenes, when she transforms into the hag and when she makes the poisoned apple, and is never seen again.
• "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: Oh boy, where to start? One can convincingly make the argument that this film suffers from this phenomenon more than any other. Here are a few reasons:
  • First off, virtually any scene of significance in this movie has been copied, homaged, parodied and ripped off incessantly for over 80 years. Best advice to parents is to show it to the kids quickly.
  • Also, modern audiences, mostly parent groups and critics, see this as "just another sappy Disney Princess film". They're not entirely wrong, but they fail to realize how truly groundbreaking a project this was when released. To put into perspective: At the time, Disney was not even big enough to be considered part of "Poverty Row" or the "Little Three" - movie studios controlled distribution, and actors. This movie was made by none of Hollywood's studios, and did not employ their stars - at the time, something like that was unheard of. It was called "Disney's Folly" for a reason.
  • In addition, fans of Disney Princess films often find this film boring and bland compared to future films, completely ignoring that the franchise had to have started somewhere and this movie was that start.
  • Lastly, Snow White's animation is often considered to put her in the Unintentional Uncanny Valley thanks to rotoscoping and occasionally going Off-Model. However, at the time, she was a huge leap forward in human animation; the artists took regular classes and studied live action films to properly nail how people moved. She was a massive improvement compared to Proserpina in The Goddess of Spring.
• Signature Scene:
  • The dwarves singing "Heigh-Ho" as they march home. The song has become one of Disney's most beloved songs and the scene that accompanies it appears in many trailers for the film.
  • The Queen's transformation into the Old Hag. One of Disney's most well-known villain transformation sequences thanks to showing the Queen's willingness to make herself ugly, just to get rid of one girl.
  • The dark forest run. This scene is highly remembered thanks to its scare factor from the hallucinated monster trees and poor Snow's terrified reactions.
  • The very opening of the film, where the Evil Queen consults the Magic Mirror.
  • The dwarfs crying around Snow White's bier as she lies seemingly dead from the poisoned apple. One of the first genuine Tear Jerker scenes in animation.
• Squick: Sneezy's deleted line in "The Silly Song" where he mentions that after he was born, he used his whiskers as a "didee" ^note (diaper). The effect is somewhat lessened by him sneezing while delivering the line, but it's still unsanitary. Presumably this is why it was deleted.
• Superlative Dubbing:
  • A Finnish blog describes the second Finnish dub of the film from 1980's as this compared to the third and newest Finnish dub made in 1994 (which can be found on the DVD). The blog describes the Finnish 1980's dub being more poetic and stylish than the Finnish dub from 1994, which concentrated too much in sounding as similar as possible with the original English version. The blog states that in the Finnish 1980's dub Snow White didn't have a voice as squeaky and high-pitched as in the English version but rather a youthful, motherly voice. The Evil Queen is described as having a voice that sounded realistically insane and bloodcurdling. The blog also criticizes the newer Finnish dub from 1994 for being way too subtle voice-acting and having ridiculous dialogue in some parts. Sadly, the Finnish dub from 1980's remains to be mostly lost.
  • The film's original Swedish dub from 1938 is considered to be this, in no small part thanks to Snow White's voice actor, Tatiana Angelini. Picked after the dub's director, Per-Axel Branner had asked her to sing during a visit to her family, her performance brought out Snow White's young, kind-hearted yet naive personality and with a beautiful, majestic singing voice, helped by the fact that her father was a singing teacher. Famously, Walt himself said that she was his personal favorite voice actor for the character, and based on statements made by Olof Thunberg, Grumpy's voice actor in the Swedish redub from 1982 and the director of Lady and the Tramp's original Swedish dub from 1955, made him get a strong interest in specifically Swedish localisations of the company's films.
• Sweetness Aversion: Snow White. Many people find her exaggerated Moe traits and sickeningly sweet attitude insufferable.
• Tear Dryer: Snow White has fallen into a deep sleep because of a poisoned apple. The dwarfs, believing her to be dead, gather around her and mourn over her. Then the prince from the beginning of the movie comes in and kisses her, which wakes her up, and everyone celebrates.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • Very few of the animated films made during Walt's lifetime were as successful.
  • The Snow White 2001 Platinum Edition DVD both kicked off one of Walt Disney Home Video's most elite collections, and marked the first 2-Disc DVD of one of Walt's movies. Its "immersive" bonus features platter proved so comprehensive, that very few other Disney DVDs could compare; even Snow White's Diamond Edition and Signature Collection re-releases pale when fans lament that Disney replaced too many of the best Platinum Edition extras with filler ^note or nothing, for the Vanilla Edition Diamond/Signature DVDs.
• Ugly Cute: The dwarfs aren't exactly lookers, but they're just so genial, charming, and eager to please that it's hard not to love them.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Even back then, everyone loved the cartoony dwarfs and noted how stiff and wooden looking the rotoscoped human characters were. At least the Queen's uncanniness works in her favor since it highlights why she is not the "fairest in the land" despite her beauty.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The animation and visuals have aged quite well for a movie made in the late 1930s.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Possibly the Ur-Example. In fact, Walt never intended "Disney" to become synonymous with being kid-friendly (family-friendly, yes, but not kid-friendly. "Family-friendly" implies that it's adult, but still respects its child audience by not going too far). Animation was just easier for all the detail he wanted to include in the story. Incidentally, the film was originally approved for mature audiences in the UK (and effectively rated R in some locations in the country, as in minors who wanted to see the film had to be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian) because of the scare factor.

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/SnowWhiteAndTheSevenDwarfs

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