The Voice of Snow

I think I mentioned getting a record player a few months ago. It makes me feel cool because music truly does sound different--and now when I'm out doing my antiquing, I can take a look at the records, too, because they're now relevant to me.

Like the stack of Disney records I came across yesterday. Mary Poppins and Bambi and Peter Pan. I took the two I liked best, Snow White and Cinderella (if only they'd had my dearest, Sleeping Beauty). The latter mainly for "So This Is Love" and the former for "Some Day My Prince Will Come" and "One Song." They are in fact more than just songs. Each record also comes with an illustrated storybook and the audio contains narration in addition to the songs. Kind of nice if you do want to put them on for children or even for yourself while doing housework or something. But a little inconvenient if what you want is just to listen to a specific song (there are no marks in the records themselves that show the breaks between songs like usual since the narration makes it all just one continuous audio piece).

It isn't too hard, though, to find each one since you do know at what point in the story the song you want comes in. And oh, is it lovely to hear these songs in this way. (The records, by the way, are from 1960.)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs I have said many times is as near to perfect as is possible. Disney did something amazing with that one. The combination of Grimm's with the 1930's with Disney just hit it right. And so you put that dark and yet hopeful music and Snow's child voice into a record player and you just have something special. You're transported.

It's that Gothic element that makes Snow White so great--and makes me so biased in favor of it. Darkness and light, darkness and light, darkness and light. Darkness and light coming from my record player now.

Disney Princess Analysis - Part 1: Snow White

There is this . . . concept in people's minds that the Disney princess movies are love stories about girls being rescued by princes. Snow White and Cinderella take most of the heat, and Ariel and Rapunzel get most of the praise. (By the way, I am going with the twelve official Disney princesses: Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora/Sleeping Beauty, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana, Rapunzel, Merida, and Elena.) I, however, don't see things in that way, and often the characters who get the most criticism deserve it least and those who get the least attention deserve more and those who are favorited most could actually get more criticism. So. I'm starting this series to look at what these characters really are like and what message or theme their stories really try and get across.

Let's start at the beginning, with Snow White from 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The way I see this movie, it is not a love story--despite what a beautiful love song "One Song" is. I believe this is the reason why the prince has no name: he is a metaphorical prince. Now, we all know that fairy tales have background as moral tales. And Walt Disney supported the promotion of good values as part of the Disney name. So let's look at Snow White that way. She is a hard worker who doesn't complain, not when she is washing the steps outside the castle nor when she is helping to clean the dwarfs' home. She takes initiative, as evidenced by her proposition to keep house for the dwarfs if they'll offer her shelter in return. And she knows that fear is something to overcome: when she is afraid, fleeing into the wild forest after attempted murder, she cheers herself up and tries to make friends with whoever is around, even if it's only forest animals. This, too, represents a respect for the natural world: she doesn't just consider them birds and rabbits but rather living beings whose environment she shares.

Here's the part that people overlook with Snow White, though: she knows about periods of waiting. Patience is a virtue, after all, they say, and Snow White knows this. When she is at the castle under her stepmother, she sings into the Wishing Well because she has hope that she won't have to live under disrespect and cruelty forever. At the dwarves' home, she also sings about her prince, whom she has now met; she sings about meeting him again in spring, that is, the time after the winter has passed. Good times follow the bad, or rewards come to those who wait. Either way, Snow White has been a classic example of all of the virtues, and she deserves a reward for this.

Does the story, then, teach people that a reward for a good woman is a man? No, not at all. Remember, I said the prince was metaphorical. You know that scene at the end, when the prince is leading Snow White home to his castle? Yeah, everyone references him kissing her to wake her up from the spell, but people seem to forget the image of his castle, which I prefer to the waking. His castle is up in the clouds--it isn't just far off in the distance so that it appears on the pink sunset horizon. It's in the clouds. Okay, this can just be a pretty image because animation isn't limited by the "physicalness" of live action. But none of the other images in the movie are fantasized like this. So it must be significant that Snow White is looking out and seeing this castle in the clouds.

A castle in the clouds, if you put it that way, sounds like heaven. Which would make Prince Charming a sort of symbolic stand in for the Prince of Peace, the one who is escorting Snow White to this heavenly place in the sky. I'm not saying she died at the end of the movie: I'm just saying that, to me, the whole prince thing is representative of her choice to lead a good life and the positive results that follow that choice. So Snow White is never "dependent" on a man and getting a man isn't her reward/happy ending. The point of her story is simply her never-ending goodness, hope, and perseverance. These are important virtues for everyone to learn, and Snow White is simply a female character expressing these virtues.

Top Disney Animated Films

I've been thinking of Disney so much lately, that I'm going to take a moment to list the best of Disney's animated, feature length films--and explain why I consider these the best. I'm putting them in the order they were released rather than ranking them.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) - Walt Disney felt like the studio would never again be able to do what it did with Snow White, and in a way, he was right. This, however, isn't to say that Disney would never again make great movies--it's just an immense compliment to what they did do with this film. This film is pretty much perfect, and remains so nearly 80 years later. Something of the 1930's film style permeates it, emphasizing the fairy tale darkness and softening out the romance (by which I refer to the style of romance, rather than specifically love romance) into something swirly, thematic, and poetic. Memorable characters, great songs, beautiful animation, and well-crafted sequences and pacing make this film a true classic.

Fantasia (1940) - The film that threatened to ruin Disney animation because its costs ran so ridiculously high, Fantasia became something unique and incredible, a true piece of art--to some of us. I realize that it's one of those movies that not everyone can sit through, but I find it the most fascinating combination of visual and auditory art. The details of how everything is woven together just amaze me.

Beauty and the Beast (1991) - Basically I consider Snow White the best Disney animated film from back when and Beauty and the Beast the best one from today--but that shows my age because Beauty and the Beast is no longer a new film. Still, it's in the top five of most people's lists and I often hear it named as number one, as well. Once again, great pacing, characters and songs. As far as animation goes, the style falls between the muddy look of 1980's animation and the clearer coloration of the 90's (which ended up leading to the weird look of early computer animation). So you sometimes have less defined, more obscured backgrounds with clear and crisp characters--and that creates a recognizable visual style. Like Snow White, this is a love story that isn't really a love story when you think about it (I think I'll do another post later on to describe with I mean with that).

The Lion King (1994) - Ah, here I go showing my age again by including two 90's movies. The thing is, I never knew for sure how much I liked The Lion King until recently. It was just a Disney movie, part of a collective. Lately, though, I've been noticing so much about it. First of all, it's one of the more successful attempts at a leading male character (Aladdin was also successful, I suppose, but Tarzan and Quasimodo and others not so much) in Disney animated films. Second, it shows us something different that still feels familiar. Third, I really appreciate the content and themes referencing nature and respect and respect for nature and the natural order of things. Fourth, that theme is wonderful (I'm not the only one to compare this story to Hamlet): the need to step up to responsibility and to face what you know you need to do, whatever else is going on. And yes, good songs, distinctive animation style, wonderful voice acting, good pacing.

Shouldn't this this be a top five list, rather than only top four? I tried to come up with five films, but the trouble was that these four came quickly and easily to mind, while I had to try and consider what the last one would be. I'm tempted to give it to Sleeping Beauty because I'm rather fond of that movie for the music and the Good vs. Evil theme--but it does have some weak spots. Many people like Peter Pan but that movie was never my favorite. 101 Dalmatians and Lady and the Tramp and Bambi are good but are they top five good? I like The Rescuers and The Black Cauldron because they're dark but do I think they're great instead of just good? The Little Mermaid is a good movie but it doesn't reach the high thematic levels that I've come to expect from Disney movies. I would put Mulan on the list except that I don't like all the comedic bits with the ancestors and Mushu. The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, and Frozen likewise have some good material accompanied by some weak points. So I'm going to stick with my top four as the best overall of Disney animation.

"Modern Fairy Tales"

It seems everywhere I turn lately, I see another trailer for Snow White and the Huntsman. It has me thinking about the general idea of modern interpretations of a fairy tales.

There are different ways that these interpretations can work. They can try and tell the story in its original way. Or they can add twists like this movie will be doing, or like Ever After does. Or they can be removed to a different time and setting, like Enchanted or the ten movies named some variation of Another Cinderella Story. The latter two ways are something like inverted the fairy tale.

I say this because fairy tales represent aspects of their cultures, maybe in more or less abstract ways and often in changing ways. Snow White can stand for a complacent woman waiting for the marriage that will define her life, or she can be a patient and ingenuous person maintaining hope for better times. The fairy tale acts as a kind of carrier for ideas like this. But when we reinterpret fairy tales, we pull out certain aspects of it and put those into a new picture. Probably we are taking out from the original the pieces that feel most applicable to ourselves, but still we are not really making another fairy tale. It's still just inspired by a fairy tale. It has something of the abstract nature of fairy tales taken away, and it didn't form as part of a natural process (that no one remembers). We can track the progress of the creation of Snow White and the Huntsman or Enchanted, but not of the original Snow White or Cinderella tales (maybe of recordings of them, but their actual first origins).

But I don't mean to say that fairy tales are never intentional. It's a complicated thing to define a fairy tale; Tolkien, though, describes them quite well in his article "On Fairy-Stories."

I think my main point is that "modern fairy tales" aren't so much stand-alone fairy tales as they are conversations with the collective body of fairy stories. They're one person's (or one group's) take on what all these stories or versions of stories say, mean to say, should say, or could say.