The Animated Man by Michael Barrier

of Disney’s affinities with the silent comedians—particularly his intense exploration of gag possibilities—he had not created screen personalities strong enough to sustain a feature, as Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd had done. Mickey Mouse might echo Chaplin’s Little Tramp, but the Tramp was a much richer character. And so, when Disney went into feature production, he turned to the fairy tales that were already giving him the narratives for some of his
Silly Symphonies
.
    Disney remembered seeing the silent Marguerite Clark live-action version of
Snow White
when he was a fifteen-year-old newspaper carrier. The
Kansas City Star
sponsored five free showings of
Snow White
at Kansas City’s ConventionHall on January 27–28, 1917. The film was shown on four screens hanging at right angles in the center of the hall, so that someone sitting at one of the angles could see the film on two different screens. “From the spot where I viewed the picture,” Disney wrote in 1938, “I was able to watch two screens at the same time. I could look at one screen and tell what was going to happen on the next.” 4
    Although the Clark
Snow White
seems clumsy now, its Kansas City showings were a huge event, attracting crowds that the newspaper sponsors claimed totaled sixty-seven thousand people. The film made an impression on Disney for more than one reason. Not only was it one of the first “big feature pictures” he had seen, but “I thought it was a perfect story.” 5
    If nothing else, he knew from that film that the Grimms’ story could be expanded without strain to feature length. Many other fairy tales, like the few he had already made into
Silly Symphonies
, could not. Fairy tales are as a rule rather stark. Disney’s challenge in adapting one of them for an animated film was to enrich the characterizations without destroying the story’s structure. The “Snow White” of the brothers Grimm was especially well suited to such expansion because its characters included seven undifferentiated dwarfs.
    One of the earliest traces of work on
Snow White
—twenty-one pages of “Snowwhite
[sic]
Suggestions,” dated August 9, 1934—includes a list of suggested names and traits for the dwarfs, who are unnamed in the Grimms’ version of the story. 6 Giving the dwarfs distinct identities would permit shifting the weight of the story away from the lethal rivalry between Snow White and the queen, and toward Snow White’s stay with the little men. The girl and the dwarfs could have a warmer relationship, to say the least, and one more congenial to animation as it was developing at Disney’s studio. As much as Shakespeare or Verdi, Disney chose a subject that would take advantage of the abilities of the performers—that is, the animators—he was working with.
    Disney’s life was undergoing significant changes away from the studio, too. After more than eight years of marriage and two miscarriages, Lillian had given birth to a daughter, Diane Marie, on December 18, 1933. With a new home and a new daughter, Lillian now had strong competitors for whatever interest she felt in her husband’s work.
    Disney’s prosperity showed itself not just in the new house on Woking Way but in other ways. “For a good many years after Mickey Mouse was a success,” he said, “I still didn’t have a new car. And I think the first new car that I actually bought, I bought for Mrs. Disney. I still drove around in a little second-hand one that I had. When I got my family, then I had to get a family car, so . . . I splurged, I got a Packard, a new one.”
    The scrappy clothes that Lillian remembered from the 1920s were now far in the past. “He was always a nice dresser,” Roy Disney said in 1967. “He had a good taste for clothes, according to the styles at the time. . . . Walt always liked sports, he always