With 1.5 million individual drawings sketched, transferred to transparent cells, hand coloured and composited into over 350 thousand frames… Walt changed the game when it came to animation.
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The emotional gap between the cartoon characters and the audience needed to be bridged, and in order to achieve this Walt needed to imbue Snow White with a sense of realism, giving the audience the feeling that this was all happening to a real person who could think and feel, allowing them to empathise with Snow White and the dwarves all while retaining the charm and whimsy that comes from the unreal nature of animation. Almost every choice made in the production of the film was pointed towards striking this balance.
100 Years of Cinema – 1937: Snow White – The Making of Walt’s First Masterpiece
Recommended, especially for its comparison of footage from Snow White with films made only a few years earlier.