Of course I've "seen" Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs before. The reason I use quotes is because it's probably been nearly 15 years since I last watched it. I know the basic plot: Queen looks in mirror and gets mad, Snow White goes to live with dwarfs, the dwarfs mine, Snow White cleans, the Queen becomes an old hag, and the prince saves the day. I was pretty sure that, for the most part, I knew what I was about to watch. That's where I was wrong.
I want to emphasize that I'm only about halfway through the film. Snow White just met the dwarves and learned all their names. My opinion of the movie so far? WEIRD. And rather disappointing.
First of all, why does Snow White have such a strange voice?!?! Not just her singing voice, her basic conversation voice. I literally gasped when she first spoke. It's so high and light. Her words are unnecessarily wavery and song-y. I don't know how movies were recorded back in the 30s, but I'm laughing picturing the actress who voiced snow white (Adriana Caselloti, thank you IMDb) actually speaking like that. I mean come on, nobody actually speaks like that. Even 70+ years ago. The way Snow White talks kind of reminds me of the way Dora the Explorer talks when she's talking to her audience. Dora goes, "Do you see the big tree?" *Pauses* "There it is!". Snow White had a similar, playing dumb kind of vibe to her speech.
Besides that obvious, in-your-face shocker, I was also surprised by the lack of complexity in the film. Now I know that, duh, there are going to be major differences in the levels of animation between Snow White and Frozen. Clearly the ever-changing technology has improved animation exponentially in the past decades. The simple style of animation in Snow White was pretty much what I expected to see. However, what I didn't consider was that not only would the actual style of animation be different, but also the ideas behind the animation. Animating was such a new and unknown field. There was no past evidence on what worked and what didn't, so Disney was pretty much taking risks and crossing his fingers for good luck. Conceptually, this film so far is very simple. For example, when Snow White is fleeing after the huntsman let her go, she runs through the dark forest. In that scene, the tree branches come to life and "attack" Snow White. Additionally, eyes pop up in a dark hole and bats fly out. The fast paced music creates a frightened mood. This scene looks like something a student would make in Animations 101. It was very cookie cutter, not just in technique but in concept too.
Overall, I was disenchanted by this film. I expected to reawaken my childhood love for an old film, but instead I was reminded why Snow White isn't one of the Disney films I watch when I'm bored. There are many films that fall into this category (Aladdin, Pocahontas, Frozen, etc.), but I can assure you that Snow White won't be one of them any time soon. Off to go finish the movie now. *Sigh*
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