Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Disney's first animated feature takes the Grimms' fairy-tale and turns it into a generally cute fantasy for American kids: Snow White herself might be felt to be almost unbearably winsome, and the anthropomorphic characterisation of the forest creatures soon becomes tiresome. But the animation itself is top-notch, and in a number of darker sequences (Snow White's terrified entry into the forest, for example), Disney's adoption of Expressionist visual devices makes for genuinely powerful drama. Ideologically, however, what remains most intersting, as one writer has noted, is the way Walt's obvious desire to promote the American Way (off to work we go, indeed!) is married - presumably unthinkingly - to a virtual celebration of polygamy in which, moreover, it is a woman, not a man, who lives with seven members of the opposite sex!