The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Snow White (1933/USA/ani. Roland Crandall) appeared at #37 on my original list.
What it is • Not the Snow White you were expecting to see here? True, Betty Boop's version of the Grimm tale isn't exactly identical to the Disney feature, but there really are quite a lot of similarities! Both display the Evil Queen's jealousy when she discovers that Betty, er, Snow White is the "fairest in the land" by honing in on her face, with its wide eyes and bulbous nose, as it morphs into a frying pan with two sizzling eggs. The two Snow Whites also depict our heroine's escape from execution in similar fashion: the queen's knights destroy their weapons before brawling with the tree stump on which they were going to chop off her head, punching and kicking the scowling block of wood as it wraps its roots around them like tentacles. Most memorable of all is the music these films share - hallmarks of Sing-A-Long Song videotapes cherished by millennial children, in which the bouncing ball struggles to keep up with Cab Calloway in clown/ghost drag, lamenting his dead lover while his head detaches and becomes a giant bottle of "boooooze."
On second thought, maybe these two films are pretty different. Packing one hell of a punch at seven minutes and seven seconds (one for each dwarf), the 1933 Snow White beat its more famous companion by four years. Produced by the Fleischer brothers, it was largely the work of animator Roland Crandall who, according to Wikipedia, was given free reign to create this stream-of-consciousness cartoon by his own hand (which took half a year). The result is remarkable, every frame stuffed with hilariously random invention.
Why I like it •
