Extra Credit: Annotating an Additional Film

The film that I am going to write about is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It is the first feature-length animated film in movie history. It was released in 1937 and directed by William Cottrell, David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, and Ben Sharpsteen. The writers are Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Rickard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De Maris, Dorothy Ann Blank, and Webb Smith. When it was first released on December 21, 1937, it received $66,596,804. The title of the review I read is “Is It Any Good?” by Common Sense. This review approves the sweetness of Snow White and criticizes its terror scenes. It also relates the film to other Disney fairy tales and compares different princesses’ role in the film. There is a quote from the review “although Snow White may not be as brave as Mulan, as intelligent as Belle, or as talented as Ariel, she is, like Cinderella after her, the sweetest among the Disney princesses.”

In this film, females are considered beautiful if they have a beautiful appearance, being fragile, passive, and longing for love. Snow White, the main female character of this film, is beautiful but possesses no real power and ability to change her life. She sings a song from the beginning of the film “I’m wishing for the one I love to find me today. I’m hoping, and I’m dreaming of the nice thing he will say” (00:04:30-00:05:01). And there is a screenshot from the film at this moment.

The picture and the words she sings show that she is passive and longing for love. Instead of trying hard to change her life and find the one she loves, she prefers to wish, and wait. It is the belief that she firmly holds helps her to find the one she loves. Although we know that this seems impossible today, at that time it may be considered right and sweet by a girl to hold a good wish for her future. In other Disney films like Beauty and the Beast and Rogue One, in which female main characters are all independent and brave, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs are dedicated mostly on hope, sweetness and passivity of a beautiful girl. We should see that the time when the film was released plays a big role on gender roles displayed in the film. For instance, Rogue One was released the most recently in 2016. Therefore, the gender value presented in Rogue One was very different than that presented in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Independency, braveness, and helpfulness are the characteristic of heroine in recent films which are agreed by societies nowadays.