Monday, December 19, 2011

Episode 88.5 - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Review 7/10

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - 1937 - Like four damn directors...

So I'm guessing over the years, and I'll have to watch movies in order to really confirm this, but Disney spent a couple movies getting comfortable with having plot lines because in watching Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs I discovered that it's pretty much the same fucking thing as Sleeping Beauty but with significantly less comfort showing danger and story except for instead of three old bags taking care of some dumb bimbo out in the woods, it's seven short, single fratboys all bound together by the Brotherhood of the Traveling Pants.
This really should have been called Snow White THEN the Seven Dwarfs…then Some Bitch for about Ten Seconds because the integration of these characters was pretty much non-existent. The first 20 minutes was Snow White singing with a voice that made me concerned that her voice actress was drowning. The next half hour were the Seven Dwarfs playing around with each other trying to hide the fact that they all had erections because there was some chick in the house now. Then dumb bitch evil queen showed up with her apple, knocked Snow White unconscious, fell off a cliff (spoiler alert) and the movie proceeded to give you a text version of everything that happened for the following…however the fuck long up until the line "then the overly effeminate Prince found the house and fixed everything." Wait a tick! I've seen this before (shuffles through the pages of the BackLOG), it's Inkheart all over again, maybe Brendan Fraser should have been reading this aloud! At least in Sleeping Beauty there was a real battle instead of a 10 second mildly-offensive chase where a bunch of midgets try to climb up tall rocks.
The problem with having to do a review for an iconic film like this is that I'm not entirely sure the kinds of things I should give a free pass on. It tried a lot of things, was a first of its kind, a prototype for animated film-making. Should I look at its lazy story as a negative? Or a necessary evil? Naturally, the animation is going to be on par with a rotoscope using Microsoft Paint, the music is going to be all Fantasia-esque and dreary, and there's not a damn thing that can be said about cinematic technique so ummm…let's just go with "this was tolerable."
For what it was, for when it was, this was probably amazing. We felt the same way about The Matrix and then all felt relatively stupid shortly after for letting that movie be successful enough to make Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Bible Edition. But watching it now, am I going to say "good god, what an unbelievable experience?" No! The only true nostalgic experience that will continue to blow me away like that is the Atari 2600, but I will say about this movie that it was fun and impressive enough to, like Sleeping Beauty, do what it needed to do.
There was some of it that was enjoyable, some genuinely funny "kitten YouTube Video awwww" moments, so it's not that I was tearing up screaming "make it stop," but I would have liked to see SOMETHING happen. I just dealt with this with You Can't Take It With You, too much atmosphere, not enough story.
But fine, I can't hold too too much against them so here's the way this is going to work. This was the same damn story as Sleeping Beauty. Better in some points, worse in some points. So let's just even this out with the same score then. 7 dustbusters out of 10 for this one with a solid "if I have to watch a Disney movie to watch…it won't be this one."

1 comment:

  1. I'm a HUGE sucker for a Disney flick, but I've got to agree; "Snow White" has never been a favorite. I justify it with about the same logic you do; it seems like it wasn't meant to immerse you into a story as much as it was to prove that the medium of animation could be used to produce a feature-length film.

    There are standout moments that for me rank up there with some of the greatest Disney scenes of all time, including the Queen's transformation and the twisting escape through the forest. The animation is stunning, and I actually appreciate that a little of the darkness from the original story was retained (a huntsman sent to cut out a girl's heart and bring it back in a box? Holy shit). But other than that, it leaves me a little cold (no pun intended).

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