On December 21, 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves premiered to a crowded Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. It was one of many firsts; the first full length feature film created by Walt Disney, and the first animated feature film ever produced. It would also garner Disney his first, and only, Academy Award for a feature length dramatic film. Snow White changed the world of film entertainment, and it was made by a group of guys who had never done anything like it before.
The Disney studio in the early 1930’s didn’t make feature films. It was a small operation that had begun when Disney moved to Hollywood to work with his brother, Roy Disney, and produce and release cartoon shorts for distribution. Made famous by Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon released both with sound and featuring the iconic Mickey Mouse character, Disney elected to make his next project a major one. He decided to embark on creating the first ever feature length animated film, and found that it was much bigger proposition that he’d originally thought.
The original budget had been estimated at around $250,000, or ten times what it typically cost to produce a Disney short. That estimate would end up nearly six times higher by the time production had concluded, indicating the relative complexity and size of undertaking a feature length animation project. As one had never been attempted before, there was no such thing as a feature animator; all of Disney’s artists were converted from drawing newspaper comics. The head artist arranged for weekly art classes where the animators would practice classic artistic technique and have their past animating work critiqued by an expert fine artist brought in from the Chouinard Art Institute. This man, Don Graham, would have a lasting effect on not just this group of animators, but also the Disney style and subsequently the style of all animated films to come.
After mortgaging his house to pay production bills and shepherding the project for three years, Disney was ready to release Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to the public. The response was immediate and overwhelming: it was a huge hit. Not only was the movie itself compelling, but it proved that audiences loved the idea of the animated feature length film. More importantly for Disney, who had taken a huge personal financial risk on the project, it became far and away the biggest box office hit of the year and, adjusted for inflation, one of the most financially successful films of all time. With funds from Snow White, Disney constructed his 51 acre studio campus in California which still serves as the center of the Disney empire, an empire founded on the success of an animated film about a girl and her seven dwarves.