• Snow White's Wishing Well: This area, presented visually by a view down the well, contains the sections 'History' and 'Story', with a series of static text screens presenting timelines for the production of Snow White and also Disney's own biography, and a brief but welcome version of the Grimm Brothers' original fairy tale. The 'Story' section holds multi-angle storyboard-to-film comparisons for four entire sequeces from the film. The original storyboard designs, the finished sequence and a split-screen comparison are each available separately using the Angle function. Most notable is how closely the animators stuck to the original designs for all four of these great sequences.
• The Queen's Castle: A vast amount of design sketches, test material and concept work is presented in a series of halls within the castle. The Visual Development Gallery houses innumerable preliminary designs and abandoned concepts, in many cases accompanied by optional audio captions. Another major section in this area holds extensive background and layout designs, preceded by a short introduction. The 'Camera and Tests' section includes two eight-minute excepts from 1958 episodes of Disney's syndicated Disneyland TV show, in which the workings of the multiplane camera are clearly explained and illustrated, and which also shed light on a few other key subjects in Disney animation. Quite a few archival camera and filter tests are also available here, showing how different filters and Technicolor stocks were tried out to get the color schemes just right.
  Finally, the 'Animation' area holds a great featurette on the voice talents used to bring the characters to life, as well as over six minutes of live-action reference footage (with audio commentary) and enormous character design galleries for all major characters.
• The Queen's Dungeon: The 'Concepts' area of the Dungeon presents three abandoned concepts, which are presented as a sequence of storyboard drawings set to music from the film. Two of these abandoned sequences deal with the Prince, who turned out to be so difficult to animate that he ended up a rather marginal character in the final film. Also included is a much more over-the-top fantasy version of 'Some Day My Prince Will Come', complete with Snow White dancing among the clouds with a full chorus line of animated stars in the Silly Symphony tradition. The Restoration section holds a featurette on the film's recent series of restoration attempts, started in 1987 for the film's fiftieth anniversary, and culminating in the new high-definition restoration presented on this DVD. A wonderfully informative piece that clearly demonstrates how incredible current technology really is when it comes to this kind of restoration. It's too bad though that the split-screen comparison between the 1997 version and the newly restored Snow White - which shown at the DVD's press presentation - has not been included.
• The Dwarfs' Mine: Digging through the mines will yield several impressive nuggets from the Disney archives, not the least of which is the Deleted Scenes section, which holds five fully-animated bits and pieces of footage excised from the final film. The longer selections are pencil-animated, but 'The Witch at the Cauldron' even fully inked and colored. This is great stuff for Disney fans, as most of this footage has never been available outside the well-guarded Disney archives. It is worth noting that the excision of these scenes was in all cases clearly justified: their inclusion in the finished film would have added little to the story or character development, and would have slowed down the narrative needlessly. It is testament to the risk-taking genius of Walt Disney himself that he chose to abandon these sequences late in the game, a move that was clearly beneficial to the final film, but these sequences nevertheless represent a rare treasure trove for Disney fans and animation historians alike. The other item within this area is more a trivia tidbit included for completion's sake more than anything else: the RKO Opening and End Credits are simply a presentation of the credits as they appeared in the film's first theatrical release, as they were made to conform (just slightly) to fit distributor RKO's generic font and background. The current credits boards underwent a slight redesign when Disney founded its own distribution company Buena Vista in the 1950s.
  A surprisingly engrossing item in this area is the presentation 'Disney Through the Ages'. Since its extraordinarily successful opening in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has been released theatrically in the US no less than seven times. This may not be quite as amazing a feat as Disney would have us believe, as it has been standard Disney policy to re-release their animated features periodically (especially before the advent of home video). Still, it's great fun to watch the theatrical trailers as they re-introduce the movie throughout the years, with changes in fashion and tone, and in the way the movie is presented. Each of these trailers also has a four-minute celebrity-narrated introduction that ends up talking the viewer through seventy years of Disney history, using the continuous Snow White re-releases as a springboard. Great stuff, nicely presented.
• The Dwarfs' Cottage: This area holds most publicity-related material, most of which is rare archival material that dates back to the period around the film's original 1937 release. 'The Release' presents newsreel footage and radio excerpts of the star-studded Los Angeles premiere, as well as a scrapbook featuring lots of still material of merchandising, poster galleries, still images, publicity entries, and more. The trailers presented in the 'Disney through the Ages' section are included here as well. Distributor RKO had to field so many queries about how animated films were made at the time of the film's release, that the Disney studios ended up making a ten-minute featurette on how this works, called 'A Trip Through the Walt Disney Studios'. It was never shown to the general public before, but is presented here in full, as is a shorter version that was later shown theatrically as a short subject, called 'How Disney Cartoons Are Made'.
  During the 1930s, people relied on radio for the most recent news and features, and generous helpings of audio supplements taken from various radio broadcasts have also been included in the Cottage area. Two broadcasts from the months preceding the film's premiere present interviews with Walt Disney taken by famed director Cecil B. Demille, both of which run a little under ten minutes. The half-hour excerpt from the radio broadcast event of the film's premiere is a great historical document, and an effective indication of what those radio days were actually like, as the events are unfolded quite vividly. A handful of radio commercials from the re-release campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s are also on board. Finally, the deleted songs feature the unused track 'You're Never Too Old to Be Young' (which sounds remarkably similar to the 'Silly Song' from the final film), and hilarious recording session footage of the yodeling dwarfs, unearthed accidentally when a Disney librarian was going through the dusty old audio archives.

Dan Hassler-Forest and Noah Eamon

Reviewed: 2001

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