Hollywood Mocked a Feature Cartoon as Disney's Folly Until It Became the Biggest Hit Up to Then
Roy Disney said it would bankrupt the studio. Walt Disney spent more than 50 times a normal cartoon budget anyway.
Acquired · The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio)In Hollywood in the mid-1930s, the gossip had a nickname for Walt Disney's new project. They called it Disney's folly.
Disney, the cartoon maker behind Mickey Mouse, wanted to do what no studio had ever tried. He wanted to make Hollywood's first full length animated feature, a fairy tale called Snow White. His older brother Roy Disney, who ran the business side of the studio, argued it would bankrupt them.
Walt Disney would later put his logic this way: "we had decided there was only one way we could successfully do Snow White, and that was to go for broke, shoot the works. There would be no compromise on money, talent, or time." He did not know if the public would pay for a cartoon feature, but he was sure they would not pay for a bad one.
That decision turned a short-cartoon studio into a three-year production of unprecedented size. Normal shorts then cost $20,000 to $30,000. Snow White cost $1.5 million, about $35 million in today's money, paid for with a string of borrowings from Bank of America.
Most of the money paid for artists' work, drawn by hand. About 750 artists worked for three years, producing 2 million sketches and 250,000 finished drawings. To make a princess and seven dwarfs move like people and make audiences cry, Disney hired live actors in full costume and filmed them so animators could study natural motion. The live-action model for Snow White even put on a hair helmet, because the drawn girl's head and body were proportioned differently than a real woman's.
When Snow White premiered in Hollywood on December 21, 1937, the folly talk stopped. It earned $8 million in film rentals on that $1.5 million cost and became the biggest box-office hit in history to that point, animated or otherwise.
The category was so new that the academy did not think a cartoon could qualify for the top award, so it created a special prize. Disney received one large Oscar statuette standing above seven tiny Oscars, the only such award ever made.
Questions people ask
Why did a cartoon feature cost so much more than a cartoon short?
A feature needs about 80 minutes of screen time, and animation is photographed at 24 still images per second. Even reusing backgrounds, that means tens of thousands of individual drawings, plus ink, paint, and camera work for every frame. A five minute short could be finished in weeks. A feature multiplied that labor by more than ten.
Did Disney keep all of that $8 million?
The rentals figure is the studio's share after theaters keep their cut, not total ticket sales. In that era theaters kept roughly two thirds of the box office, so $8 million in rentals implied ticket sales more than twice as large. The $1.5 million was just the production cost, before distribution fees and loan interest.
Who played Snow White?
Adriana Caselotti, a 19-year-old singer from Connecticut, voiced Snow White. Walt Disney reportedly kept her off screen and restricted her other work so her voice would stay linked to the character. She was paid less than $1,000 for the role.