So this is Disney’s first feature-length animation thing, from 1937, which is why it’s on the list, and y’know, legit. Disney animation has been a major throughline in American cinema for the last almost-100 years, and the one that started it all is an extremely reasonable choice.

But. It’s not good.

So from an animation perspective, the backgrounds are beautifully painted, and there are some sequences that are just extremely animated, with shots from wild angles and the kind of sweeping motion that you don’t get in your Hanna-Barbera cartoons. The characters look a little weird — if you’re used to a more modern rendering of Snow White, she looks off-model throughout the entire movie — but their designs are still iconic, and fundamentally, this thing is visually solid.

But then there’s the music. Much of it is actively terrible, and even the ones that are memorable aren’t good — “Whistle While You Work” sounds like a PSA encouraging children to clean the house, and “Hi-Ho” literally has no lyrics besides “Hi-ho, off to work we go.” It’s just repeated over and over and over again.

But worst of all is the story and its pacing. Basically, the premise is given to you in two(!) title cards upfront that explain what the deal is with Snow White and her stepmother and the mirror, so it never even tries to organically tell that part of the story. Then we have Snow White singing and her Prince randomly finding her and singing at her while she hides. Then we get the mirror telling the queen about Snow White, her telling the huntsman to kill her, and him not doing it. This is dense with plot in the context of this movie, because the next 40 minutes, more or less, is her fucking around with dwarfs.

It’s her exploring the house, her cleaning the house, the dwarfs coming home and trying to find out who’s in their house, them finding Snow White, her preparing dinner, them washing up for dinner, &c. There’s like six songs in here, and each scene just goes on interminably forever.

Then finally, we get the queen transforming into a crone, feeding Snow White the apple, killing her, and… cut to a title card that explains rather than shows that the dwarfs made her a glass coffin, and the Prince has been out there seeking the girl in the glass coffin… and now we’re back, and he finds her and kisses her, roughly one minute in screen time after she “died,” and then she rides off with him for what the end title assures us is a happy ending.

Kidmovies always have these random irrelevant fuck-around parts that have nothing to really do with the movie, but are there to sell merch, but even by those standards, this is egregious. The dwarf stuff just drags on and on and on and on.

So yeah. If you want to watch a movie that’s doing something like what this one is doing, go watch Beauty and the Beast instead, because it’s better in every way. But I’m sure this was good for its time, which is why we all can name at least some of the dwarfs.