Snow White: How Disney Plays with Roles | Big Joel

hey everybody today I'm gonna be talking about the 1937 animated movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs it was Disney's first feature-length film and it's just one of the weirdest things I've ever seen in my life on one hand it has brilliant influential animation and some really catchy songs but on the other the movie doesn't hold together too well the main character is this passive domestic weirdo who doesn't have a personality besides cleaning and wanting to date more the dwarves are totally irrelevant to everything the plots trying to do there's a song about hand washing in there I don't know and considering all that weirdness it's really easy to just shrug and say let's just appreciate the movie for what it is a really interesting aesthetic experience no more no less and honestly I think that's a totally valid way of appreciating the movie Snow White is a piece of escapist entertainment and not every media experience we have has to be a big deal but in this video I want to try to take on the weirdness of Snow White to look through the film and it's characters closely and see if we can understand what it's trying to do on a thematic and emotional level [Music] I'm gonna start by taking you through snow white's most important theme and that's that there are certain roles that people should fill and that these roles sort of have a life of their own where today's Disney movies make the claim that our identities are in our own hands I don't want to be the bad guy anymore Snow White seems to take the opposite position it says that our lives are not ours to mold or shape that there are certain things we must do and that we have little power in shaping those things just look at the first scene of the film it's one of the most oddly efficient introductions to any Disney movie ever in the first 10 minutes we learn every important thing we have to know about the main actors and the purpose of the scene isn't to build personality it's to establish a set of roles for the characters to fill the movie starts with an imbalancing of power Snow White's mother the proper Queen is presumably dead and her father is nowhere to be found and in the absence of other forms of authority Snow White is forced into an improper subservient role she cleans the castle when she should be acting like a princess finding a hot prince or whatever but what's important here isn't that Snow White centers on a disruption of roles I mean that's an incredibly common thing and you can see it in everything from Shakespeare to Star Wars know what makes Snow White different is that the way this conflict is resolved has nothing to do with who the characters are or what they think we can see snow white as a character who starts the film having something she doesn't want and which isn't appropriate for her and who ends the movie having something she does want and which is appropriate for her but what allows her to go from the start point to the end point isn't something that comes from her instead it comes from a force that somehow external to her and which controls her life whether she's aware of it or not we can see examples of this throughout the movie when snow is cast out of the kingdom and the Huntsman is tasked with killing her he fails to do this and shows her mercy but why does he do this it's not because she says something were acts away it's cuz she's pretty and he likes that I guess this scene is echoed later on with the dwarves see they also consider murdering her but then because she's sleeping and cute they don't again it's not her that makes people not kill her it's not a power that she produces or has control over it's what she is not who she is that makes her successful a really clear example of this occurs at the end of the movie when Snow White dies instead of burying her like normal dwarves would these guys keep her in a glass box so they can look at her and in the end the prince kisses her and she's good here it's made obvious that it's not something about Snow White that allows her to survive I mean at this point she's a body right she's nothing but still forces come together the dwarves put her in a box the prince kisses her similar to Snow White the evil stepmother is also subject to forces that are far beyond her control that's a bit of a strange thing to say because at first glance she seems like a bit of a rebel at the beginning of the movie the tides are changing she's not the most beautiful woman in the land anymore but is she gonna take that no she fights against it kill huh what your majesty but when we look deeper at her character we can see that although she seems to fight her role her character arc is totally informed by things that she just isn't aware of I think the most important example of this is the way that the stepmother tries to kill Snow White in order to poison her she puts on the disguise of an ugly old woman on one hand we can look at this masking on a literal level the stepmother conceals herself so that Snow White won't know it's her clearly that's her motivation here but on the other hand the stepmothers transformation turns out to be a permanent one even though she's not aware of it she won't ever be beautiful again after this point and isn't that kind of odd here we have a character who wants to be pretty but she seems to subconsciously make a decision that reinforces her true and proper role she lowers herself before snow white and becomes a hag and just look at the way the poor woman dies after doing everything right after successfully killing snow white and running and winning the day lightening strikes her and she falls off a cliff and that's it looking at this section we can see that the stepmother never really had a chance of getting what she wanted never could have broken from her prescribes role just like Snow White the stepmother lacks the power to change her life in any meaningful way [Music] so if Snow White presents us with characters who can't do anything to affect the quality or the purpose of their lives what can these characters do how should they be acting the answer the movie tells us is good manners the difference between Snow White and the stepmother isn't that one has power over her life and the other doesn't it's that one act sweep and has proper etiquette and the other is rude and mean think about all the times in the movie that the audience is made aware of how charming and polite Snow White is she can beckon animals to do her bidding with nothing about her natural charisma she can make a dark forest happy through a bright disposition she won't enter a home without cleaning it and when it's dinner time she makes sure everyone washes their hands Snow White is a role model but not in the way we generally think of them she's not impressive because she does things or has ambitions she's impressive because she rolls with the punches and treats people well she doesn't have agency but she's okay with that in my analysis so far I've basically just talked about Snow White and her stepmother and that feels a bit wrong because one of the most important aspects of the film is the Seven Dwarfs aside from these guys the Moo is pretty much just an accurate adaptation of the original fairy tale so now I'm gonna turn our attention to the dwarves and it's lucky for us that their presence in the movie is really interesting and really strange see where the protagonist and antagonist of the story are characters who neatly occupy their roles Snow White's the princess the stepmothers the witch the Seven Dwarves are harder to pin down they don't seem to fit any coherent role when Snow White first meets the dwarves it seems like they're going to enter a traditional patriarchal family structure it's the job of these seven dudes to venture out into the world and gain capital meanwhile it quickly becomes clear that Snow White's role is in the home she cooks and cleans and generally facilitates a positive environment for the men to come back to but as the relationship between Snow White and the dwarves progresses this split between roles becomes sort of amorphous at different times the dwarves seem to function as Snow White's father and as her children likewise Snow White functions as a daughter and a mother I think a good way of understanding the instability of roles in this relationship is to ask the question who's in charge here who has authority over whom in Snow White's first scene with the dwarves it seems like the dwarves have all the power they own the house and they let her stay in exchange for labor moreover the dwarves frequently put themselves in a paternal role and see Snow White as a child so beware strangers but at times the Power Balance seems to go the other way and Snow White is in charge and three the day after she meets the dwarves she is already heading up the households she makes them dinner and sends them off with cute little lunches plus she has the authority to demand that they wash their hands before they eat suggesting that they are in some way subservient to her to make their roles even stranger there seems to be a sort of infantile sexuality underscoring their relationship all the dwarves fawn over how beautiful Snow White is grumpy claims that she has feminine wiles though he doesn't know what that means [Music] and in one of the final scenes dopey is obsessed with getting a kiss on the lips from Snow White so what do we do with this weird blob of roles and dynamics well this is how I see it because Snow White at the beginning of the movie is left without paternal figures she's unable to have a childhood in the proper sense and that's what her relationship with the dwarves approximates here in the woods she's able to play with the roles that shall one day adopt sort of in the way a child plays house at times she's the mother with authority at times she's the daughter who needs safeguarding it's chaotic and lacks coherent direction because it's a game one that instructor on what it is to be a woman and when the Prince finally awakens her all that role shifting and weirdness ends he is the prince meant to take her and take care of her and she is the damsel meant to live and act like a princess so put it simply her childhood is over she's done playing and is ready to take on the mantle of adulthood haven't given it a closer look I find Snow White really interesting because it seems to position its themes in a way totally unlike any modern Disney movie after the 90s Disney was all about characters who obsessed about their purpose in life laughs street rat they're worried that people don't appreciate them for who they are or that various impressive forces will stop them from reaching their potential but for snow white rolls aren't a conscious decision they aren't a goal to aspire to or an antagonist to fight against they exist only in the background of the film as a set of assumptions a rulebook that functions through the characters Snow White is a film about roles it's about playing with roles and inhabiting roles and embracing the role you were given but what's strange is that neither the characters nor the film itself seems completely aware of this fact so that's that video I was thinking about making this into a bit of a series I'm really interesting in tracking the first four Golden Age Disney films so if you're interested in that let me know I'll leave a pinned comment down below or whatever thanks for watching like comment and subscribe and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Big Joel

Views: 230,168

Keywords: Snow white, snow white and the seven dwarves, dwarves, disney, snow white analysis, disney golden age, snow white 1937, old disney movies, gender roles, roles, disney politics, disney video essay, disney analysis, snow, white, snow white and the seven dwarfs, fairy tales

Id: wZ9Em2K1W_k

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 29 2017