Important eventsBack

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a 1937 American animated film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures. Based on the German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, it is the first full-length cel animated feature film and the earliest in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series. The story was adapted by storyboard artists Dorothy Ann Blank, Richard Creedon, Merrill De Maris, Otto Englander, Earl Hurd, Dick Rickard, Ted Sears and Webb Smith. David Hand was the supervising director, while William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, and Ben Sharpsteen directed the film's individual sequences.

Snow White premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937, followed by a nationwide release on February 4, 1938, and with international earnings of $8 million during its initial release briefly assumed the record of highest grossing sound film at the time. The popularity of the film has led to it being re-released theatrically many times, until its home video release in the 1990s. Adjusted for inflation, it is one of the top ten performers at the North American box office.

At the 11th Academy Awards, Walt Disney was awarded an honorary Oscar, and the film was nominated for Best Musical Score. It was added to the United States National Film Registry in 1989 and is ranked in the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films, who also named the film as the greatest American animated film of all time in 2008.

Disney's take on the fairytale has had a huge cultural impact, resulting in a popular theme park attraction, a video game, and a Broadway musical


Original theatrical run

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937, to a wildly receptive audience, many of whom were the same naysayers who dubbed the film "Disney's Folly". The film received a standing ovation at its completion from an audience that included Judy Garland and Marlene Dietrich. Six days later, Walt Disney and the seven dwarfs appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The New York Times said "Thank you very much, Mr. Disney". Variety suggested that "[so] perfect is the illusion, so tender the romance and fantasy, so emotional are certain portions when the acting of the characters strikes a depth comparable to the sincerity of human players, that the film approaches real greatness."

Following successful exclusive runs at Radio City Music Hall in New York City and a theater in Miami in January 1938, RKO Radio Pictures put the film into general release on February 4. It became a major box-office success, making four times more money than any other motion picture released in 1938. In its original release, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs grossed $3.5 million in the United States and Canada, and by May 1939 its total international gross of $6.5 million made it the most successful sound film of all time, displacing Al Jolson's The Singing Fool (1928) (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was soon displaced from this position by Gone with the Wind in 1940). By the end of its original run, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had earned $7,846,000 in international box office receipts. This earned RKO a profit of $380,000.