A COMING OF AGE
The story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is well known and well documented: Walt Disney gambles the future of his studio on an expensive, lavishly drawn full-length animated feature. Skeptics dub the movie “Disney’s folly,” claiming no one will sit through an 83-minute cartoon. The film is released just before Christmas in 1937 and becomes a runaway box office success, not to mention one of the greatest movies of all time.
But what is not so well known is that Walt had much more in mind than “just” creating and producing the first animated feature. What he envisioned was something closer to Broadway musical than Hollywood motion picture.
From its beginnings, Snow White was planned around music. Unfortunately, early attempts at songs for the movie did not satisfy Walt. He complained that they were too much in the vein of so many Hollywood musicals, which introduced songs and dances without regard to the story. “We should set a new pattern, a new way to use music,” he told his staff during the early stages of production. “Weave it into the story so somebody doesn’t just burst into song.”
Frustration must have run rampant through the Disney music department during the production of Snow White because by the time all was said and sung, Frank Churchill and a young artist named Larry Morey (who also served as a sequence director on the movie) had written 25 songs, only eight of which ended up in the film, but what an eight they were.
Walt didn’t write a single note of music or contribute any lyrics (or at least he didn’t take credit for any), but he was the one who defined the content of each song and how it fit into the film. His intense involvement detailed in these notes from a story conference in which he is discussing the use of “Whistle While You Work” in the film:
Change words in song so they fit in more with Snow White’s handing the animals brushes, etc. Snow White: “If you just hum a merry tune”… and they start humming. Then Snow White would start to tell them to “whistle while you work.” She would start giving the animals things to do. By that time, she has sung, of course… Birds would come marching in. Try to arrange to stay with the birds for a section of whistling. Orchestra would play with a whistling effect… get it in the woodwinds… like playing something instrumentally to sound like whistling… Get a way to finish the song that isn’t just an end. Work in a shot trucking [moving] out of the house. Truck back and show animals shaking rugs out of the windows… little characters outside beating things out in the yard… Truck out and the melody of “Whistle While You Work” gets quieter and quieter. Leave them all working. The last thing you see as you truck away is little birds hanging out clothes. Fade out on that music and music would fade out. At the end, all you hear is the flute – before fading into the “Dig Dig” song [which precedes the song “Heigh Ho”] and the hammering rhythm.
Eighteen-year-old Adriana Caselotti, who was trained in Italian opera, provided Snow White’s beautiful, tender soprano, which is heard on “Whistle While You Work” and “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
Chanting their way through “Heigh Ho” as the dwarfs were vaudeville comic Roy Atwell as Doc, comedian Billy Gilbert as Sneezy, Scotty Mattraw as Bashful, Otis Harlan as Happy and the irrepressible and invaluable Pinto Colvig as both Grumpy and Sleepy. In case you’re wondering why only six dwarfs are listed, remember, Dopey never speaks.
Perhaps more astounding than the success of the movie was the chart performance of the songs featured in it. In fact, more popular hit songs originated with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs than any other Disney animated film. The Hit Parade of 1938 featured six tunes from the film: the three included in this collection, as well as “One Song,” “With a Smile and a Song” and “I’m Wishing.”
Come Academy Awards time, though, the film and its songs were almost completely overlooked. The score, by Disney music staffers Leigh Harline, Frank Churchill and Paul J. Smith, was nominated for an award, thanks in part to a new rule that guaranteed every studio at least one nomination in the Best Score category simply by submitting an entry.
As for Best Song, not one of Snow White’s eight songs was nominated, but at least they were in good company. Such classics as “Hooray for Hollywood” and “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” also failed to receive nominations, which left the Oscar to something called “Sweet Leilani” from the movie Waikiki Wedding.
(Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs did earn a special Oscar; in fact, it earned one Oscar and seven little Oscars, which were presented to Walt Disney by Shirley Temple. The award recognized Snow White “as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field for the motion picture cartoon.”)
It didn’t take long for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to make up for its transgression in almost completely ignoring the music in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney’s next film, Pinocchio, released in early 1940, took two of the three music awards at the 1941 Academy Awards, earning Oscars for Best Song (“When You Wish Upon a Star”) and Best Original Score (the third music category was Best Adapted Score, for which Pinocchio was not eligible).
The success of Pinocchio’s songs and score provided some consolation for Walt since the movie itself was a money loser in its initial release (thanks largely to World War II, which succeeded in shutting off Disney’s foreign markets, markets that usually accounted for almost half of the company’s income). Of course, the movie later became a roaring financial success in subsequent re-releases and on videocassette.
The two Academy Awards also served to vindicate Walt after several reviewers complained that the songs in Pinocchio were not as good as those in Snow White.
“What they [the critics] failed to realize,” wrote Maurice Sendak in the Los Angeles Times upon the film’s re-release in 1978, “is that the score is a vital, integral part of the whole; nothing was allowed to obtrude, even at the risk of sacrificing obvious melody and the hit song charts.”
And yet Walt and his writers, Ned Washington and Leigh Harline, ended up sacrificing neither melody nor the song charts. Upon its release, “When You Wish Upon a Star” broke all Hit Parade records and has gone on to become the most beloved of all Disney tunes. For years, it was the opening song for Disney’s network television show and it’s heard every night at closing in both Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World.
Cliff Edwards, who had a hit song in the 1920s as a character called “Ukulele Ike,” provided the voice of Jiminy Cricket, the official, 18-karat conscience of Pinocchio who croons “When You Wish Upon a Star” and “Give a Little Whistle,” the two songs from the film included in this collection (in “Give a Little Whistle,” he gets a little help from 12-year-old Dickie Jones, who, because he had “a typical nice boy’s voice,” landed the role of Pinocchio).
Walt Disney
met Leopold Stokowski, the famed conductor of the Philadelphia
Orchestra, by chance at a restaurant in the late 1930s. A big fan of
Disney cartoons, Stokowski expressed an interest in working with his
newfound friend. Walt responded that perhaps he could use Stokowski’s
expertise immediately because his studio was currently working on a
version of Paul Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” with Mickey Mouse in
the title role.
Stokowski eagerly agreed to conduct the music for the short and, after
a visit to the studio, suggested that Walt tackle an entire feature
composed of sequences animated to popular classical music. Walt agreed
and Fantasia was born (“fantasia,” by the way, is a musical term
meaning the free development of a composition or theme).
Walt wasn’t aiming for an audience of stuffed shirts with Fantasia. Nor was he trying to educate common folk in the ways of highbrow culture. To him, the film was simply another challenge in his continuing effort to push the boundaries of animation.
Some music critics reacted hostilely to the film. They objected to both the adaptations of the scores (one critic called them “butchery”) and their animated visualizations, which the purists decried because they felt listeners should create their own images for the music.
But even the film’s harshest critics had to admit that Fantasia was completely different from anything they’d seen before. Instead of the music advancing the story, as had been the case in Snow White and Pinocchio, the music was the story. In that respect, Fantasia was essentially a series of music videos – and we know about the debate that rages around them today (although, granted, what Walt and Stokowski had in mind wasn’t anywhere near Madonna or Michael Jackson).
Despite all the controversy over Fantasia, the film was still honored with two special Academy Awards for 1941, one for the innovative Fanta-sound system that was developed for the film and the other for Stokowski, who got some measure of revenge on his critics by being recognized for his “unique achievement in the creation of a new form of visualized music… thereby widening the scope of the motion picture as entertainment and art form.”
Of course, the film and its music earned further redemption – and even some long overdue (albeit still grudgingly given) praise – when, after its first unsuccessful runs in the 1940s and 1950s, it gained new life during its releases in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1991 it became one of the biggest selling videocassettes of all time. The remastered soundtrack has also enjoyed great success, earning a gold record for sales of more than 500,000 copies.
The section of the score heard here, “Dance of the Reed Flutes,” comes from The Nutcracker Suite, written by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. While listening to it, imagine delicate flower petals caught by the breeze, then gliding down to float amongst lily pads resting gently on water. At least that’s the scenario imagined by Disney animators. Perhaps you’ll think of something else.
With Dumbo and Bambi, Walt Disney returned to more conventional storytelling and musical scores, and he was rewarded both critically and commercially.
Dumbo hit the screens first, debuting in 1941 with six songs written by lyricist Ned Washington and composers Frank Churchill and Oliver Wallace. None of the songs from the film repeated the Hit Parade success of Snow White and Pinocchio, but the score earned Churchill and Wallace an Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture and “Baby Mine” was nominated for Best Song. The Oscar that year went to “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” which, ironically enough, was co-written by Jerome Kern, the songwriter who said such nice things about Walt Disney just a few years earlier (“Baby Mine” was in good company, though: “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” also came up on the short end for Best Song).
Written by Churchill and Washington, “Baby Mine” is such a heartfelt ballad that tears are almost certainly guaranteed. In a gently humorous way, Steven Spielberg paid homage to the song in his movie 1941, which featured General Joseph Stilwell, played by Robert Stack, crying as he watched Mrs. Jumbo try to comfort her poor son Dumbo.
Bambi also featured an Academy Award-nominated tune, “Love Is a Song,” but it, too, came up short at the awards ceremony. No one was surprised, though, since the winner for 1942 was a little ditty by Irving Berlin called “White Christmas.” The score was also nominated, in the Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture category.
Churchill and Larry Morey, the duo behind the eight classic tunes that make up Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, re-teamed to write the songs for Bambi, a film that had been in development at the Disney Studio since 1935 (animation actually began in 1937, but the movie was constantly pushed aside in favor of other projects, such as Pinocchio and Fantasia). It was finally finished and released in 1942.
This time Churchill and Morey wrote four songs, including “Little April Shower” and the aforementioned “Love Is a Song.”
Although Bambi is a 69-minute film, it has less than 900 words of dialog (shorter than a four-page business letter). Clearly, music had to convey emotions and experiences that words could not.
