This is Walt Disney's dream come true. For years he has hoped to make a feature-length film, a wholly animated production without human actors.

Snow White has a rare and elusive charm. It is a lovely translation of the old fairy tale created by Jakob Ludwig Grimm and Wilhelm Karl Grimm — the fantasy of the beautiful little princess who flees her wicked stepmother and comes to dwell in the depths of the forest with the seven dwarfs who labor by day in a jewel mine.

But the stepmother consults her magic mirror, summons all her black wiles, and sets out to kill the little princess.

Like all Germanic folk tales, Snow White has its vein of cruelty. It has fearsome things reaching out of the forest darkness to terrorize the fleeing Snow White; it has its horrible witch with her lust for blood. But the fable also has its beauty, its humor, its tenderness.

The birds, the squirrels, the forest hares, the fawns, all the shy folk of the woodland, do their best to help Snow White. Here the film achieves a lyric loveliness impossible to anything of flesh and blood. Too, the fantasy, unbelievable as it may seem, possesses its tense and moving moments.

Snow White and her forest friends, as they appear in Walt Disney's success.

The dwarfs are individual and delightfully characterized, quaint little beings of fantasy.

Snow White is something brand-new under the Hollywood sun.

VITAL STATISTICS: Story's been left much as the Grimm Bros. — Jakob Ludwig & Wilhelm Karl — conceived it late in the 19th century. Chief differences: Animals and birds have been given human characteristics, dwarfs have been named Sleepy, Sneezy, Grumpy, Happy, Bashful, Dopey, and Doe characterized sharply. Squatty, by the way, is a ringer for Dopey but wears a beard. Grimm Bros, won undying fame but few riches.... Snow White's been years in the making, tying with Chaplin's Modern Times for the longevity production record. Hollywood called it Disney's Folly. At world premeer, however, all Hollywood paid $5.50 a ticket, cheered Disney, speculators got $50 a seat.... Disney artistic are known as Disney's hands, work for from $19 a week to about $350 tops.... None of the offstage voices in Snow White get credit, are sworn by contract to secrecy as to their identity, ride around in comfortable cars nevertheless.... Walter Elias Disney is a 1-goal-handicap polo player, loves his 2 children to distraction, is happily and once married, he's of Chicago birth and Missouri Studied drawing at Chicago night school, was turned down for ill health when he applied as a postman in Chicago, went home, put on make-up and got the job. Spent two years driving a Red Cross was ambulance in France. His first art job was drawing farmyard animals for a Kansas City ad agency. While working nights over a drawing board a fat mouse ran out, made friends with him, got named Mortimer Mouse, Inter became Mickey Mouse after quite a struggle to crash world of animation.

Publication Date: February 12, 1938