Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

I let my daughter, Azalea, choose what movie to watch for Fun Friday and she picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  I had not seen this film since I was little.

What I enjoyed was the overall darkness of the story.  The evil queen is so jealous of the beautiful Snow White that she sets out to kill her.  Actually, she asks the Magic Mirror who is the fairest in the land. Fair means fair-skinned, and obviously someone with skin as white as snow would be fairer than anyone else. But today we take it to mean beautiful.  However, I would much rather stay my fair-skinned self than go to a tanning bed and turn orange.

The queen orders her huntsman to lead Snow White into the woods and kill her. But to make sure she's dead, the queen tells him to put her heart in a box.  Not only does he have to kill the most beautiful person in all the land, he has to saw her chest open and slice out her dead heart. That is the most metal thing I have ever heard.

Snow White flees for her life into the woods.  This part was the scariest for me when I was little - the scary woods with the eyeballs trying to get her. She comes across an empty yet dirty cottage and does what any normal person would do - clean it with her animal friends while singing. It turn out that the cottage doesn't belong to orphan children as she thought, it's owned by seven dwarves. The dwarves spend their entire days mining for diamonds and rubies, yet live in a modest cottage and all sleep in the same room.  I think it would be okay to at least do an add-on or maybe a guest house.

Every element or cliche that we associate with fairytale princesses stems from this movie. She sings about her dreams, her need for companionship, her ability to summon woodland creatures to help her do chores, her naivety, and her ability to fall in love with someone after meeting them only once.

The audio/video syncing was perfection. Today we have computer animated films, so the music and words are just programmed. However, they managed to perfectly sync up the audio to a hand drawn cartoon all the way back in 1937. It was flawless. I give it a 10/10.