Fairy Tale Friday--Snow White (Betty Boop, 1933)

Hello and welcome to Fairy Tale Friday. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.

This week we look at the Betty Boop version of Snow White. It was made in 1933 by Max Fleischer Studios It is considered a milestone in the Golden Age of American Animation and took six months to complete. That’s about one month per minute of film. Wikipedia says the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1994. The same year, it was voted #19 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field. It stars Betty Boop, Koko the clown and Bimbo the dog, who in other films has appeared as her boyfriend. This would be one of the last films he appeared in due to the Hays Code censorship rules becoming more strictly enforced in 1934. Wiki says: Bimbo disappeared from future Fleischer cartoons of the era, due to the implications of an anthropomorphic dog dating a human girlfriend being too risqué at the time.

Interesting fact: Koko's dancing (including some moves that look like the much later "moonwalk" and "dab") during the "St. James" number is rotoscoped from footage of Cab Calloway. (thanks to Wiki for this trivia.)  

This film is clearly influenced by the Brothers Grimm version as it has a stepmother obsessed with her looks and jealous of her stepdaughter’s beauty, a magic mirror (which in this case also acts a magic wand), a glass casket and seven dwarfs. There is more emphasis on the stepmother and the mirror than on the dwarfs here. Here, events happen out of order than we expect—a frozen river encases our heroine in a coffin of ice (like the glass casket), but she appears at the seven dwarfs’ cottage frozen and appearing dead at their first meeting rather than them entombing her there after she dies. Here she appears sort of half alive, unable to move but blinking out a weird Morse Code of “Help me.” Okay, I may be making the Morse Code bit up, but her slow blinking in the block of ice while scary ghost stuff happens all around her is definitely creepy.

I am including a summary from Wikipedia , but with my own notes interspersed.

We begin with the ugly Queen gazing at herself in the mirror. There is some funny animation here with her powdering her enormous phallic nose and then dropping the powder puff  down the back of her dress. Then a hand comes out of the mirror and buffs her sausage-like nose shiny. She asks a variation on the magical question, “Mirror mirror in my hand, who’s the fairest in the land?” At first the mirror says it is her but then Betty Boop comes over and sings about meeting her stepmother and the mirror changes its mind. Wiki says the face in the mirror is meant to be Cab Calloway, but I felt it looked more like The Black and White Minstrel Show. There is a tiny “Easter egg” of Micky Mouse in the sequence where she enters if you look carefully.

Betty Boop goes to see the stepmother and some very interesting animation ensues. The glass in the mirror disappears like an empty tennis racket allowing the stepmother’s face to go through the glass leaving her hair behind. Then her face morphs into a skillet of fried eggs with the eggy eyes popping out of the sockets. She also has a very well done “Off with her head!” snicking scissor motion that is well animated. It is clever and makes you understand why it was considered such a masterpiece.

 The Queen orders her guards Bimbo and Koko to behead Betty. With tears in their eyes, they take Betty into the forest and tie her to a tree; as they prepare to execute her, they spare her by destroying their weapons, but fall into a pit before they can free her.

 Note: The pit fills up with a heap a snow after they fall in which makes it resemble a grave. She is still tied to a tree and calls for help. The tree appears as magical helper and unties her and sets her free. As she is walking away the garter on her thigh falls off and the tree lays it on the “grave” like a wreath.

 Betty falls into a giant snowball (as you do) and rolls downhill into a frozen river. The  frozen river encloses her in a coffin of ice. This block slips downhill to the home of the seven dwarfs, who carry the frozen Betty into an enchanted cave, running into Koko and Bimbo.

Note: You know it is enchanted by the huge sign outside bearing the words MYSTERY CAVE in big letters.

 The evil stepmother comes upon the snowy “grave” with the garter wreath and presumes her beautiful stepdaughter is dead. She asks the mirror who mocks her due to her ugliness causing her to fly into a temper. She uses the mirror first as a shovel to lift the snow from the pit and then as a sort of magic wand which turns her into a witch-like hag and then becomes a sort of hoverboard which transports her down into the pit where she encounters Koko and Bimbo.  Koko sees the seemingly dead Betty Boop and sings a very heartfelt rendition of  the St. James Infirmary Blues.

 Note: This animation is stunning. It is sung by Cab Calloway and was rotoscoped over his movement. Rotoscoping (if you don’t know) is a type of animation which involves tracing  a live action film onto glass and animating it. Most films of this era are quite jerky and crackle-y (the rest of the film is) but this part is as smooth as butter. It is a quite sad and sinister song with lyrics like

I was down to St. James infirmary, I saw my baby there
She was stretched out on a long white table,
So sweet, cool and so fair

As Cab Calloway/Koko the clown is doing his slippery dance, weird and scary things like ghosts and flying skeletons are passing through the air. The evil Queen, now transformed into a witch, turns them into grotesque creatures as Koko sings. The Queen then freezes them all.

 With her rivals disposed of, the Queen again asks the magic mirror who the fairest in the land is, but the mirror explodes in a puff of magic smoke that returns Betty and Koko to their normal states and changes the Queen into a hideous and mysterious dragon-like monster. The dragon-like monster chases the protagonists until Bimbo grabs its tongue and yanks it, turning the creature inside out and causing it to flee away. Betty, Koko, and Bimbo dance around in a circle of victory as the film ends.

Note: The turning inside out of the dog-barking dragon is another wonderful example of the cleverness of this animation.

 This was truly incredible for its time. I do have one quibble, though. Betty Boop wears a garter on her left thigh. It is there on her left leg when she enters the castle to see her “step-mama”, it is there when she is tied to a tree in the woods. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a garter appears on her right thigh and conveniently falls off in the snow. She is never pictured wearing two…but suddenly when the need arises, a second one appears. I am know you have to willingly suspend your disbelief in cartoons, but this bugs me. Why I am seemingly okay with a flapper dating a dog but not an extra article of clothing, I have no idea.

 Watch it here:

That’s all for this week. Stay tuned next week for a funny version. There are several live action foreign language versions of Snow White, but none I can find a complete copy of on YouTube, sadly. While I would love to look at a version from Germany or Hong Kong, instead we will look at a version with three stooges.