Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Adriana Caselotti, Lucille La Verne, Harry Stockwell Producer: Walt Disney
'Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who is the fairest of them all?'
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is, if you think about it, a creepy, offensive little fairy tale. A young princess, admired for her beauty and flawless white skin, drives her royal stepmother to devise ever more bizarre ways of murdering her, because a magic mirror keeps telling her Snow White is still alive and prettier than her.
Having won over the huntsman who was instructed to kill her, the innocent girl is led by singing woodland creatures to a house belonging to seven dwarf miners. They agree that if she cooks and cleans for them, the little men will look after her.
However, on discovering her whereabouts, the evil queen drinks a potion to disguise herself as an old hag, poisons her stepchild with an apple and watches her slip into a deathlike coma, from which she can only be saved by Prince Charming. There is a storm, the queen is squashed by a boulder and dies. That is Walt Disney's version, which became his first feature film in 1937.
The Brothers Grimm, naturally, told a much darker original story in which the queen tells the huntsman to bring back Snow White's lungs and liver for her to eat; at the end, the evil woman is forced to dance to death in red-hot iron shoes. In the first Grimm edition, the sadistic queen was Snow White's mother: the story was apparently 'toned down' for children by making her the stepmother instead.