The Traditional Snow White

After watching the original version of Snow White, I had a feeling there would be a general community of comments about the film and it's production. So rather than discussing the obvious I'd like to reign my comments to the ones that may not get brought up in class today.

1. I could not keep my eyes off of Snow White. Everything about her was so unique and different to what I had become accustomed to in a Disney Princess culture. Her waist size was a reasonable size, her eyes didn't take up half of her face and it was definitely a weird feeling. My initial instinct was to say that she was certainly a more fuller figured princess, when in reality she is just one of the few with realistic measurements. The jarring difference between this Snow White and the one I was used to seeing definitely highlighted how formulaic Disney designers have become in terms of their female characters. Below I have an image of Snow White from the original movie next to an image of how her copyrighted image looks today.

                                                                             (1938)

(2015)

Although I couldn't manage to find one that wasn't blurry when uploaded, you can still see the differences made in her appearance. She was given more defined cheekbones, heavier makeup, a larger bust, a much smaller waist and thinner arms. The photoshopped effect is one that I don't think I enjoy. I feel as though I could swap the hair and dress of Belle or Aurora or Cinderella and still have the same looking character. While this bothered me, I can't say I wasn't surprised.

2. Music hasn't changed, but vocal styles sure have. The accompaniment of most of the songs in this film were really enjoyable to hear and almost comforting in a nostalgic sense. However, the voices of the singers made my head tilt like a confused chihuahua every time they started to sing. I've become so accustomed to digitally refined, pitch perfect soundtracks that it seemed foreign for me to be able to spot mistakes or hear the individual voices of each dwarves when they sung as a group. Now if there is an instance like that, a single voice is just looped and given the necessary audio adjustments to sound like  many people. 

3. I couldn't help but think back to an earlier reading we had in which an argument was made that humans are more inclined to like round edged characters than ones with many sharp edges. Less liked dwarves such as Grumpy were identified with sharp points and the the friendlier ones such as Dopey were dominated by curves in their visual composition. When comparing the Queen to Snow White, you can notice the overwhelming presence of angles and edges in the image of the villain, but not the princess. While at first I thought maybe that authoring was exaggerating, I am starting to see their point.