Disney's Folly
In the 1930s Walt Disney's studio made short cartoons, and when he announced a full-length animated film, people in Hollywood called it Disney's Folly: nobody believed audiences would sit through ninety minutes of drawings. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs took about three years, cost far more than planned, and nearly bankrupted the company. When it opened in 1937 it became one of the most successful films ever made.
It was not quite the first animated feature in the world — earlier ones had been made in Argentina and Germany — but it was the first full-length hand-drawn film in colour and with sound from an American studio, and it set the pattern for PINOCCHIO, DUMBO, BAMBI and CINDERELLA that followed.
Mickey is now anyone's
MICKEY Mouse became a star in 1928 with Steamboat Willie, one of the first cartoons with a synchronised soundtrack. Copyright in that early version of Mickey ran out in the United States at the start of 2024, which means anyone there can now use the black-and-white, whistling Steamboat Willie Mickey. Later versions, and the Disney trademarks, are still protected.
Many Disney films are themselves built on old stories that were free to use. Our fairy tales page looks at how the studio became the latest in a long line of people retelling them.
Elsa was going to be the villain
In early versions of FROZEN, ELSA was the Snow Queen of Hans Christian Andersen's tale, a cold villain. Then the songwriters wrote Let It Go, and the song was so much about a person finally accepting who they are that the story was rewritten around it, turning Elsa into a heroine and the film into a story about two sisters. OLAF the snowman survived every draft.
Songs have often changed Disney films. The GENIE in ALADDIN was voiced by Robin Williams, who improvised so much that the animators had to redraw scenes around his jokes. ENCANTO produced We Don't Talk About Bruno, which went to number one in the American charts in 2022 — higher than Let It Go ever reached.
A camera that made drawings deep
Flat drawings filmed on a single sheet look flat. For Snow White, Disney's engineers used a multiplane camera: a tall rig in which painted layers of background, middle ground and characters sat on separate sheets of glass at different distances from a lens pointing down. When the camera moved, the near layers slid past faster than the far ones, just as they do when you look out of a train window, and the forest suddenly had depth.
The studio tested it first on a short film, The Old Mill, in 1937, which won an Oscar, and used it in BAMBI and PINOCCHIO. Every frame was still painted by hand, and those films took years to finish.
Why Zootopia is Zootropolis in Britain
The animal-city film released as ZOOTOPIA in most countries was called Zootropolis in Britain and much of Europe. Disney has said the change was made partly because of a similar name already in use in Denmark. Several of the city's animals were also swapped between countries: a news anchor is a moose in some versions, a koala in Australia and a panda in China.
The rest of the grid holds more of the studio's heroes and films — MOANA, MULAN, TANGLED, POCAHONTAS, HERCULES and TARZAN, SIMBA from The Lion King, ARIEL and BELLE, GOOFY, STITCH and the wicked fairy MALEFICENT.