Starting with snow white

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:
Disney’s Resounding Influence 
on the American Fairy Tale” focuses primarily on Disney’s “classic” and how it 
distinguished itself from its precursors, in other words, how it achieved this status as a 
foundational precedent for the 
Snow White 
tale in the United States 
and 
for adaptations 
that followed. To enter into this discussion and address the contested nature of Disney’s 
animation in its ability to effectively represent 
Snow White 
from the stance of folklore or 
the literary fairy tale, I first critically evaluate what I term a “misrepresentation” of 
Snow 
White—
the Fleischer Brother’s animated short, “Betty Boop in Snow-White” (1933).
Where this cartoon short shreds the tradition of the tale in favor of its series’ title 
character, Disney’s version of the tale, presented in the second portion of my analysis, 
actively engages with the preceding European and American folklore, in addition to 
productively layering these traditions with technological advances—combining 
word/language, image (animation and color), and sound—which further supported those 
folkloric episodes that already informed the tale’s inherent structure. I use Jones’ model 

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to frame this section and validate Disney’s powerful engagement with folklore through 
this new media representation. While Jones’ model provides a baseline for understanding 
Disney’s folklore, in its emphasis on the oral/literary, it misses the context of film. For 
this reason, I draw in Linda Dégh, Sharon R. Sherman, and Juwen Zhang, for their 
theorizations of folklore in mass media or film. These forward-thinking perspectives 
usefully attune folklore to Disney’s medium of transmission, enabling a critical 
revaluation of Disney’s impact. Moreover, together these layers of analysis enable one to 
see Disney first and foremost for his ability to unify a range of elements through story. It 
is this which has given his film such force in the 
Snow White 
tradition, an effect which is 
proven out in my fifth and final chapter. 
To open a discussion of Disney’s immediate successors, presented in Chapter 5, 
“Following Disney:
Snow White 
Successors Wanda Gág and Bob Clampett Employ a 
New Folkloric Model,” I briefly examine the reception following Disney’s film to offer 
something of the “sensation” created by 
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 
(1937) (
Snow 
White and the Seven Dwarfs
7). The larger portion of the chapter is then devoted to the 
adaptive responses of Gág and Clampett, demonstrating that Disney’s impact was one 
that could not be refuted by either the sphere of literature or animation. Although Gág’s 
German background and prior work translating the Grimms appeared to perfectly match 
the needs of children’s publishing, which demanded an “authentic” version to counter 
Disney’s film (and books published immediately thereafter), her illustrations, softened 
language, and romance drew this first American literary adaptation (
Snow White and the 
Seven Dwarfs, 
1938) nearer to Disney’s version than the Grimms’. The Warner Bros., in 

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their animation, strove (in some sense) to follow closely on Disney’s heels with 
Coal 
Black and de Sebben Dwarfs 
(1943)—markedly manipulating Disney’s memorable 
images, scenes, and coloring, as well the unifying effect of song and story functioning 
together.

However, for animating director, Bob Clampett, Disney’s tale was utilized as 
an