Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Walt Disney Company

We will eventually meet Snow White and the evil Queen, both residing in the castle as the film begins, the latter struck by incurable jealousy that she is not as beautiful as her stepdaughter. The opening moments of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs depict something fairly simple: a castle emerging from the forest. But hand-drawn animation, in its own special way, is timeless and Snow White proves that as definitively as possible. Snow White cannot claim a similar sense of photorealism, even though it (like a number of other Disney animated films of the 1940s and 1950s) used live actors as reference points for Snow White, the Prince, and others. A recent Pixar film like The Good Dinosaur may be largely unremarkable in its storytelling, but its design of a world where humans and dinosaurs co-habitate is among the most jaw-droppingly realistic visions captured through computer technology. It's not automatically a bad thing that he's set dressing, but.he's set dressing.) Hand-drawn animation is not able to evince a sense of photorealism in quite the same way as computer animation. (Your mileage may vary on how some of the characterizations work, but the romance in Snow White is almost parodic in how brief it is, to the point where Snow White's Prince literally has no name, and has all of a handful of lines of dialogue. Since there are so many familiar elements in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, most of which have been improved upon vastly over time, what may be most striking of all is how well the film holds up visually.

But what is the true mark of the influence that Snow White left behind? The state of animation is vastly different now than it was 80 years ago, in ways that are so tangled as to barely see Snow White's cinematic footprint as being present. It is arguably one of the five or six most influential films ever made - though it is not the first animated feature released anywhere in the world, it's the first American-made animated feature - and was immediately praised as one of the greatest films ever by filmmakers and icons like Sergei Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin.

But Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has ridden a wave of love almost from the moment it premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles, California on December 21, 1937. Some of the oft-considered great films in American cinema did not initially get a warm reception from critics and audiences movies like Citizen Kane and Vertigo only grew in prominence over time as opposed to being championed by the consensus upon their initial release. Today marks the 80th anniversary of that folly.

Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Walt Disney Company