Snow White gets a 4K restoration for Disney’s 100th anniversary
The studio’s first animated feature film will return to Disney+, more beautiful than ever.
Released in 1937 in cinemas, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is one of the biggest hits in Disney history. In France, the animated film has, for example, recorded 18 million admissions, and has remained in the top 5 since the creation of the box office in 1945. By adding its first scores, poorly listed at the time, it can even be considered a bigger box with us than Titanic and its 21 million tickets!
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As Disney prepares to celebrate its centenary, the studio is preparing a surprise for its fans: on big day, October 16, Snow White will return to Disney+, in a brand new restored version. A 4K remaster concocted by the same team as that of Cinderellathe fairy tale released in 1950 which recently got a brilliant new version.
“The opportunity to help restore this classic was both an honor and a challenge,” comments Eric Goldberg, known for having supervised the visuals of The Genius ofAladdin and co-directed Pocahontas. He is accompanied to direct this restoration by Mike Giaimo, an animator who notably worked on the two opuses of Snow Queen And wishthe studio’s next animated film. “We felt like we owed a debt to history by tackling Snow Whitetrying to make this work as beautiful and true to the original colors as possible.”
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In the 1930s, Walt Disney invested a large sum to freely adapt this tale from the Brothers Grimm: 1.3 million dollars (or around 30 million today). David Hand supervised its production, after having worked on the “Silly Symphonies”, short films commissioned by the studio boss, as well as on Trader Mickey. He subsequently oversaw the creation of Bambibefore leaving Disney in 1944.
In 1939, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was honored with the big trophy at the Venice Film Festival, and the following year, 8 statuettes were given to Walt Disney for this film: one big Oscar, and seven smaller ones. It has since appeared in the top of the best American films established by the American Film Institute, as well as within the Library of Congress, responsible since 1989 for preserving and protecting works that have marked the history of cinema.
While waiting to see the restoration on Disney+, here is a comparative image before/after the retouching, shared by the firm to the US media:
