10 Fascinating Facts About Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs
9. It Was An Expensive Gamble
The film began pre-production in 1934, with Walt Disney arranging meetings with his animation staff and setting an initial budget of $250,000. As all the previous shorts Disney made in his Silly Symphonies were all cel-shaded, he wanted to continue this trend and make Snow White the first cel-shaded animated motion picture. The result of this decision was a battle to even get the film off the ground.
Disney was desperate to breach the feature film market, so to ensure the production had enough money to get the film finished he re-mortgaged his house and increased the budget to almost $1.5 million, something that went against the pleas of his brother Roy and his wife Linda. Accounting for inflation, that’s nearly $26 million, which doesn’t seem high for a feature film, but for the 1930s and for animation it was an insane amount, and throughout production was referred to by those in the Hollywood film industry as “Disney’s Folly”.
Despite this the film was finished and met with universal praise and massive financial reward. And to put into perspective the budget of the movie and the finished product, that $26 million was half the budget of The Emoji Movie, and it took three times the amount of time to make. It seems time and effort pay off as opposed to trends and lots of money.