10 Fascinating Facts About Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs

10. It Wasn't The First Animated Film

Many people believe that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first animated feature film, and in fairness there is a certain amount of truth to that. It was the first entirely traditionally animated feature to be completed, and the first to be released in “glorious” technicolor. However, Disney were 20 years too late in being the so-called first feature-length animation. In fact, there were a good few before them in the years before its release, and Latin America got there first.

The official first animation was a 1917 Argentinian film called The Apostle, or El Apóstol. The 70-minute piece featured cut-out animation similar to that of the early South Park episodes, and seemingly showed a strange correlation with their sense of humour too.

It was the story of President Hipólito Yrigoyen wanting to destroy the city of Buenos Aires with lightning bolts, which he got from the planet Jupiter, in order to get rid of corruption. It was apparently just as insane as it sounds but sadly, the only print of the film was lost forever after it was destroyed in a fire. Argentina did it again the following year with their second cut-out feature Without a Trace, but it’s unknown whether any copies exist.

It took another 8 years for another feature-length animation, this time with silhouettes and this time from Germany, with the release of 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Ahmed. Luckily this one survives to this day. Snow White wasn’t even the first animation with sound, with that honour going to 1931’s Peludo City (once again from Argentina, and once again lost to time). It was almost not even the first feature with traditional animation. The 1936 Italian film The Adventures of Pinocchio would have been the first, but production was never complete.

We all praise Disney for being the grandfather of animation, when really, all the credit goes to the Argies.