The Fairest One of All
J.B. Kaufman2012

The official celebratory book, published to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Walt Disney’ s first full-length animated movie.

Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was first shown to a theatrical audience in December 1937 and brought overwhelming, joyous applause from a cinema full of hardened film-industry professionals. In subsequent months it would open internationally, happily acclaimed by audiences and critics everywhere as one of the best films of the year, if not the decade.

From today’ s perspective, its stature is even greater — repeatedly cited as one of the finest movies of all time by cineastes and academics, and still beloved by children and adults around the globe, Snow White can be seen as the flowering of an all-too-brief golden age of animation as well as a fascinating document of its time.

Such a level of artistic achievement doesn’ t happen by accident. Walt Disney and a staff of exceptionally talented artists laboured over the movie for four years, endlessly working and reworking their scenes to achieve an ever higher standard. The finished film, as we know, was magnificent. It also heralded a new future for the Disney studio and, indeed, for the art of animation itself.

This book is the first to reconstruct Snow White’ s production process in exacting detail and with the loving attention it deserves. Author J.B. Kaufman has devoted years to researching the movie’ s history, interviewing participants, and studying the marvellous archival imagery that appears in these pages. The result is a work that can be appreciated equally as a piece of cinema history and as a collectable art book, a joy for anyone who loves film, animation, and the magical world that Walt Disney created.