Cinema Nirvana Enlightenment Lessons From The Movies

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) Dare to Be Dopey So, in planning a new picture, we don't think of grown-ups and we don't think of children, but just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us, that the world has maybe made us forget and maybe our pictures can help recall. Walt Disney As a role model, Snow White sucks. She's an utterly passive fairy-tale heroine who climbs no beanstalks and slays no dragons. She has no talents but housecleaning and no interests beyond pining away for that Special Someone who will someday come and solve all her problems. Her shrill, girly voice attests to her empty-headed helplessnessshe's sisters-under-the-skin with the old politically incorrect Teen Talk Barbie that sighed, "Math is hard!" All she is is young and pretty, and not smart enough to understand that one day, like the Queen, she'll be forty and washed up. This sort of critique is valid as long as we're viewing the film on a strictly literal level. But on that level, Jack and the Beanstalk teaches us to solve our problems by stealing and killing, and Christ's parables are pointless stories about pearls and swine, lost sheep and mustard seeds. If we look at it in the right light and from the right angle, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length cartoon ever made, turns out to be an extended dharma parable, its teachings as exquisitely detailed as they are unintended. Back in 1937, when the film was in production, the press called it "Disney's Folly." Even Roy Disney, Walt's brother and partner, wanted to stick to their wildly popular Mickey Mouse shorts, fearful that the project would sink the studio. Walt kept hiring more artists, hundreds of them, and going back to the bank for more money. To realize his vision, new technology was developed (a giant multiplane camera to add layers of perspective), an in-house art school was established, live dancers and dwarfs were filmed and copied, chemists mixed 1,500 custom paint colors, and teams of animators worked around the clock for months, fired up by Walt's relentless perfectionism. As one artist said, "Disney had only one rule: whatever we did had to be better than anybody else could do it, even if you had to animate it nine times." The result tapped in to something universal, and Snow White became the first great international blockbuster of the sound era. True, it set in motion the Disney juggernaut-of-cuteness that would eventually crush every delicate, wistful children's classic in sight (poor Pooh!), but that's another story. Visually, the film is still stunning today, in such scenes as the climactic storm, where the fall and splatter of each individual raindrop is hand-rendered with painstaking predigital craftsmanship. But most remarkable is how, out of the intensely concentrated awareness of some 1,000 collaborating artists (writers, animators, colorists, actors, musicians, and more) emerged a self-portrait of awareness itself: our pristine, snow-white inmost being, with its innate yearning to find fulfillment in the arms of the Prince Charming of enlightenment. But enlightenment, in all its expansiveness, is an unfamiliar realm. So the film begins with the all-too-familiar constrictedness of unenlightenment, in the person of Snow White's stepmother, the Queen, closeted in the dark, claustrophobic recesses of her strangely uninhabited castle. Where are the King, the courtiers, the ladies in waiting? She dwells in isolation, just as we dwell (so it seems) alone inside a body, a tiny island of self lost in the wide sea of all that is not our self. Gazing into her mirror, she pronounces her famous incantation Magic mirror on thSluyter, Ean is the author of 'Cinema Nirvana Enlightenment Lessons From The Movies', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400049745 and ISBN 1400049741.