L’Express is a French weekly news magazine founded in 1953 by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Françoise Giroud.
Not everyone likes Snow White. Danièle Heymann (1933 – 2019), who wrote this article for the 1973 rerelease of the film in France, is far from impressed. Or rather, she argues that the film, underneath a schmaltzy veneer, is too gruesome for children, the way TV cop show such as Mannix lull them into accepting violence in their everyday life. By putting the term “masterpiece” in quotation marks, she emphasizes her disagreement with its use in reference to this film.
Snow White in Appeal
by Danièle Heymann (December 3, 1973)
Snow White returns to a hundred theaters… Danièle Heymann has reviewed it. With indignation.
She is nearly 40. Alright, she doesn’t look it. Snow White, released by Walt Disney studios in 1936, is making a strong comeback in a hundred French theaters on December 5. This film, the first animated musical in history, has been seen by 200 million viewers worldwide. Fine. But those who are now 40 (even if they don’t look it) risk, upon rediscovering this “masterpiece” with their adult eyes, watching their childhood memories crumble.
Snow White? An idiot. The Prince? A fool. The animals? Small, servile slaves. The seven dwarfs? Horrible old men, filthy and wicked. Simpleton, especially, who bears the marks of a serious glandular disorder, hairless, toothless, devoted to the Princess with a lustful loyalty. And above it all, a terrifying chaos, a primal sadism. The forest, initially streaked with storm clouds, sending out branches like claws, the Queen demanding the still-warm heart of her rival, then transforming into a witch, while a terrified crow hides in a mocking skull. The descent of the dreadful woman into the oubliettes where the skeleton of a pleading prisoner awaits. The poisoned apple, the vultures waiting for their prey…
Underneath the marshmallow sweetness. Never mind, perhaps, that mothers are now annoyed, since their daughters enjoy the spectacle just as much as they once did (see the “reviews” from Stéphanie, 11, and Agnès, 7).
Also, never mind that a specialist, Dr. Pierre Debray-Ritzen, a child psychiatrist who just published The Disorders of Child Behavior, denounces the poor taste in Walt Disney’s work. “He,” he says, “imposed a graphic style on several generations, a dangerously invasive style, unbearable” in the young Bambi (whom he, of course, identifies with), crying human-like tears over the corpse of his mother deer.
It’s fashionable to approve. To claim, sheltering behind the ghost of Countess de Ségur, and recalling the tutelary cruelty of Hans Christian Andersen or Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, that fairy tales, stories, and novels for children are always mean, and that’s just fine. After all, life isn’t kind, and it’s better that they learn to accept the worst, by gazing into the troubling mirror of imagination.
True. But, among young children of threatened abundance, where does the boundary between reality and imagination lie? It is becoming more and more vague, artificial.
For real. Fed with television, absorbing with the same passive pleasure the commercials and American soap operas, news bulletins, and playback by fashionable singers, they put everything in the same basket, real fiction or fictional reality. Mannix shoots a gangster? They laugh: “We know the gangster will get back up, it would cost too much to kill the actors.” A report on the Yom Kippur War? They ask: “And those, did they die for real?”
The question: “Is this spectacle for them?” doesn’t it seem outdated now? Tragedy with the deer: for them. The tragedy of Sinai: not for them. Death in animation: for them. Death in the headlines: not for them.
Perhaps it’s time to take children out of the ghetto of reserved leisure. Haven’t they acquired — perhaps too quickly, perhaps too early — the right to (almost) see everything, understand, know? Let’s acknowledge it. It’s too late to show them the truth only through the hypocritical filter of the “imaginary.” They deserve better. Better than Snow White.
