Customer Reviews

Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

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WHAT CAN I SAY ?: This is considered by most to be Disney's best film story, originally adapted from Grimm's Fairy Tales. In this book version some of you will see for the first time the great conceptual art done for the film by Gustaf Tenggren which is definitely worth the price of the book which is CHEAP. However for a collector of first editions it does not fit the bill. The story has been reworked, pictures eliminated, original black and white pictures colored. Reference page numbers are given for black and white pictures that were colorized but none of the pages are numbered. The book provides a quick reference to Tenggren's art with enlarged pictures that can be handled with less care than that of a first edition. The single word "retold" does not seem to give enough credit where due. I suggest you find a copy of "SNOW WHITE and THE SEVEN DWARFS", Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1938. It is scarce but not rare.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The previous books in this series: Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland, were nothing to write home about in spite of the wonderful Mary Blair art. But this one is a real step down. It seems that the purpose of these books is to showcase the conceptual artists whose work inspired the look and feeling of the classic Disney films. If that's so, then what's with the horrible reproductions? Tenggren's glorious art is cropped and shot so dark that all delicacy disappears. I know this art is over seventy years old and perhaps it wasn't possible to shoot from the original paintings; still, in this age of Photoshop surely something better could have been achieved. I have seen far superior copies online. Just Google Tenggren and you'll get a taste of how the art should look. The book design is fussy and cluttered and the text by Cynthia Rylant, a normally good writer, is self-conscious, failing to capture the spirit of Walt Disney's great classic. Too inferior for collectors and too muddy for children, I wonder just who the target audience for this book is supposed to be. Save your money and buy the movie.

This book is a must have for any disney fan! It's illustrations are absolutely breathtaking, and the story is well told. In addition to being an avid disney fan, I'm also an elementary school teacher and my students loved this retelling! The ending is a smidge different from other fairy tales (it doesn't end with "And they lived happily ever after") and so it served to be a great compare and contrast tool with other fairy tales, which led to great discussions about why the author would choose to go with a differently worded ending. Absolutely fantastic!

Classic storybook illustrations are by Gustav Tenggren, who also illustrated Andrew Lang's "Rainbow" series of fairy books. Tenggren was already a famous storybook illustrator before coming to America to work for Disney. The Tenggren illustrations make this book an irresistable buy for collectors of children's classics or Disney.