To undertake a scholarly project on the Wonderful World of Disney, in particular one focused on the historical, cultural and artistic significance of its celebrated cel-animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937), is an endeavour that often feels like jumping headlong ‘into burning coals’. Over eighty years after its initial theatrical release, Disney’s adaptation of the Grimm Brothers’ nineteenth-century German fairy tale2 remains ‘one of the most-discussed films in animation studies, and one of the most historically significant films of all time’.3Snow White’s unwavering durability as the emblematic Disney product, its historical contribution to the Golden Age of Hollywood animation, and its industrial and artistic relationship to the creativity of animation as an expressive medium during the first decades of the twentieth century have all combined to secure the film’s overwhelming place within American – and indeed global – film history. As animation historian Leonard Maltin explains, ‘There is no way to overstate the effect of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the film industry, the moviegoing public, and the world in general.