Walt Disney: Tinkering

Announcing that he was going to launch an animated feature, he told the story of Snow White, not just telling it but acting it out, assuming the characters’ mannerisms, putting on their voices, letting his audience visualise exactly what they would be seeing on the screen. He became Snow White and the wicked queen and the prince and each of the dwarfs . . . The performance took over three hours . . . ‘That one performance lasted us three years,’ one animator claimed. ‘Whenever we’d get stuck, we’d remember how Walt did it on that night.’