Fleischer Friday, Film-Scholarly Edition
This was a originally written as a reading response for my Theory and Criticism class, and I thought it might find a home here while I work on getting the blog back into gear.
Thierry Kuntzel’s ideas about the use of Freudian psychoanalytic models as a mode of analysis for narrative film has the potential to be applied to a wide range of film genres, but given my own critical leanings, I’m particularly interested in its relevance to the discussion of 1930′s animation, which tends to be particularly dreamlike in its structure, and to have a strong element of the uncanny. Thus inspired, I decided to follow Kuntzel’s lead and examine one of my favorite animated shorts, Snow White (Dave Fleischer, 1933), in terms of dream-work.
There are three primary constellations of dream elements which recur throughout Snow White: sexual desire (and specifically, the desirability of Betty Boop/Snow White), ice/freezing, and physical metamorphosis.
Betty is introduced as an embodiment of desire by her theme song, which opens the cartoon: “Made of pen and ink / She can win you with a wink / Ain’t she cute? / Boop-oop-a-doop / Sweet Betty.” Interestingly, the lyrics make clear not only that she’s meant to be desired by all who meet her, but also that she explicitly does not exist. Despite her considerable charms, she’s only “made of pen and ink.” Her lack of physical existence frees her from the messiness of being a real person, making her a pure object of desire.
When she enters the story a moment later, the Queen’s two guards (“played” by recurring Fleischer characters Bimbo the Dog and Koko the Clown) immediately fall for her, as does the Magic Mirror. Even the empty suits or armor in the castle hallway fall apart at the sight of Snow White. The Queen cannot abide this, of course, and orders her execution. In a manner similar to the original fairy tale, however, she survives because the guards are incapable of overcoming their infatuation with her, and throw themselves into a pit instead. The very tree she has been tied to takes pity on her as well and lets her go.
The constellation of ice and freezing, which takes over the narrative at this point, was hinted at earlier in the short, when Snow White arrives at the castle with snow in her hair and flanked by a duo of singing icicles. After she is released by the tree, she becomes completely engulfed in snow, which is quickly converted to a perfectly formed block of ice, thanks to a dip in a frozen lake. Snow White, our immaterial object of pure desire, remains frozen in this ice coffin until the end of the film.
The third constellation, metamorphosis, occurs to some degree in almost every shot (and in all Fleischer cartoons, for that matter). In this world, everything is living and fluid, and nothing holds its shape for long. The first overt metamorphosis of a primary character, however, occurs when the Queen becomes angry at Snow White. As she fumes, her face becomes a skillet, complete with fried eggs in place of eyes. Later in the film, the Queen becomes the focal point of transformation. Using her Magic Mirror, she turns herself into a witch, and then transforms Koko into a ghost and Bimbo into a potted plant. The Mirror soon gets fed up with her, however, and changes everyone else back to their true forms, while changing the Queen into a dragon.
The high point of Snow White is Koko’s performance of Cab Calloway’s “St. James Infirmary Blues.” He sings this song (with its lyrics telling of a dead or departed lover, and contemplating the speaker’s own death) to the frozen form of Snow White. As he sings, the Witch changes him into a ghost. Aside from the obvious shifts from alive to dead and from material to immaterial, this metamorphosis has an unmistakable visual element of castration anxiety. Koko is drawn with human dimensions (in fact, he is the only “man-shaped” character in the film), but his ghost form lacks any sort of torso—its legs reach all the way up to its shoulders. In other words, as he sings his song of lost love to the frozen object of his desire, he is reduced to a creature with only empty space where his genitals should be. Even within the often bizarre Fleischer canon, this stands out as a particularly strong example of the uncanny.
As with most of the Betty Boop cartoons, the “climactic” chase and happy ending are rushed and unrewarding, because that sort of resolution is beside the point of a cartoon like this. The real climax is the musical number, in which all the elements of the cartoon come together in a perfect blend of swinging jazz, virtuosic hand-drawn animation, and a heaping helping of subconscious dream imagery.
