![]() There are also facial similarities to George de Feure's La Femme au chapeau noir (1898- 1900).īabbitt based the Queen on "all of the women I've ever known", and noted that, while the animation of the Queen relied, to an extent, on live-action footage, he felt the need to 'caricature' and 'invent' in order to justify the medium of animation the animation was not rotoscoped as the Prince's was.Ĭoncept art of the Witch offering the poisoned apple to Snow White. The Queen's costume and general silhouette may have been inspired by a column statue at Naumburg Cathedral depicting Uta, wife of the Margrave of Meissen. Her 'Hollywood mask' of a face may also draw inspiration from Joan Crawford, particularly in the lips and eyes. At a meeting on October 30, 1934, Disney suggested that the papier mache masks by Art Deco illustrator Vladislav Theodor Benda (an influence on Joe Grant's work) be used as inspiration for the Queen's face. The Queen's costume is rumored to be based on that worn by Helen Gahagan in the 1935 film She, though animator Art Babbitt and other Disney artists have denied this. Rather than a comical villain, she became a femme fatale, a type of character with which the Disney artists would have been familiar, through the silent screen at the same time she is a figure from ancient Europe, viewed by American audiences in the 1930s as a symbol of not only charm and elegance, but also decadence and self-destruction. However, when Albert Hurter introduced a more realistic style of character design to the Disney animators, it was ultimately decided that the Queen should be more beautiful, regal, cold and sinister, creating a much scarier character than had ever been attempted in animation before. The Fleischer Betty Boop short Snow White, which, like much of Fleisher's work, had probably been studied by Disney's animators, also has an ugly Queen. In the early stages of design, the Queen was drawn as a fat, frumpy, comical character, in the style of the characters of the Silly Symphonies.
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