I’d like to quote to you one of my favourite pieces of criticism about animation. Scrub that, it’s one of my favourite pieces of criticism full stop. It’s from Michael Barrier’s Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (Oxford University Press, 1999), and is about Disney’s first feature length animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
The important thing you need to know about the following is what Barrier means by rotoscoping in this context. For a fair chunk of Snow White, live action versions of each scene were filmed; these were then used as reference for the animation, either as loose inspiration, or in the later stages of production, rather more directly. Rotoscoping is this latter technique: literally tracing over the live action footage of the actors, in order to create the animation.
As Barrier describes, this caused noticeable problems in the final film. But he describes it using an absolutely beautiful piece of writing. The kind of writing that inspires any critic to try and become better at their craft.
“Snow White‘s failings do not count for much when weighed against its great central successes, and the film’s most obvious failing – the weak, rotoscope-derived animation of Snow White and the Prince in the opening and closing scenes – actually gives it a dimension that Disney himself surely did not intend. It is in those scenes that the film is most wholly “fairy tale,” artificial and removed from reality; the all-but-weightless animation in the opening scenes is of a piece with the operetta-like musical treatment. Snow White seems more substantial when the animals lead her through the woods and into the dwarfs’ cottage, and then as she cleans the cottage—the music here is a work song. By the time she meets the dwarfs, she is at last a solid figure. She is most real in the evening musicale, as she dances with the dwarfs; her graceful movements, although they originated with Marjorie Belcher, are wholly the character’s.
Disney decided as early as the fall of 1934 to fence off the final sequence from the rest of the film by using a highly artificial device, three title cards that represent the changing seasons. It is in that sequence that Snow White melts again into a reverie. When the Prince appears at her glass coffin, operetta returns with him—he is singing “One Song,” his serenade at the beginning of the film. The dwarfs are mere spectators as the Prince kisses Snow White and lifts her to carry her away. He pauses long enough for her to kiss the dwarfs; she addresses only Grumpy and Dopey by name. The boy and girl are like two wraiths, bidding farewell to creatures of flesh and blood. Only what comes in between the fairy-tale sequences seems altogether real: the homely particulars of housekeeping and cooking and amusing one another, and the girl’s death most of all. It is as if the dwarfs dreamed this lovely girl’s life before she joined them, ever so briefly, and now that she is dead, they dream of her resurrection.
That the film should admit of such an interpretation is owing not just to the weakness of the rotoscoping, but to the tremendous vitality of the best dwarf animation. Because that animation is so emotionally revealing, it is the dwarfs, and not the characters who look more nearly human, who are the most like us. And like us, they long for a world where kindness can vanquish cruelty, and love conquer death.”
Barrier isn’t exaggerating about the odd nature of the rotoscoped scenes which bookend Snow White; even a cursory watch reveals they have a markedly different nature to the central part of the film. But it’s his interpretation about why those scenes still work anyway which I find the most fascinating.
For a start, note how clearly Barrier indicates that this interpretation is his interpretation, rather than attempting to ascribe any of this meaning to Disney himself. I also love how Barrier makes the point that this interpretation is about a presence – the Dwarf animation – as much as an absence – in the faults of the animation of Snow White and the Prince. Barrier, in other words, does his due diligence when it comes to what could be seen as an extreme interpretation of the film, rather than going off at the deep end without even attempting to bring you along with him.
But what really strikes me about the above piece it is how Barrier – without using the word, and probably never having even heard of the term – manages to invoke the troubled idea of hauntology.
I say “troubled”, because one problem with hauntology has always been defining exactly what it means. Bob Fischer, in his article on the subject in the Fortean Times in 2017, gives the following definition:
“There are four of them, blank-faced children in old-fashioned pinafores, standing at the end of the street, staring back at me. They could be Edwardian; it’s difficult to tell. Time is standing still here. The world has suddenly become fuzzy, vague, and sepia-tinted, and I’m filled with an overwhelming and inexplicable feeling of strange, melancholy disquiet.
They are, of course, the four children in the opening titles to Bagpuss. It’s 1977, I’m four years old, and I’m watching Oliver Postgate‘s immortal childrens’ television programme in our shadowy, brown front room, clutching a mug of warm milk before the dancing flames of a roaring coal fire. At the time, I find it hard to put my feelings into words. Four decades on, I can try: the programme makes me feel both simultaneously reassured and unsettled. It’s filled with old things, lost things, tatty puppets and sadness; folk tales, ships in bottles, abandoned toys and long-ago kings. It’s like television made by the ghosts of those Edwardian children themselves. It makes me feel, for want of a better word, haunted.
This wasn’t just a feeling that I got from Bagpuss; it seemed to pervade much of my 1970s childhood.”
But exactly what hauntology is seems to slip from your grasp, even as you try to define it. This seems by design as much as anything. The concept is deliberately hazy, because it encompasses something similarly blurry and obfuscated.1
My own personal interest is perhaps best summed up by this Jaffa Cakes for Proust podcast, “Hauntology Vs. Millennial Nostalgia”, from 2015. I’ve lightly edited the below excerpt for clarity:
OCHO: Mooncat, do you know what I mean by the odd, shadowy unnerving quality of childhood?
MOONCAT: Yes, I do. I’m talking specifically in terms of television. Between the programmes, when I was growing up – early 1980s – it was far more common than it is nowadays to see Public Information Films at all times during the day. A lot of these Public Information Films were produced in the 1970s. So here I am, growing up at the same time as hip-and-happening computerised graphics, Channel 4 is just beginning, and all the other television channels are trying to follow suit… and yet every now and then, several times a day you’ve got this little portal into what looks like a dated world.
The fact that it was on film as well meant that sometimes it could seem a little bit tatty, sometimes you get little bits of sound, or little flashes that didn’t quite fit the normal televisual landscape, and sometimes you could even get colours all washed out and so on. That, coupled with the message they were trying to get across, a general sense of foreboding.
Getting these little glimpses of this other dated world regularly, every single day, it did add to a sense that things were not altogether all Children’s BBC Broom Cupboard everything’s-lovely-and-happy.
Or, to give an example mentioned later in the podcast, hauntology is this:
But not this:
What fascinates me with this area of hauntology is how much of it was deliberate, and how much was entirely unintended. Some Public Information Films were clearly meant to frighten you; others seemed to do so purely by accident.
OCHO: The Tufty Club was not designed to be scary. But there was just something about the faded film stock and the stop-motion animation, and the sense these might be actual dead squirrels somebody had animated…
This tension between what was intended, and what the audience actually experiences, is the part of hauntology which has grabbed hold of my brain and refuses to let go.
Hauntology as a word dates to 1993, but the term as we generally use it today is based in 2000s-era criticism, and most often when discussing British culture, especially British culture of the 70s. It’s therefore unusual that Barrier’s writing here is from 1999, and yet seems to be rooted in the same idea. It surely counts as some of the earliest discussion of this phenomenon, even if he doesn’t use the the actual word itself. Moreover, he is applying it to a piece of material from the 1930s, an era which isn’t often associated with the term. We’re far from the likes of Look Around You here.
No wonder I respond to Barrier’s writing here, though: the area of hauntology I’m interested in is about the technical limitations of a piece of work, and how those limitations can accidentally add meaning. This is precisely what Barrier is talking about here. Snow White’s inappropriate, too-realistic movement in the closely-rotoscoped scenes is very much the equivalent of stop-motion squirrels.
But why did Snow White use rotoscoping so directly, when there was such a risk of damaging the film? The usual boogeymen: budget, and time. Elsewhere in Hollywood Cartoons, Barrier describes the production issues which lead to this;
“It was now, as work wound down toward the December premiere date, that Disney began to settle for compromises that he probably would not have accepted a few months before. […]
Snow White began to look like a rotoscoped character in scenes for the first part of the film, those showing her in rags at the Queen’s castle. Jack Campbell, whose scenes these were, did not conceal Marjorie Belcher’s filmed movements in his animation, as Luske and Natwick did, and what wound up on the screen looked too little like animation, and too much like the tentative movements of an inexperienced actress. (By this time, the animators were working not with tracings from the live-action film, but with photostatic frame blowups, so that using the live action as a crutch was easier than ever.) The Prince, in his brief courtship of Snow White, looked even worse: he was no more than tracings from film of Louis Hightower, another dancer from the Belcher studio. With the premiere only a few weeks away, though, Disney could avoid rotoscoping no longer, and even the best animators lacked time to transform the live action they started with.”
This is what happens when technical and budget limitations interfere with the storytelling of a full-length feature. In a short, those squirrels in The Tufty Club only really have the chance to create an unnerving atmosphere. In a film like Snow White, those limitations have an entire film structure in which to accidentally create meaning. No wonder the results have such a radical implication for the film, in a way that is far more acute than a mere PIF.
It’s more than that, though. In invoking the explicit image of ghostly forms, Snow White becomes unambiguously haunted, in a way that is extreme even for hauntology. A unsettling analogue fuzz is one thing; actual spectral imagery is quite another.
“The boy and girl are like two wraiths, bidding farewell to creatures of flesh and blood.”
Hauntology can be many things. But Snow White as a wraith is surely one of the most hauntological pieces of hauntology that could ever haunt. And yet it belongs firmly in the world of 1930s Americana.
A version of this post was first published in the October issue of my monthly newsletter.
Note in particular that this article isn’t about the musical genre, and doesn’t spend much time with “lost futures”. Both are hugely important aspects of hauntology, but not really what we’re discussing today. ↩