The Disney Canon: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Let's get started, shall we?

Friends, I come before you today because I have a theory.

Yes, really. What better way for me to start up a paid subscription option for this Substack than by opening just like this?

OK, it won’t be that bad. I don’t think it will, anyway, but stick with me. If you’re here, I presume you are already familiar with the 2015 film Inside Out. You know the one, in which we’re placed inside the head of a preteen girl grappling with budding emotions as her family moves her across the country. Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust all jockeying for time in the head of said little girl? A movie that inexplicably didn’t get a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars?

Like I said, you know the film. And you know the emotions I noted above, which center the film and its message of embracing the conflict that exists when…well, when Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust all jockey for time in your head. To that end, by the end of Inside Out, it is clear that every human within the film has some version of the same five emotions commandeering their lives and their every decision.

I am not — contrary to popular belief — a PhD in human psychology, and I am sorry to inform you of your misconception in this way. I won’t dive into the accuracy of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust being the five emotions, or how many more emotions may exist within each of our minds. What I want to do is suggest here that some version of those five emotions is evident in each film of the Walt Disney Animation Studios canon, and the best of those films embody all of those emotions at one time or another. The flip side is that the films within the canon that may lean too hard on one emotion may end up having less power, and that recent Disney films eschew the most important emotion of all: Fear.