Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
An orphaned princess is poisoned by her jealous stepmother queen and takes refuge with seven dwarf miners, who protect her in their forest cottage until a prince's kiss breaks the spell. Disney's animators developed entirely new techniques to render the depth of the forest, the distinctiveness of each dwarf's personality, and the realistic movement of the human characters. The multiplane camera created genuine depth of field in animation for the first time, allowing backgrounds to move at different rates and producing the illusion of looking through a series of transparent planes.
Snow White is the first full-length cel-animated feature film in history, a creative and technical achievement so ambitious that critics dismissed it as "Disney's Folly" before its release made it the highest-grossing sound film of 1938. Its production essentially defined the Disney house style — the principles of animation codified in company training materials that were used throughout the industry for decades. Every subsequent animated feature is a descendant of Snow White's ambition.
Disney financed Snow White by mortgaging his house and studio in the mid-1930s Depression, a moment of extraordinary risk for a project that most industry observers thought commercially impossible. Its box office success allowed him to build the Burbank studio that housed the company's subsequent Golden Age productions, and established feature animation as an economically viable form that could compete with live-action cinema.