Snow White, the first full-length animated feature, premiered

On the evening of December 21, 1937, a black-tie crowd filed into the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles to watch something the industry had bet against: a full-length cartoon. By the final scene, an audience that reportedly included Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland, and Marlene Dietrich was on its feet.

Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first full-length cel-animated feature film. Skeptics had nicknamed the project “Disney’s Folly,” doubting anyone would sit through more than an hour of drawings. They were wrong.

Tuesday, the 21st of December, dawned fair and mild.

The film took roughly three years and a small army of about 750 artists, who hand-painted close to two million cells, one frame at a time. It went into general release in February 1938 and, against a budget near $1.5 million, became the highest-grossing film of its year. In 1989 the Library of Congress chose it among the very first films named to the National Film Registry, calling it culturally significant. It had ushered in the golden age of animation.