Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 film) in the context of "Helen Gahagan Douglas"

Walter Elias Disney (/ˈdɪzni/ DIZ-nee; December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American animator, film producer, voice actor, and entrepreneur. A pioneer of the American animation industry, he introduced several developments in the production of cartoons. As a film producer, he holds the record for most Academy Awards won (22) and nominations (59) by an individual. He was presented with two Golden Globe Special Achievement Awards and an Emmy Award, among other honors. Several of his films are included in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress and have also been named as some of the greatest films ever by the American Film Institute.

Born in Chicago in 1901 and raised largely in Missouri, Disney developed an early interest in drawing. He took art classes as a boy and took a job as a commercial illustrator at the age of 18. He moved to California in the early 1920s and set up the Disney Brothers Studio (now the Walt Disney Company) with his brother Roy. With Ub Iwerks, he developed the character Mickey Mouse in 1928, his first highly popular success; he also provided the voice for his creation in the early years. As the studio grew, he became more adventurous, introducing synchronized sound, full-color three-strip Technicolor, feature-length cartoons and technical developments in cameras. The results, seen in features such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio, Fantasia (both 1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942), furthered the development of animated film. New animated and live-action films followed after World War II, including Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and Mary Poppins (1964), the last of which received five Academy Awards.

A soundtrack album is any album that incorporates music directly recorded from the soundtrack of a particular feature film or television show. The first such album to be commercially released was Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the soundtrack to the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1938. The first soundtrack album of a film's orchestral score was that for Alexander Korda's 1942 film Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, composed by Miklós Rózsa.

The Walt Disney Studios, located in Burbank, California, United States, serves as the corporate headquarters for the Walt Disney Company. The 51-acre (20.6 ha) studio lot also contains several sound stages, a backlot, and other filmmaking production facilities for Walt Disney Studios's motion picture production. The complex also houses the offices for many of the company's units, including the film and TV studios Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Animation Studios, ABC, Disney Channel, Freeform, and Marvel Studios; the units of 20th Century Studios, 20th Television, Searchlight Pictures and FX Networks are set to move to this location from Century City at the end of 2025.

Walt Disney used the earnings from the successful release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to finance the construction of the Burbank studio. Disney is the only major film studio out of the Big Five that does not currently offer regular tours of their studio lot to the general public. Since the mid-2000s, Adventures by Disney has offered tours of the studio, but only as an integral component of their Southern California tour package. The other way to tour the studio is to join the official Disney D23 fan club, which offers tours to members every few months. The studio used to open to the public once a year in November on the Saturday before Thanksgiving (with some exceptions) for its annual Magical Holiday Faire craft sale, but stopped hosting the Faire around 2003. As an aid to visitors, many buildings on the Disney lot are currently marked with identifying signs that include historical information and trivia about each site.

"Snow White" is a German fairy tale, first written down in the early 19th century. The Brothers Grimm published it in 1812 in the first edition of their collection Grimms' Fairy Tales, numbered as Tale 53. The original title was Sneewittchen, which is a partial translation from Low German. The modern spelling is Schneewittchen. The Grimms completed their final revision of the story in 1854, which can be found in the 1857 version of Grimms' Fairy Tales. The story was first published in English in 1823 under the title "Snow-Drop", which was also used in other early translations. Occasionally, the title "Little Snow-white" was also used.

The fairy tale features elements such as the magic mirror, the poisoned apple, the glass coffin, and the characters of the Evil Queen and the seven Dwarfs. The seven dwarfs were first given individual names in the 1912 Broadway play Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and then given different names in Walt Disney's 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The Grimm story, which is commonly referred to as "Snow White", should not be confused with the story of "Snow-White and Rose-Red" (in German "Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot"), another fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the soundtrack from the 1937 Walt Disney film, notable as the first commercially issued soundtrack album. The recording has been expanded and reissued numerous times following its original release in January 1938 as Songs from Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (with the Same Characters and Sound Effects as in the Film of That Title).

Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS), sometimes shortened to Disney Animation, is an American animation studio which produces animated feature films and short films for the Walt Disney Company. The studio's current production logo features a scene from its first synchronized sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928). Founded on October 16, 1923, by brothers Walt and Roy O. Disney after the closure of Laugh-O-Gram Studio, it is the longest-running animation studio in the world. It is currently organized as a division of Walt Disney Studios and is headquartered at the Roy E. Disney Animation Building at the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California. Since its foundation, the studio has produced 64 feature films, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)—which is also the first hand-drawn animated feature film—to Zootopia 2 (2025), and hundreds of short films.

Founded as Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio (DBCS) in 1923, renamed Walt Disney Studio (WDS) in 1926 and incorporated as Walt Disney Productions (WDP) in 1929, the studio was dedicated to producing short films until it entered feature production in 1934, resulting in 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of the first full-length animated feature films and the first U.S.-based one. In 1986, during a large corporate restructuring, Walt Disney Productions, which had grown from a single animation studio into an international media conglomerate, was renamed the Walt Disney Company and the animation studio became Walt Disney Feature Animation (WDFA) in order to differentiate it from the company's other divisions. Its current name was adopted in 2006 after Pixar Animation Studios was acquired by Disney.

"Snow-White and Rose-Red" (German: Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot) is a German fairy tale. The best-known version is the one collected by the Brothers Grimm in 1837 in the third edition of their collection Grimm's Fairy Tales (KHM 161). It was first published by Wilhelm Grimm in 1827 in Wilhelm Hauff's Märchen-Almanach. An older, somewhat shorter version, "The Ungrateful Dwarf", was written by Caroline Stahl (1776–1837). Indeed, that appears to be the oldest variant; no previous oral version is known, although several have been collected since its publication in 1818. Oral versions are very limited regionally. The tale is of Aarne–Thompson type 426 ("The Two Girls, the Bear, and the Dwarf").

Despite having a character with the same name, this story is not related to the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Snow White" that provided the basis for the 1937 Walt Disney animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The modern German name of that heroine is Schneewittchen rather than Schneeweißchen. This story has little in common but the similar name of its fair-skinned girl.

William Norman Ferguson (September 2, 1902 – November 4, 1957) was an American animator for Walt Disney Studios and a central contributor to the studio's stylistic development in the 1930s. He is most frequently noted for his contribution to the creation of Pluto, one of the studio's best-known and most enduring characters, and is the artist most closely associated with that character. He is also credited for developing Peg-Leg Pete and the Big Bad Wolf. Ferguson, known at the studio as "Norm" or "Fergy", was the primary animator of the witch from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first in a long line of great Disney feature villains. He was also a sequence director on the film.

David Dodd Hand (January 23, 1900 – October 11, 1986) was an American animator and animation filmmaker known for his work at Walt Disney Productions. He worked on numerous Disney shorts during the 1930s and eventually became supervising director on the animated features Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi.