Screenwriter

Ted Sears

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

Cinderella

Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi · 1950

A servant in her own home waits out her stepmother's cruelty until a fairy godmother gives her one night at the palace ball, in the version of Perrault's fairy tale Disney finally completed in 1950 after years of false starts. Made for $2.2 million while the studio was roughly $4 million in debt, the film became Disney's biggest hit since Snow White and reversed a run of expensive, underperforming features — helped along by nearly 380 women auditioning for the title role before Ilene Woods got it almost by accident.

13:00

Peter Pan

Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske · 1953

Wendy Darling and her brothers follow Peter Pan to Never Land to escape growing up, then have to help him outwit Captain Hook once they're there. Disney bought the animation rights from Paramount in 1938 and began preliminary work almost immediately, only for the Second World War to divert the studio into government propaganda work for years; production finally resumed after 1945 and the finished film, made for $4 million, became a solid commercial success while carrying a depiction of its Native American characters that has drawn deserved criticism since.

13:00

Pinocchio

Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske, Norm Ferguson, T. Hee · 1940

A woodcarver's puppet is brought to life and told he must prove himself brave, truthful and unselfish before he can become a real boy, guided — imperfectly — by a cricket appointed as his conscience. Made for $2.5 million as Disney's second feature, the film pushed effects animation further than Snow White had, rendering water, smoke and lightning with a level of realism the studio hadn't attempted before, even as it lost money on first release when the war cut off its overseas markets.

13:00

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

David Hand, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey · 1937

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs follows the fairy-tale plot closely — a jealous queen, a poisoned apple, seven miners who take in a runaway princess — but its significance is in what it proved possible: a full-length animated feature with distinct character personalities, made for $1.5 million after two years of story meetings that discarded far more ideas than they kept. Industry figures dismissed it in advance as Disney's Folly; it opened at the Carthay Circle Theatre in December 1937 and changed what a cartoon was allowed to be.