Snow White's dance in the clouds

One dream that Walt Disney took over twenty years to materialize was a dance sequence in the clouds between one of his Princesses and her Prince. Since the very first feature film, a lyrical scene was planned right after Snow White had sung Some Day My Prince Will Come, and she was daydreaming that she and Prince Charming were floating in some kind of swan-boat pulled by star-shaped angels. Then they would dance among the clouds during an instrumental reprise of the song. Snow White would wear a different dress in that scene, one that would inspire the ones used for some dolls.


The scene never went beyond the stage of storyboard. Disney felt it had to be dropped for several reasons. First of all, it stopped the pacing of the story dead: no new plot element was introduced in the sequence and it could only be a visual treat. But the major problem was that he feared that they may not manage to reach that level of perfection on a relatively reasonable (and already exploding) budget because the Prince's animation was too difficult to handle for most animators.

Gone was the scene. The next opportunity was of course Cinderella. One could argue that Cinderella does dance with her Prince this time, and that the evocative backgrounds of the sequence could evoke a cloudy sky at some point, also a song called "Dancing on a cloud" was recorded by Ilene Woods but not kept in the final cut. But, as short as it is, the final scene of Sleeping Beauty is clearly the  finalized sequence closest to the original intent.

But in my book, Aurora is no Snow White and the few seconds of waltz in Sleeping Beauty cannot compare to the lengthy unproduced dance sequence of Snow White and her magic stars. There are two other ways of seeing what a dance between the two characters would have looked like.

You can watch the bonus section of your Blu-ray edition of the film where the beautiful storyboards have been filmed in sequence or... you can buy the DVD of the Marx brothers' movie A Night at the Opera.

At this point, you probably think I'm pulling your leg. Although I consider it a great film, my interest here lies in the bonus section again. In it, there is an MGM short with quality picture and deplorable audio called Sunday Night at the Trocadero. This 1937 film is basically a party hosted by former silent star Reginald Denny who was the subject of my article last month. He introduces famous and not so famous performers who only get a few seconds of screen time. Among the ones that are not credited, or even properly introduced by Denny are two dancers in the style of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers duo.

They actually have the most screen time of anyone else in the film. Their dance is energetic and they look like they're having fun dancing together. The names of these unknown would be revealed in an unrelated 1938 Life magazine article. The man was Louis Hightower and his partner was Marjorie Belcher, performing under the name Margie Bell.

The names may not be familiar to you but these two happen to be the live action models that Disney animators used for the characters of Snow White and the Prince! Some color home movie footage of Marge Belcher's sessions survives and is available on the Snow White Blu-ray. In it, you can see the animators giving instructions to the dancer while she was being filmed. If her movements seem familiar, that's because the still frames of the film were traced on paper (a technique called rotoscoping) and animators would adapt these movements to the design of the characters. Specifically, for instance, Snow White has a much bigger head than a regular human. Marge even had to wear a helmet so that the size of her head would match the intended drawing but the idea was soon dropped because it was so uncomfortable.

Although the use of the technique was somewhat minimized in the Life article (where the two dancers were supposedly only an inspiration), their role in the making of the film is immense. Marge Belcher, the daughter of dance instructor Ernest Belcher, went on to model for the blue fairy for Pinocchio and married animator Art Babbitt. She later achieved worldwide fame when she remarried Gower Champion and they both became stars of a dancing duo in films. However, Louis Hightower, who had been suggested by Marge herself for the role since he was her dancing partner then, had no such luck: he was killed in World War II before he could make a name for himself.


Here is a short excerpt of their dance together that you can enjoy in its entirety by buying the DVD:

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That's all for today folks!