Based on the 1812 German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, the production was supervised by David Hand, and was directed by a team of sequence directors, including Perce Pearce, William Cottrell, Larry Morey, Wilfred Jackson, and Ben Sharpsteen.

[a] Fearing that Snow White's beauty will outshine her own, the Queen forces her to work as a scullery maid and asks her Magic Mirror daily "who is the fairest one of all."

Snow White soon learns that the cottage is the home of seven dwarfs named Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, and Dopey, who work in a nearby mine.

[20][21] Although they were popular with the audience, Disney believed that the shorts did not bring enough profit for the further growth of the studio;[22] he also saw the full-length film as a way to expand his "storytelling possibilities",[21] allowing for elaborate plots and character development.

[27] After the successful release of the Silly Symphony short Three Little Pigs in May 1933, Disney was strengthened in his decision to make a feature film and began introducing the idea to his staff through a "slow infiltration" – sharing it with everyone individually during casual conversations.

[35][36] Disney had originally planned to produce Snow White as a Silly Symphony short, but reconsidered, believing that the story had enough potential for a feature film adaptation.

[38] The project (then known as the "Feature Symphony") was initially developed by a small unit of writers that Disney personally supervised, before it was introduced to the studio staff at large on October 30, 1934, when the basic story outline was completed.

[22][39][40] As some animators later recalled, Disney assembled them on the sound stage in the evening and acted out the entire story of Snow White for three hours, concluding with announcement of their first feature film.

[46][47] The earliest known story outline – entitled "Manuscript" – was compiled by staff writer Richard Creedon on August 9, 1934,[32][d] featuring twenty-one pages of suggestions for characters, scenes, and songs (including "Some Day My Prince Will Come").

[37] Snow White was originally envisioned to be more tomboyish,[51] with the Queen described as "stately, beautiful in the way of a Benda mask ... a cool serene character who demonstrates her fury only in moments of great passion.

[48] In October 1934, Disney began holding weekly story meetings with a small unit of writers,[41] which included Creedon, Larry Morey, Ted Sears, Albert Hurter, and Pinto Colvig.

Walt Disney encouraged all staff at the studio to contribute to the story, offering five dollars for every 'gag';[69] such gags included the dwarfs' noses popping over the foot of the bed when they first meet Snow White.

Disney became concerned that such a comical approach would lessen the plausibility of the characters and, sensing that more time was needed for the development of the Queen, advised in an outline circulated on November 6 that attention be paid exclusively to "scenes in which only Snow White, the Dwarfs, and their bird and animal friends appear".

[49][79] She was invited to audition after Disney's casting director Roy Scott telephoned her father (who was a vocal coach in Los Angeles) in search for voice talents, and Caselotti, overhearing their conversation, recommended herself for the part.

[49][82][86] Thelma Hubbard provided Snow White's screams in the forest flight scene and later voiced the character in the film's 1938 Spanish dub and Lux Radio Theatre adaptation.

[85][87] The studio auditioned over a dozen actresses for the role of the Queen before Lucille La Verne was chosen, although several members of Disney's staff contended that she sounded a "little old" for the part.

[83][88] Having portrayed similar characters in Orphans of the Storm (1921) and A Tale of Two Cities (1935), La Verne also tried out for the role of the Witch, and the animators initially felt that her voice was "too smooth and not rough enough" until she removed her false teeth.

Tenggren was used as a color stylist and to determine the staging and atmosphere of many of the scenes in the film, as his style borrowed from the likes of Arthur Rackham and John Bauer and thus possessed the European illustration quality that Walt Disney sought.

After three weeks, Walt Disney called Babbit to his office and offered to provide the supplies, working space and models required if the sessions were moved to the studio.

For example, Graham criticised Babbitt's animation of Abner the mouse in The Country Cousin as "taking a few of the obvious actions of a drunk without coordinating the rest of the body", while praising it for maintaining its humour without getting "dirty or mean or vulgar.

These ranged from the mainstream, such as MGM's Romeo and Juliet (1936)—to which Disney made direct reference in a story meeting pertaining to the scene in which Snow White lies in her glass coffin—to the more obscure, including European silent cinema.

The restoration project was carried out entirely at 4K resolution and 10-bit color depth using the Cineon system (10 bits each of red, green and blue—30 in total) to digitally remove dirt and scratches.

"[128] Variety observed that "[so] perfect is the illusion, so tender the romance and fantasy, so emotional are certain portions when the acting of the characters strikes a depth comparable to the sincerity of human players, that the film approaches real greatness.

[131] "Some Day My Prince Will Come" has become a jazz standard that has been performed by numerous artists, including Buddy Rich, Lee Wiley, Oscar Peterson, Frank Churchill,[132] and Oliver Jones;[133] it was also the title for albums by Miles Davis, by Wynton Kelly, and Alexis Cole.

The AFI 100 Years... series, which ran from 1998 to 2008, created categorized lists of America's best movies as selected by juries composed from among over 1,500 artists, scholars, critics, and historians.

[149] The deluxe edition contained the film along with several bonus material such as a making-of documentary, an archival interview of Walt Disney, deleted scenes, a hardcover book and lithographs of the original theater posters.

On the process, Goldberg remarked "The opportunity to help restore Snow White was both an honor and a challenge ... we owed a debt to history to get it looking as beautiful and as accurate to the original colors as we could.

Director Mike Disa and screenwriter Evan Spiliotopoulos pitched a story explaining how the Dwarfs met, and how the Evil Queen killed Snow White's father and took the throne.

[199] Peter Dinklage criticized Disney for what he described as "hypocrisy" for being "proud" of casting a Latina actress as Snow White while making a film about "seven dwarfs living in a cave together".

[213] At the end of the 2022 Marvel Cinematic Universe film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Wanda Maximoff's sons can be seen watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the television in the living room.