The Evil Queen, also known as the Wicked Queen, Queen Grimhilde, Evil Stepmother, or just the Queen, is a fictional character who appears in Walt Disney Productions' first animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and remains a villain character in their extended Snow White franchise. She is based on the Evil Queen character from the 1812 German fairy-tale "Snow White".
The Evil Queen is very cold, sadistic, cruel, and extremely vain, owning a magic mirror, and obsessively desiring to remain the "fairest in the land". She becomes madly envious over the beauty of her stepdaughter, Princess Snow White, as well as the attentions of the Prince from another land; this love triangle element is one of Disney's changes to the story. This leads her to plot the death of Snow White and ultimately on the path to her own demise, which in the film is indirectly caused by the Seven Dwarfs. The film's version of the Queen character uses her dark magic powers to actually transform herself into an old woman instead of just taking a disguise like in the Grimms' story; this appearance of hers is commonly referred to as the Wicked Witch or alternatively as the Old Hag or just the Witch in the stepmother's disguised form. The Queen dies in the film, but lives on in a variety of non-canonical Disney works.
The film's version of the Queen was created by Walt Disney and Joe Grant, and originally animated by Art Babbitt and voiced by Lucille La Verne. Inspiration for her facial features came from Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich.Ryan Gilbey, Jonathan Ross, The Ultimate Film: The UK's 100 Most Popular Films, page 19.Douglas Brode, Multiculturalism and the Mouse, page 172. Her wardrobe design came from the characters of Queen Hash-a-Motep from She and Princess Kriemhild from Die Nibelungen. The Queen has since been voiced by Paula Winslowe, Jeanette Nolan, Eleanor Audley, June Foray, Ginny Tyler, Janet Waldo and Susanne Blakeslee, among others, and was portrayed live by Anne Francine (musical), Jane Curtin (50th anniversary TV special), Olivia Wilde (Disney Dream Portraits), Kathy Najimy (Descendants), and Gal Gadot (Snow White).
This version of the fairy-tale character has been very well received by film critics and the public, and is considered one of Disney's most iconic and menacing villains. Besides the film, the Evil Queen has made numerous appearances in Disney attractions and productions, including not only these directly related to the tale of Snow White, such as Fantasmic!, The Kingdom Keepers and Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, sometimes appearing in them alongside Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. The film's version of the Queen has also become a popular archetype that influenced a number of artists and non-Disney works.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Storyline
In "another land, far away," "many, many years ago," about "the time of fairy-tales of castles, knights, fair maidens, romance, magic and witches," a mysterious and icily beautiful woman with magical powers has gained her royal position by marrying the widowed King, giving her rule over his kingdom before he died. The vain Queen owned a magical mirror with which she could look upon whatever she wished. The Magic Mirror shows a haunted, smokey face which replies to Queen's requests. She regularly asks the mirror who is the fairest in the realm and the mirror would always reply that she is. The Queen has magical power only over her own domain, which is the castle.
One day, however, the mirror tells her that there is a new fairest woman in the land, her stepdaughter, Princess Snow White. She became obsessively jealous of the princess' emerging beauty, therefore turning her into a scullery maid in her own home. After observing the handsome young prince named Florian from another kingdom singing a love song to Snow White, the proud Queen falls in a jealous rage. She commands her faithful Huntsman to take the princess deep into the woods and kill her. He is also ordered to bring back her heart in a box to prove that he had done so. But the Huntsman cannot bear to kill the young princess upon seeing her innocence, so he tells Snow White of Queen's plot and tells her to run away and never to come back. To escape the penalty, he comes back with a pig's heart and gives it to the Queen. When she questions her mirror, it again replies that Snow White is the fairest in the land, and that she lives at the remote cottage of the Seven Dwarfs, revealing that the box contains the heart of a pig. The Dwarfs, too, are frightened of the Queen's black magic and fear she would kill them all, but they decided to take in Snow White anyway.
Furious that the Huntsman tricked her, the Queen decides that Snow White shall die by her own hand and at any cost. She goes down the dungeon to her secret room where she practices her dark magic, and in desperation uses her spellbook and cauldron to make a potion that transforms her into a hag. The recipe calls it a peddler disguise as she gathers its ingredients like mummy dust to make her old, the black of night to shroud her clothes, the old hag's cackle to age her voice, the scream of fright to whiten her hair, a breath of wind to fan her hate, and a thunderbolt to mix it well. Her beauty is shrouded in ugliness and age upon ingesting the potion, though presumably reversible.Heidi Breuer, Crafting the Witch: Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England, page 134. She then conjures a poison apple, which will cause "the Sleeping Death",Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , Observer-Reporter, July 29, 1993. and leaves the castle. She is sure that no one would know or perform the counter-curse to her spell, and believes the Dwarfs would bury her rival alive, thinking her dead. The Queen comes to the cottage and finds Snow White baking a pie for Grumpy the dwarf as she passes herself off as a traveling peddler. Snow White's forest animal friends feel there is something wrong about this strange old woman. After an unsuccessful attempt to warn Snow White by attacking the Queen, they hurry to warn the Dwarfs of the Queen's arrival. Now alone, the Queen successfully tricks the princess into letting her inside the cottage and eating the bewitched apple, telling her that it is a magic wishing apple. Snow White takes a bite of the apple, which puts her in a deep sleep.
The Queen rejoices in her victory, but is soon discovered by the angry Seven Dwarfs and attempts to escape. The Dwarfs, who have lost all fear of her, grab clubs and chase her deep into the forest as a great storm begins. The Queen climbs up into the mountains, where she is trapped upon a precipice that overlooks a seemingly bottomless canyon. She tries to push down a large boulder to crush the approaching vengeful Dwarfs. Just before she can do so, a lightning bolt strikes between her and the boulder, destroying the precipice and sending the Queen (along with the boulder) down the cliff to her death, screaming while she falls to the jagged rocks below. As the Dwarfs look wide-eyed over the cliff's edge, they cannot see her, but the vultures descend into the valley towards the meal they have been waiting for. The Queen's dark reign is over, and her castle is then taken over by the revived Snow White and Florian who broke the spell. (A 1936 pre-release Good Housekeeping novelization by Dorothy Ann Blank, a member of the film's story team, affirms that the Queen in fact dies: "Far below, in a chasm as dark as her own wicked soul, lay the body of the hateful Queen. No magic would ever bring her to life again.")
Conception, design and portrayal Early concepts for the film called for a "fat, batty, cartoon type, self-satisfied" Evil Queen. However, Walt Disney became concerned that such an approach would make the character seem less plausible. Sensing that more time was needed for the development of the Queen, he advised that attention be paid exclusively to "scenes in which only Snow White, the Dwarfs, and their bird and animal friends appear."Paul Muljadi, Disney Theatrical Animated Features, page 14. Disney further developed the main plot himself (Ollie Johnston said the film's story was based on the idea that the Queen's character was going to murder "another drawing" and Disney decided to make it appear believable), finding a dilemma in the characterization of the Queen, whom he envisioned as a mixture of Lady Macbeth and the Big Bad Wolf,John Hanson Saunders, The Evolution of Snow White: A Close Textual Analysis of Three Versions of the Snow White Fairy Tale, page 117. and decided to set on "a high collar stately beautiful type"Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, page 128. whose "beauty is sinister, mature, plenty of curves – she becomes ugly and menacing when scheming." According to a description in her card in the Disney Villains set, "the Witch's ugliness symbolises the evil disguised by the Queen's beauty."
The Queen was made to look like both a 1930s femme fatale and a medieval, magical villainess.Slethaug, p. 218. Her appearance was inspired by Queen Ayesha ("She who must be obeyed"), an "ageless ice goddess" from the film She, played by Helen Gahagan. The Queen, who originally had the name Grimhilde (but would ultimately remain nameless in the film), was also modeled in part on Kriemhild in the film Die Nibelungen.Golden Anniversary: Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Gladstone 1987. Her face bears resemblance to two American actresses Joan Crawford and Gale Sondergaard.Axel Nissen, Actresses of a Certain Character: Forty Familiar Hollywood Faces from the Thirties to the Fifties, page 197 as well as two Hollywood stars from Europe, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Her costume and figure may have been based on a column statue at the Naumburg Cathedral depicting Uta von Ballenstedt who was widely regarded as the most beautiful woman of Medieval Germany. Both the Queen and Snow White were refined by Grim Natwick and Norm Ferguson, who would often override Walt Disney's instructions.Biggest opening day in film history is coming up , Beaver County Times, April 15, 1987. As in the case of other characters for the film, the Queen's appearance had to be approved by Albert Hurter before being finalised. One pre-final version of the queen had her wear a looser hood and a different crown and the edge of her cape was fur trimmed, as it can be seen in Gustaf Tenggren's pictures.
Unlike much of Disney's animation of human characters in the era, none of Art Babbitt's lead animation work on the character was rotoscoped.Bruno Girveau (editor), Once Upon a Time ― Walt Disney: The Sources of inspiration for the Disney Studios (Prestel, London, 2006) . The animators were noted to prefer to draw the Queen over Snow White "because she was more real and complex as a woman, more erotic, and driven to desperate acts by her magic mirror."Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films, pages 115, 122. The character, however, turned out to be especially problematic for the animators, as she had to be "regally beautiful, with confined but graceful movements," and "the experiments on her lovely cruel mouth and eyes alone represent drawings enough to fill a paper house." The sequence of her transformation in particular was the film's toughest to visualise using trick effects, especially since Disney insisted on showing how the Queen felt as she changed.