Snow White Movie

The story behind the animated film "Happily Ever After" is no fairy tale. Five years and at least three false starts later, the film professing to show what became of Snow White is scheduled to hit theaters next week. Previous efforts to release the film, completed in 1988 by the now-defunct Filmation cartoon factory, collapsed. The film is being released through an obscure Texas company, 1st National Film Corp., whose most recent public documents suggest the company's future is on the line.

"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"--the movie--isn't the only Walt Disney landmark available again. There's also "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the soundtrack album. And it, too, is a delight. Where the 1937 "Snow White" movie has the distinction of being Disney's first full-length animated feature, the "Snow White" album was also a historic first: the first genuine soundtrack release.

All grown up, Hansel and Gretel return to the forest to exact revenge on their childhood tormentors. Snow White escapes the Evil Queen and takes up with a group of Shaolin monks. And after leaving Kansas, carnival barker Oscar Diggs remakes himself as a wizard in the Emerald City. Childhood classics as seen through a fun-house mirror? Well, yes. But for the film business, it's also something far more consequential: its future. Movie studios are taking timeless stories from authors such as the Brothers Grimm and L. Frank Baum and reimagining them with a modern, playful sensibility.

Early in"Snow White and the Huntsman,"several droplets of blood fall to the frozen ground in extreme slow motion, a sample not only of the menace to follow but also of first-time director Rupert Sanders' truly painstaking attention to detail. The shot was the last sequence filmed by the veteran commercial director, and no matter how hard the crew tried, the production's artificial serum never had the proper viscosity or splatter. "It just looked like raspberry jam," Sanders said.