Color, depth, cartoon superstars and Snow White (jan 1, 1930 – dec 31, 1939)

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Two-strip Colour a cartoon segment in the feature film King of Jazz (April 1930), made by Walter Lantz and Bill Nolan, was the first animation presented in two-strip Technicolor.

Fiddlesticks, released together with King of Jazz, was the first Flip the Frog film and the first project Ub Iwerks worked on after he had left Disney to set up his own studio. In England, the cartoon was released in Harris Colour, a two-colour process, probably as the first theatrically released standalone animated cartoon to boast both sound and colour.

Disney’s silly symphonies series that started in1929 has gone not as he expected and soon after he turned to the new innovation to improve the impact of the series. Working together with Technicolor Company to produce the first full-colour animation “Flowers and Trees” debuting the three-strip technique which is not matched till the release of “circa” a live action feature film two years later.
At least eight animated feature films were released before Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, while at least another two earlier animated feature projects remained unfinished. Most of these films (of which only four survive) were made using cutout, silhouette or stop-motion techniques. Among the lost animated features were three features by Quirino Cristiani, who had premiered his third feature Peludópolis on 18 September 1931 in Buenos Aires with a Vitaphone sound-on-disc synchronized soundtrack. It was received quite positively by critics, but did not become a hit and was an economic fiasco for the filmmaker. Cristiani soon realized that he could no longer make a career with animation in Argentina.

When it became known that Disney was working on a feature-length animation, critics regularly referred to the project as "Disney's folly", not believing that audiences could stand the expected bright colors and jokes for such a long time. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered on 21 December 1937 and became a worldwide success. The film continued Disney's tradition to appropriate old fairy tales and other stories (started with the Laugh-O-Grams in 1921), as would most of the Disney features that followed.

This period also introduced three new characters that joined Mickey and Minnie mouse. 1930 gave birth to Pluto, followed by Goofy in 1932 and finally a character that would become a new favourite in 1934 Donnald Duck.

A major breakthrough for Walt was the realisation that success of the animated feature film depended on telling an emotionally gripping g story, prompting him to develop the “story department”.

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