Why is Persephone, the first princess, so important to Disney?

Did you know that Snow White wasn’t the first Disney princess? The truth is that the pioneer among the holders of this title was Persephone, a character who is the daughter of Zeus, the king of the gods and lord of Olympus, with Demeter, the goddess of harvest and fertility.

The character appeared in 1924 through the short film that belongs to the ‘Silly Symphonies’ series, ‘The Goddess of Spring’, based on an ancient myth from Ancient Greece, entitled “Abduction of Persephone”, where Persephone is kidnapped by Hades, god from the world of the dead in order to make her his wife, causing the world to live a long winter.

Lasting 10 minutes, more than presenting the studio’s first princess, the plot was responsible for introducing some creative processes that transformed Disney’s history and served as the basis for other major productions that came later, becoming extremely important for the label. . Discover some of them below:

Animation method for human character

This is because ‘The Goddess of Spring’ marks the first time that human characters appeared in the productions of the company founded by Walt It is Roy Disneysince, before that, only animals and vegetation were part of the list of beings and things that the studio animated.

Thus, it was in this production that the team of animators, the main ones being, Ham Luske It is Les Clarkwere able to test different ways to make the character act realistically on screen, one of them being the modeling of movements through real actions of a real person, in this case, through the gestures of the character’s wife. Luske, Frankie.

As a result, the production of this short served as preparation for the studio’s first animated feature film: ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, as it was through this title that the animators understood what didn’t work and what could be. replicated in other titles. So much so that the princess poisoned by an apple has some similar traits to Persephone, such as the way she holds the skirt of her dress, for example.

Creating Character Design Sheets

More than that, it was with ‘The Goddess of Spring’ that a new method for creating characters was developed: Character Design Sheets.

This process, created by Disney artists and animators, consists of creating cards that present the characters in different angles, poses and expressions, as these should be used as a guide to maintain appropriate proportions and the main characteristics of these figures even in frames or sizes many different.