Film Intel's Fight Club - Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs vs The Lion King

Last week saw Disney's fiftieth animated feature, Tangled, hit DVD and Blu-ray. This week sees two of Disney's classics hit each other. First ever Disney feature, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs finds itself up against one of the studios most beloved pieces of animation, 1994's The Lion King, complete with Elton John as featured celebrity backer. Can the classic overcome the modern great? It'll be a tough battle and several pencil strokes might well have to be sacrificed. Bashful, ready? Simba, ready? Fight!

First Google Image Result (above)

Decent results from both films but Snow White (SW) takes the win by virtue of not having The Lion King's (LK) slightly pointless green border.

SW: 8/10
LK: 7/10

Best Piece Of Parental Guidance On IMDb

LK's suggests that the film 'repeatedly presents violence as an acceptable solution to most, if not all conflicts', which might be true but also might be over-analysing a film about talking lions. There are a couple of fantastic entries in SW's Parental Guidance but the easy win goes to the addition under the heading 'Profanity' which states that 'Grumpy is a little sarcastic'.

SW: 9/10
LK: 5/10

Best Character Name

There's nothing revolutionary in either film but kudos to LK for creating Timon and Pumbaa who act exactly as the sound of their names suggest they might. SW's dwarfs are iconic but hardly break new ground in non-descriptive monikers.

SW: 5/10
LK: 4/10

Best Quote

There's a rather clever section in LK which involves Zazu giving a report full of semi-clever animal in-jokes such as, 'the buzz from the bees is that the leopards are in a bit of a spot. And the baboons are going ape over this. Of course, the giraffes are acting like they're above it all', etc., etc. There's lots of rhyming in SW, some of it full of Disney's old 'subliminal darkness' that creeps into the earlier films. 'Dip the apple in the brew. Let the Sleeping Death seep through' is a good example, as is pretty much anything the evil Queen says.

SW: 6/10
LK: 6/10

Best Comparison

Not being overtly familiar with religion per se I'm not entirely sure why 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is like what the ark is to Noah' as is claimed here but the comparison is so grandiose that it deserves to feature. The obvious and prevalent comparison for LK is its passing similarity to Hamlet but sticking with the religious theme one viewer interprets the film as being like the 'crucifiction story'.

SW: 5/10
LK: 5/10

Best Tweet

An intriguing claim from @victoriavanwart wins the LK best tweet, suggesting that 'my math teacher looks like she should be in the lion king'. Not the first thing which might spring to everyone's mind when watching SW but @chriscolfer's summation that 'that cottage needs some serious pest control' is probably not completely without merit.

SW: 6/10
LK: 7/10

Best Rotten Tomatoes Review

The importance of SW historically features in around 90% of the Rotten Tomatoes reviews but Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times doesn't risk understatement when describing the film as 'a classic, as important cinematically as The Birth of a Nation or the birth of Mickey Mouse'. Nell Minow's summation that LK is 'not just a movie, but a marketing phenomenon' might hit the nail on the head as to why it has a smattering of 'rotten' reviews.

SW: 5/10
LK: 4/10

Best Piece Of IMDb Trivia

Already accepted as a masterpiece, the real joy in the SW trivia is discovering the nuggets that didn't make it into the film. Twenty-five songs were written but only eight are featured in the final cut. The prince was originally a major character but the animators found him difficult to draw and cut his part down. Dopey is only mute because a suitable voice actor couldn't be found. The rich history of the production, and all of its lost material, is astounding. All sorts of magical facts can be produced about the time certain films take to make. The fact that LK's wildebeest scene took three years to complete is non-the-less astonishing.

SW: 8/10
LK: 7/10

Disney's first masterpiece takes the win from Disney's mid-nineties classic by a score of 52/80 to 45/80 which puts it on level pegging with The Matrix for overall Fight Club lead. Snow White's Parental Guidance entry is deserving of the victory all on its own.

Film Intel's Fight Club: where two films get pushed head-to-head over such irreverent issues as 'first Google image result' and 'best IMDb parental guidance entry'. All films are marked out of ten on each topic with a possible maximum score of 80 - it won't tell you anything about the quality of the film (or will it?) but it might give you a few giggles. Or it might not. We'll see.