<P> Columbia distributed Disney's shorts for two years before the Disney studio entered a new distribution deal with United Artists in 1932 . The same year, Disney signed a two - year exclusive deal with Technicolor to utilize its new 3 - strip color film process, which allowed for fuller - color reproduction where previous color film processors could not . The result was the Silly Symphony Flowers and Trees, the first film commercially released in full Technicolor . Flowers and Trees was a major success, and all Silly Symphonies were subsequently produced in Technicolor . </P> <P> By the early 1930s, Walt Disney had realized that the success of animated films depended upon telling emotionally gripping stories that would grab the audience and not let go, and this realization led him to create a separate "story department" with storyboard artists dedicated to story development . With well - developed characters and an interesting story, the 1933 Technicolor Silly Symphony cartoon Three Little Pigs became a major box office and pop culture success, with its theme song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" becoming a popular chart hit . </P> <P> In 1934, Walt Disney gathered several key staff members and announced his plans to make his first feature animated film . Despite derision from most of the film industry, who dubbed the production "Disney's Folly," Disney proceeded undaunted into the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which would become the first animated feature in English and Technicolor . Considerable training and development went into the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the studio greatly expanded with established animators, artists from other fields, and recent college graduates joining the studio to work on the film . The training classes, supervised by the head animators such as Les Clark, Norm Ferguson, and Art Babbit and taught by Donald W. Graham, an art teacher from the nearby Chouinard Art Institute, had begun at the studio in 1932 and were greatly expanded into orientation training and continuing education classes . In the course of teaching the classes, Graham and the animators created or formalized many of the techniques and processes that became the key tenets and principles of traditional animation . Silly Symphonies such as The Goddess of Spring (1934) and The Old Mill (1937) served as experimentation grounds for new techniques such as the animation of realistic human figures, special effects animation, the use of the multiplane camera, an invention which split animation artwork layers into several planes, allowing the camera to appear to move dimensionally through an animated scene . </P> <P> Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs cost Disney a then - expensive sum of $1.4 million to complete (including $100,000 on story development alone) and was an unprecedented success when released in February 1938 by RKO Radio Pictures, which had assumed distribution of Disney product from United Artists in 1937 . It was briefly the highest - grossing film of all time before the success of Gone with the Wind two years later, grossing over $8 million on its initial release, the equivalent of $139,082,740 in 1999 dollars . </P>

What was disney's 1930 first feature- length animation