The output of Walt Disney Animation Studios–currently totaling 54 full-length films–has been cherished by audiences young and old for almost 80 years. In this weekly online feature, arts and entertainment editor Nathan Tucker reviews and ranks each of them.

When it was released in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a revelation. No one could have supposed that a full-length animated feature, requiring thousands of individual hand-drawn frames, was even possible. The film’s success served as the foundation for Disney’s later animated pictures and its influence on the following 78 years of cinema is undoubtable.

But does Snow White hold up as more than a cultural artifact? Not really.

The film is not helped by its paper-thin plot–really only enough story for an animated short–which is essentially stuffed into the first and last ten minutes. The remaining hour is full of overlong Silly-Symphony-style slapstick that is more clever than entertaining. The constant fade-to-blacks make one suspect that the film was stitched together from the work of various animation teams, a hypothesis that the final product’s lack of tonal cohesion supports. This dearth of depth extends to the decisively one-note characters who populate the screenplay: the only difference between the human characters and the dwarfs is that the former lack names that telegraph their sole characteristic.

If the screenplay lacks depth, the animation is all but drowning in it. The elaborately painted backgrounds, the water ripple that dances along the wishing well, and the fluid little tics the animators give Snow’s animal friends are absolute delights. Even today, the film looks amazing. But there are still subtle glitches, things the animators had not quite figured out yet, like how the porcelain Snow White, Prince, and Queen all move with a stiff awkwardness alongside the more cartoonish animals and dwarfs. While that may have been a conscious choice, it does not work: the two character types look like they belong in absolutely different films.

It is that kind of unevenness that makes Snow White a chore to watch. A beautiful chore, to be sure, but still a chore. Snow White may be “the fairest of them all” but looks can only get you so far.

The List:

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs