Grumpy thinks no one is watching. While Dopey clowns for a second kiss at the front of the line, Grumpy slips back to the wall mirror, lifts his cap and tidies his hair before it is his turn at Snow White's door. For a dwarf who has spent the whole film insisting he wants nothing to do with women, it is a small confession of vanity, and the joke works because the mirror catches him in the act. This original production setup from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs holds both halves of that gag: Grumpy on one cel, and a second production cel of the mirror, painted to mirror his action so the reflection moves exactly as he does. Two cels animated to play one moment of self-conscious grooming.
He is large on the sheet here, which is itself worth noting, dwarf cels at this scale from the 1937 film do not surface often, and the hand-work is exceptional. Look closely at the face. A separate ink line has been laid onto the cel surface to hold the shading apart on the nose, the cheek and the beard, a finer pass of inking that gives the modelling its depth and keeps the warm flush of the cheek from bleeding into the pale of the beard. This is the kind of meticulous, multi-line inking the studio reserved for its first feature, when every contour on a principal character was given its own deliberate weight.
Grumpy was animated chiefly by Vladimir 'Bill' Tytla, one of the first animators assigned to the picture and the man tasked with building the character from the ground up. The performance Tytla gave Grumpy, all bluster on the surface and tenderness underneath, is precisely what this scene exposes, and it is why the moment lands as it does.
The setup is presented over a Courvoisier Galleries wood veneer background, the warm grain of the cottage wall, with the Courvoisier label confirming it as one of the original cels the studio released to the public through the gallery in the years after the film's release. The reverse tells its own story: it is dated 1937, marked with the printed warning that the material is inflammable, a direct reference to the nitrate celluloid of the period rather than the safer acetate that came later, and it bears the number 161.
The condition throughout is remarkable for art of this age and fragility.
Estimate: £3,000 - £6,000 Ω
See Online Here: 213. Grumpy In the Mirror Original Production Cels on Courvoisier Wood Veneer Background ### SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937)
