The story of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” involves a young woman, so named for her pale complexion, who is raised by her stepmother, a vain queen with a magic mirror who informs her daily that she is the most beautiful woman alive. When the mirror tells the queen that Snow White has unexpectedly surpassed her, she attempts to have Snow White assassinated. The assassin, instead, abandons Snow White in the woods where she moves in with seven aged miners. Using her experiences as a maid, she cleans their house and becomes an ersatz mother to them. While living with the miners, Snow White sings them pleasant songs, and they respond with mad enthusiasm to have her as their roommate.
In deleted footage, Snow White has prepared a vat of soup for the miners, and they sing a song, “Music in Your Soup” about it being an enjoyable meal. The footage was never inked and painted and the only surviving animation is the pencil test, but the test has been rediscovered, cleaned up and released in a 4K restoration. In the sequence, the characters glide to the beat of the music and display increasingly creative ways to soak up their soup before Snow White happily instructs them on how to use spoons. Echoes of the soup sequence can be seen decades later in the porridge scene in Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise’s “Beauty and the Beast” from 1991. The sequence ends with a comedic setting in which the miners must extract an accidentally swallowed spoon from the throat. of one of their compatriots.
The sequence is affable and slightly funny without being hilarious – typical of Disney animation – and lasts about four minutes. It’s easy to see why it was cut