Snow White Premiered On This Day In History -or- When Storytelling and Technology Meet -or- VR, and The Future of Content

Entertainment is just entertainment. Or, it isn’t. Sometimes, entertainment is something more. Sometimes entertainment takes on a moral, social, and cultural significance we don’t expect. Perhaps the creators expect it, perhaps not. But it happens. “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens, after all, has sold more than 200 million copies, qualifying it as a best seller’s best seller. “To Kill A Mockingbird,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Things Fall Apart,” “Catch-22” — all are powerful commentaries on life as we live it; all are best-sellers.

Music has its share of successes that were also powerful socio-political statements (intentional or otherwise!), and deeply influential accordingly. Can anyone doubt the cultural impact of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Born in the USA,” or “Nevermind?” These are all best-sellers, all can be classified as “entertainment,” yet all are also, somehow, art.

Art with a capital “A” itself is no stranger to being both popular, and shaping the conscience of our world. Think of Picasso’s “Guernica” or Edvard Munch’s “Scream.”

Film is in some ways the strangest of mediums when it comes to balancing entertainment and impact. A look at the highest-grossing films of all time presents a list full of spaceships, hobbits, dinosaurs, superheroes, spies, pirates, and a seemingly endless roster of talking animals. You generally don’t find characters like these in world-shaping literature. And yet, how effectively can we challenge the notion that movies may in fact be our greatest narrative accomplishment?

It’s not too far a stretch to say that we find the secret to film’s success emerging from the point at which the medium intersects with technology. Would “Avatar” or “Titanic” — the two highest-grossing films of all time — have been possible without the technology that made them possible? Unlike perhaps any other storytelling medium, cinema rewards technology. The movie as medium rewards technology with greater content, and greater stories are the result.

As we move into the mesmerizing world of virtual reality’s burgeoning potential, we are poised to witness yet another sea change in the storytelling art. Even as I type this, ingenious minds across the globe are right now beginning the works that will change our lives, and help us to understand our lives in ways previously unimagined.

Why am I thinking along these lines today? Because on this date in 1937, Snow White premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. It was the first full-length cel animated feature film ever. Needless to say, storytelling would never be the same.

As we watch students coming into our Virtual Reality Developer Nanodegree program, we can only wonder, what changes will these innovators ring?

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This post was written by Christopher Watkins, Senior Writer, Udacity.