How many cels were used in the animation?

About 250,000 cels were used in the animation of *Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs*.

A cel was a transparent sheet of celluloid on which animators’ drawings were inked and painted. Artists photographed these painted layers over fixed backgrounds, allowing background artwork to be reused instead of redrawing every element for every frame.

The figure is often confused with the film’s roughly two million sketches and drawings. Those included exploratory artwork, animation drawings, and production studies; the approximately 250,000 cels refer to the finished transparent images prepared for photography. Because several cels could be stacked in one shot, the number of photographed cel images and the number of individual cels are not always presented identically in historical accounts.

Disney’s first feature-length animated film required an enormous industrial effort. It premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles on December 21, 1937, and its detailed animation helped establish feature animation as a commercially viable art form.