*Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs* was added to the National Film Registry in 1989.
The Library of Congress selected the 1937 Disney film as one of the registry’s inaugural 25 titles. The registry preserves films considered culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and Snow White qualified as a landmark in American cinema and animation.
The selection came 52 years after the film’s theatrical premiere at Los Angeles’s Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937. Disney’s feature was the first animated feature produced in the United States and the first cel-animated feature, making it a foundational work in the development of the medium.
The year is sometimes confused with 1994, when the registry selected the earlier short *Snow White* from 1933. That is a separate film. The 1989 entry concerns Disney’s feature-length *Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs*, which was among the first 25 films preserved by the National Film Registry.