The most important continuing element is the use of satellite and sidekick characters, minor and major, serious and comic. A frame is not allowed for long to contain only a single character, long speeches are rare, musical and dance numbers are frequent, and the central action is underlined by the bit characters, who mirror it or react to it.

Disney's other insight was to make the characters physically express their personalities. He did that not by giving them funny faces or distinctive clothes (although that was part of it) but studying styles of body language and then exaggerating them. When Snow White first comes across the cottage of the dwarfs, she goes upstairs and sees their beds, each one with a nameplate: Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, and so on. When the dwarfs return home from work (“Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho!”) they are frightened and resentful to find a stranger stretched across their little beds, but she quickly wins them over by calling each one by name. She knows them, of course, because they personify their names. But that similarity alone would soon become boring if they didn't also act out every speech and movement with exaggerated body language, and if their very clothing didn't seem to move in sympathy with their personalities.

Richard Schickel's 1968 bookThe Disney Versionpoints out Disney's inspiration in providing his heroes and supporting characters with different centers of gravity. A heroine like Snow White will stand upright and tall. But all of the comic characters will make movements centered on and emanating from their posteriors. Rump-butting is commonplace in Disney films, and characters often fall on their behinds and spin around. Schickel; attributed this to some kind of Disney anal fixation, but I think Disney did it because it works: It makes the comic characters rounder, lower, softer, bouncier and funnier, and the personalities of all seven Dwarfs are built from the seat up.

The animals are also divided into body styles throughout Disney. “Real” animals (like Pluto) look more like dogs, comic animals (like Goofy) stand upright and are more bottom-loaded. In the same movie a mouse will be a rodent but Mickey will somehow be other than a mouse; the stars transcend their species. In both versions, non-star animals and other supporting characters provide counterpoint and little parallel stories. Snow White doesn't simply climb up the stairs at the dwarves' house--she's accompanied by a tumult of animals. And they don't simply follow her in one-dimensional movement. The chipmunks hurry so fast they seem to climb over each other's backs, but the turtle takes it one laborious step at a time, and provides a punch line when he tumbles back down again.