How to remake Disney’s 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the era of woke? The simplest answer might be: don’t. Disney’s latest live-action adaptation – which follows Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Aladdin (2019), Mulan (2020) and The Little Mermaid (2023) – has been mired in controversy since its casting announcements four years ago.
First, Rachel Zegler, who is of Colombian and Polish descent, was cast as Snow White – a character named for the pallor of her skin. (Not unknown territory for Disney: the news that the African-American actor Halle Bailey would play Ariel in The Little Mermaid generated the racist #NotMyAriel.) Then it was revealed the dwarfs would be created in CGI. The Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage, who has achondroplasia, criticised the film for including the dwarfs at all; other actors with forms of dwarfism instead complained Disney had taken away rare roles for them. And there were rumours of a feud between the film’s two lead actresses, Zegler and Gal Gadot, who plays the Evil Queen, over their diverging views on the war in Gaza. By the time of its release, Snow White looks more poisonous than the Evil Queen’s apple.
The film deploys a few quick fixes within the first two minutes: “and the Seven Dwarfs” is axed from the title, and we are told Snow White is so named because she was born during a blizzard. There are other changes to make the tale more palatable. The Prince is not a prince at all but Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), a noble rebel who steals from the Evil Queen to feed his band of merry bandits, Robin Hood-style. Snow White and Jonathan’s romance is a modern one: the borderline-necrophiliac, nonconsensual kiss remains, but otherwise their relationship is one of equals fighting side by side. At one point he admonishes her, “You must have mistaken me for a knight in shining armour.”
Zegler’s Snow White is more modern, too – gone is the giggly, sing-song voice and the swooning – but not too modern. She’s loyal and honest and kind, spunky but not so spunky that you’d ever think her anything but a Disney princess. She is fond of recalling lessons her long-gone parents taught her about forgiveness and bravery, and says things like: “That voice, the one that’s hidden in your heart, can be heard!”
Otherwise, the plot is largely as we know it: an evil stepmother, filled with jealousy when told by her enchanted mirror that she is no longer the fairest one of all, tries to have her stepdaughter killed; the princess escapes into the forest, where she makes herself at home among the seven dwarfs, until the queen, disguised as an old woman, tricks her into eating a poisoned apple, whence she falls into a half-death, only to be revived by true love’s kiss. It is a challenge to bring any true sense of jeopardy or pace to so well-known a story – a challenge director Marc Webb fails to meet.
Some parts remain faithful to the original, and retain their charm: the seven dwarfs, rendered in uncannily cartoonish CGI, have kept their endearing tropes, though I missed the slapstick sequence with a bar of soap, which always made me giggle as a child. The film features new music from the EGOT-winning songwriting duo Pasek and Paul, but the stand-outs are still “Heigh-Ho” and “Whistle While You Work”.
Gadot has little to work with, her entire character being that she loves beauty, power and diamonds, dammit, but she does her best with much arch twirling of her devilishly long fingernails. The Academy Award-winning costume designer Sandy Powell has had a great deal of fun here, the Evil Queen bedecked in sequins and jewels, everything elongated and pointy. But in Snow White, the question “Magic Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” is explicitly about inward rather than outward beauty: compassion, mercy and justice are what counts. It’s laudable, but a little too right-on.
Disney is no stranger to sanitising its source material. The 1937 version did away with much of the 19th-century German fairy tale (in a nod to its origins, Zegler’s Snow White says “Gesundheit” to Sneezy). The Evil Queen demands her huntsman brings her Snow White’s heart, not her lungs and liver, and she doesn’t eat the heart, but places it in a nice box. The Evil Queen is not forced to dance in red-hot iron slippers but falls to her death. And Snow White is more mature than the seven years the Brothers Grimm have her when she flees into the forest. But in Snow White, in the pursuit of inoffence, Disney has made a film so bland it barely registers. It doesn’t always pay to be the fairest of them all.
“Snow White” is in cinemas now
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This article appears in the 19 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Golden Age