Snow White. Oh, my God. Where to begin?
It’s tempting to re-make live action versions of animated classic films. Disney has explored this creative, recycling strategy with movies like Cinderella (2015), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Mulan (2020), and Cruella(2021).
The underlying logic here is that audiences have loved all these stories for decades and generations. Using modern digital technology, old, archaic, hand-drawn animation techniques can be replaced with dazzling computer-generated visuals that the original artists and animators—and Walt Disney himself-- might never have imagined. On paper, it might seem like a low-risk, high-profit venture that could not possibly fail.
Of course, because live actors are involved, casting is key. In the case of Disney’s Snow White remake, two superstar actresses were recruited: Rachel Zegler, the breakout star of Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story (2021) as Snow White, and Gal Gadot, the star of the highly successful Wonder Woman movies as the Evil Queen. The earliest movie trailers established their pitch perfect casting. For a hot minute, it seemed that the live action Snow White might live up to all the hype.
But then, over the course of the months leading up to the movie’s release, everything spun out of control for Disney. There were the off-screen, diametrically opposed, Gaza-driven, political comments from Zegler and Gadot causing enough embarrassment and concern that Disney began to back off the massive marketing campaign that usually kicks off the release of major movies like this. Things were turning into a mess.
Actor Peter Dinklage chimed in regarding the casting of the seven dwarfs, who the studio deemed would be artificially rendered, pasting the digitized, slightly distorted faces of average sized actors onto the bodies of digitized dwarfs.
There were a host of other issues and concerns. Soon, the air was buzzing with predictions of gloom and doom at the box office. Show White was being dubbed a failure long before its opening weekend.
It’s been a long road to the live action version of Snow White. The original movie (Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) was released in 1937. It was the world’s first feature-length animated movie and is still the highest grossing animated film of all time, adjusted for inflation.
Besides being released in color, two years before Gone with the Wind, Snow White’s other claim to fame was the innovative use of rotoscoping, a technique in which animators used live action footage of actors performing on a sound stage as the basis of their animation. The result was the most natural, life-like movement of an animated human character that anyone had ever seen. The original Snow White was pure magic, 88 years ago.
The problem with the new version of Snow White is the fact that it attempts to do the impossible, that is to say resurrect a movie classic in a completely different context (historically, socially, politically and temporally). Adapting a script to appeal to audiences nine decades later is a challenge, requiring substantial changes.
For starters the Prince is no longer a Prince. Instead, he’s a Robin Hood style bandit leading a bunch of forest rebels, attempting to overthrow an Evil Queen and restore peace and freedom to their countrymen.
Disney’s movies have been all about girl power for several decades now, so having a female character who needs some old-fashioned assistance and rescuing is yet another sticky problem of adaptation and updating.
There are changes in virtually all of the major characters as well as adjusted plot details that will be noticeable to the multi-generational fans of the original film.
Production-wise, Disney does its best to bring state-of-the-art effects to the creation of characters (a mix of actors and digitized creatures) and colorful, familiar settings. Nothing rises above what we’ve seen in other movies like this over the last decade. Despite a sizeable budget, the movie seems strangely small. Only a handful of soldiers appear to guard the Evil Queen’s castle.
Like the original, Snow White is a musical. Sadly, the updated songs and dance numbers are rather mundane. Granted, there are updated versions of “Whistle While You Work,” and “Heigh-Ho,” but no updated rendition of “Someday, My Prince Will Come,” an enduring tune that has resonated with audiences for almost a century before becoming a causality of political correctness.
These days, Disney heroines generally don’t wait for a Prince Charming to come and save them, though this one does.
Snow White isn’t a complete disaster artistically. It will most likely be a disaster financially for Disney, and that’s a shame. Hopefully, it will serve as a lesson about which-- if any-- classic movies from the past should be resurrected in the 21st Century, and which should be left alone. Newer is not necessarily better.
As Bob Dylan once sang: “The Times They are A-Changin’.” The world of 2025 is not the world of 1937.
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