Despite being the movie that launched feature film animation as we know it, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is curiously underrated these days. Everyone knows it of course, it is far too iconic, but it seems rarely acknowledged both for its significance and its genuine strength as a movie, overshadowed certainly among my generation by the onslaught of the Disney Renaissance. But I think it remains to this day one of Disney’s most beautiful works and until now comparatively one of its least exploited.
As Disney has found themselves running out of heavy-hitter titles to the nostalgia-brained of my generation for making pale modern copies of, they’ve finally made their way back to the last untouched princess movie in their classical canon, and also the movie that started it all. But in cannibalizing Snow White, Disney knowing the fact its not quite so beloved to their target demographic means there’s less pressure of fidelity. They don’t have to try so hard to replicate the original exactly, and especially with these older Disney movies they’re pretty uncomfortable with that as it is (see Cinderella).
Snow White, directed by Marc Webb, doesn’t suffer from the problem that has plagued so many of these remakes of being just empty reenactments, which is good and kind of refreshing. But it suffers from a host of other problems instead.
The bones of the original movie are there, and of course the aesthetics, but surrounding it is a wholly new context involving a backstory for Snow White as a princess who lost her mother, suffered through her father’s new marriage to the nameless Evil Queen (I do somewhat respect that this movie didn’t feel the need to give her a name), and was subsequently disowned as a Princess once her father died and the Queen took the throne. Some of these details actually appear to be drawn from the fairy tale itself, though Disney-fied in a way that makes them feel contrived anyways. The character of Snow White though is blended with that of Aurora from Sleeping Beauty -but with of course a touch of that facile shallow girl power that these remakes have been fond of. The casting of Rachel Zegler in some ways presupposes a more revolutionary-minded take on the character, though of course in action it is a fairly superficial form of autonomous resistance. Zegler got a lot of stupid flack for pointing out how the original Snow White wasn’t particularly active or empowering -and indeed it is one of the most dated elements of that film. But the insubstantial conservative virtues we see expressed here in her character and her conflict with the Queen are hardly better, especially in how tied-in they appear to be to her relationship with a boy.
The generic Prince Charming has been excised from this new version as Snow White's love interest in favour of a cute rebel boy played by Broadway actor Andrew Burnap -a marked improvement as a character (though that isn't saying much), he's still fairly shallow in his own way, as he and Snow White share a very typical sniping relationship. Though Burnap is older than he looks, his character represents a perceptibly Gen-Z form of ideal masculinity in his combination of boyish good looks and vaguely defined anti-authority principles, lent legitimacy in the almost Robin Hood-like band he leads. Where he and Snow White hit it off, it is the most modern corner of the movie, though not a very exciting one.
He is however a real person, and thus leagues more watchable than the Seven Dwarfs, removed from the title of this film but still very present. While the movie veers off of its source more pervasively than many of these remakes, the middle sections concerning the Dwarfs stick very close to the re-enactment approach. And of course all that charm and whimsy is depleted by the hideous creations that are the Dwarfs themselves -once more never convincingly on the same material plane as Snow White. They look as though someone just threw each canonical Dwarf into an AI live-action generator, and are about as monstrous as your average AI image as well. Grumpy and Dopey get the most screen-time and are particularly freakish, the latter's Dumbo ears a notable eyesore while the former's interjections of whiny complaints and woeful self-misery gets irritating really fast.
None of these dwarfs are played by real actors with dwarfism, the first nexus of controversy this production attained (in addition to the criticism levied by the likes of Peter Dinklage over the movie being made at all). In response, Disney cast a little person actor Martin Klebba as the voice of Grumpy, but I suppose this wasn't deemed enough, because in a very awkward obvious PR move, the film makes a point of contrasting the seven dwarfs with an actual little person in a rebel archer played by George Appleby -cast in the unenviable position of being Disney's representation prop. He's even given a blink-and-you'll-miss-it romance subplot with a fellow bandit in the dimmest of attempts to placate an audience fed up with the meagre offerings available to actors of small stature -of which this movie really is no help. The whole thing is just painfully transparent.
Like the Magic Mirror, which in a deeply ironic move now seems more based on the parody version popularized by Shrek than the original entity. And Disney expects it to be taken seriously. A problem this movie frequently runs into is the whiplash between its harsher tone and story elements and the classic film's aesthetics. Talk of rebellion and political power in a dark realistic castle chamber is followed up by Snow White cheerily picking apples in a grove in her classic dress which can't help but look like a DisneyLand costume. Style-wise, the Evil Queen fares better, but Gal Gadot's performance isn't so modulated -there's some fun to her overzealous notes, but it just as often feels forced.
This is the first Disney live-action remake to feature more new songs than it does old ones. The original movie in fairness had just a handful, and the most prominent -"Someday My Prince Will Come"- was understandably cut given the new priorities of the title character. "Heigh-Ho" and "Whistle While You Work" come back but of course in far less attractive fashion, and the film seems eager to get them over with so it can move onto new pieces by Pasek and Paul. "Waiting on a Wish", the substitute "I Want" song is pretty decent -carried a lot by Zegler's strong vocals, but the rest aren't much to consider. And much like The Little Mermaid remake, they lack in musical consistency with the ninety-year-old songs -only in this case there were so many more of them they would have been better just to scrap the classic songs they kept.
Snow White seems to demonstrate some level of awareness on Disney's part of the broad reception of their remake initiative. Enough to in this case move away from the direct copy approach but not enough to make any sort of effort to distinguish the movie as an entity on its own terms. If it had gone the route of something like Mirror Mirror (which already felt very Disney), it might have been respectable. Instead it's just one more notch on Disney's wall of defiled classics, one more diversion from the imagination and captivating artistry formerly the brand of the studio that this movie's precursor built all those decades ago.
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