What The Hell America!

There’s no way a project as utterly cynical and misbegotten as the live-action remake of Walt Disney’s landmark 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs could turn out well.

It must’ve been obvious that a contemporary remake would be anything but audience-friendly, and indeed there have been a few failed attempts by screenwriters in the early 2000s to address the antiquated aspects of the story. But, of course, the Disney remake gravy train needed to keep running.

So it’s no surprise when Snow White turns out to be a demoralizing mess of a movie. If it weren’t for the sparkling talents of Rachel Zegler (West Side Story) in the title role, it would be totally unwatchable. Somehow, even while wearing a hideous, cheap-looking knockoff of the iconic Snow White outfit, she looks adorable with her doll-like face, huge brown eyes, and sweet black bob. A gifted singer, she makes endurable some seriously bad new songs written for the film by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who also wrote the songs for Disney’s 2019 live-action remake of its 1992 animated film Aladdin. Apparently through sheer charisma and willpower, Zegler radiates enough conviction to pull the viewer through vast amounts of eye-searingly ugly CGI and a production design featuring every clashing color combination this side of hell.

And to think the first of many controversies stirred up over Snow White involved the usual online racists objecting to the casting of Zegler because she’s an American of Colombian descent, and therefore, it was argued, not white enough to have “skin as white as snow.” Disney executives who had regarded a Latina princess character as a win because of their ongoing attempts to gain some sort of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) credibility ironically wound up with the film premiering well after both the private sector and the incoming Trump government went to war with all things DEI.

It’s a nice ironic triumph that Zegler turns out to be the whole show.

And Zegler went right on being the source of a lot of other controversy, generally in ways that rate a glowing 100-percent-correct emoji. She wrote “And always remember, free Palestine” on Twitter/X, which can’t have endeared her to costar Gal Gadot, a former Israel Defense Force soldier. Unsubstantiated rumors of a feud between the two stars dogged the Snow White production as just one part of a steady drumbeat of bad press.

Zegler also (correctly) noted in interviews that indeed, the new version of Snow White would have to be modernized in some ways because the fairy tale’s emphasis on racial purity as well as the typical old-time character of the young maiden doing nothing but waiting around singing “Some Day My Prince Will Come”: “People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White,” she said in 2022. “Yeah, it is — because it needed that.”

So in spite of raging controversy surrounding the film that included scattershot death threats, modernizing changes were indeed made. It’s not Zegler’s fault that the ways screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (The Girl on the Train) found to update the material, even when broadly sensible, tended to turn out to be as awkward as ass. For example, instead of Prince Charming — so dull and generic a character that even the animators on the 1937 version reportedly hated to be assigned to Prince animating duties — there’s a Robin Hood–like figure named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap).

Borrowing from another 1930s hit, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), in order to give the prince some welcome rakish insolence might have worked except that he’s been assigned seven fellow bandits. They’re a motley crew judging by their casting and costumes, but unfortunately, they don’t have anything to do — they hardly have any lines. They just stand around behind Jonathan while he talks. Or pretend to interact among themselves while someone sings in the foreground.

There’s no reason to have seven bandits, other than a pointless symmetry with the seven dwarfs. Instead of seven undifferentiated bandits with an average of one line each, how about two specifically characterized bandits with a reasonable number of lines each? Maybe comic relief bandits? I know I could’ve used some comic relief.

The new take on Snow White herself, that she’s a downtrodden scullery maid in the Evil Queen’s castle who will have to learn to fight back in order to reclaim her queendom could have worked pretty well. But in the execution, it flounders badly. A big part of the problem is Gal Gadot, who looks well-cast in the plum role of the Evil Queen. But she’s such a dimwitted nonactor she can’t get any aspect of it right.

She reads her lines in an uncomprehending way, as if she learned them phonetically. “Arr YOO agenst meh TOOOO?” she demands of the poor Huntsman played by Ansu Kabia. Kabia’s no doubt a gifted actor, because somehow director Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man, (500) Days of Summer) got takes from him in his scenes with Gadot in which he didn’t burst out laughing.

Then there are the seven dwarfs, notably left out of the title of the film. But there they are in Snow White, capering and wearing pointy caps and heigh-hoing notwithstanding.

As actor Peter Dinklage put it on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast:

There’s a lot of hypocrisy going on. . . . Literally no offense to anyone, but I was a little taken aback when they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of Snow White and “the seven dwarfs”. . . . You’re progressive in one way but then you’re still making that f–king backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together.

And the dwarfs are so grotesquely rendered in godawful CGI, so frozen-eyed and weirdly lifeless, they make you want to look away, as from a tragic accident. Plus, the characterizations are atrocious — you literally can’t tell who most of them are by looking at them. Several of the dwarfs have to be introduced repeatedly, often by Doc — he’s the one in the glasses, which makes him easy to identify. There’s even a song joking about how to tell them apart.

If you recall, in the animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, you can always tell, every second, which dwarf is Bashful, which dwarf is Happy, which dwarf is Sneezy, and so on. That’s because the animators hardly slept for months on end — they were working so hard to get every aspect of that all-important film to a peak of animated perfection. And detailed characterization was a huge priority.

Walt Disney put all the studio assets on the line, and then mortgaged his house, in order to make that film. It was called “Disney’s folly” and confidently expected to fail because the common wisdom held that nobody wanted to sit through a feature-length cartoon. The reason we have animated features as a reliably popular genre today is because Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was considered an aesthetic triumph and became a phenomenal popular success.

I don’t have a lot of love for Walt Disney, who was a union-busting bastard who treated the vast majority of his workers terribly and pioneered some of the most disgusting capitalist practices known to the entertainment industry. But there ought to be a certain respect for his important pioneering work in animation, sound, and color in film.

The people who run the filmmaking branch of his company today have no respect, however. They’ve been shamelessly cannibalizing Disney’s corpse — or should I say, corpus — for decades. The bold inventiveness he prized was always shredding the nerves of his brother Roy, who was in charge of finances. The huge profits from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for example, got plowed back into further experimental features like the aesthetically ambitious Pinocchio (1940) and the wildly innovative but bankroll-busting Fantasia (1940).

And when Disney ran out of film innovations he wanted to pursue, he gambled on blazing a trail in early television and then entirely reconceiving how theme parks worked. But that kind of imaginative audacity hasn’t been part of the company plan for ages. Too risky. Gotta keep the shareholders happy.

It’s one of the many wearying aspects of Snow White that you can tell exactly the scene that’s going to be further monetized as the basis for an updated theme park ride — if the film does well enough. It’s the gratuitous roller coaster tram ride through the mines where the dwarfs work pointlessly mining jewels that they never sell or use.

And though the film had a box-office opening that was “more sleepy than happy” as one headline put it, there’s not much doubt it’ll make a profit eventually.  People have children, and children want to go to movies with their parents in tow, and there the Mouse stands with a long-held monopoly on children’s entertainment. It’s been a long while since there was any serious attempt to call that whole Disney-fixated tradition into question — after all, hey, they have superheroes now! But in the year of our lord 2025, maybe it’s time we give it another try.