Snow White
Disney’s troubled ‘live-action’ musical remake of its 1937 classic proves to be an underwhelming spectacle.
Rachel Zegler and digital friends
Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios.
For a film that has been plagued with so much negative publicity, it’s hard to watch it with an open mind. But as so often with these things, the end result is neither an unmitigated embarrassment nor a flawless masterpiece. It’s an odd property, though, to resurrect – for several reasons. Disney’s 1937 original, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was named by the American Film Institute as the “greatest American animated film of all time”, and yet it remains very much a piece of its period. To sidestep the awkwardness of using seven real actors with dwarfism, Disney opted to have the small septet animated. This, along with the digitally rendered woodland animals, gives the film a computer-generated aesthetic, which Rachel Zegler’s cuter-than-life physiognomy goes no way to offset. Although strictly speaking it isn’t, the new film often feels like an animated remake of an animated classic (cf. The Lion King).
The other problem is the familiarity of the story. Besides all the various off-shoots generated by the Mouse House itself, and all the other foreign-language versions, Hollywood has brought us two mainstream live-action adaptations of the Brothers Grimm original, namely 2012’s Mirror Mirror with Julia Roberts and Lily Collins and, in the same year, Snow White and the Huntsman with Kristen Stewart and Charlize Theron.
The first controversy that dogged the new production was the casting of a Latino actress in the central role, a character described in the 1937 film as having “skin as white as snow.” This hiccup is circumnavigated from the outset, by having our protagonist born in a snowstorm and named after the event (one wonders how many children were named after Hurricane Katrina, but I digress). However, Disney could do a lot worse than cast Rachel Zegler in the title role, whose butter-wouldn’t melt, pretty countenance is perfect for the part of the orphaned, victimised princess – and she has a great pair of pipes. Gal Gadot as the evil Queen is also, in theory, excellent casting, the Israeli actress being a statuesque figure of considerable presence (she’s eight inches taller than Zegler), who gets to sing her own barnstormer, ‘All is Fair’ (“Well, nice will only get you nowhere/Nice won't get the doing done/Ambitious girls must be vicious girls/And boy, they have fun!”). But she does seem to be a missed opportunity – she lacks a glint in the eye, a cackle in her throat, that would’ve made the Queen a classic villain.
The script by Erin Cressida Wilson (one of seven writers attached to the screenplay, but the only one credited), does try to introduce a modern, mischievous note, so that Sleepy now suffers from narcolepsy and Doc is a medical man with a fondness for circumlocution. And, when the dwarfs first spot Snow White in their bedroom, they suspect her of being an “ectoplasmic” apparition (Beatrix Potter would approve of such vocabulary). In addition, the queen’s megalomania and wealth – in stark contrast to her subjects’ cost-of-living crisis – does convey a modern resonance. The production design, sets and Sandy Powell’s costumes are inevitably top-of-the-range, which one would hope for from a film that cost $270 million. But in the end, the story fails to soar and the hasty conclusion resolved by a crossbow-wielding outlaw called Rebel Quick (limned by the real-life dwarf George Appleby), feels like a cop-out.
Also known as Disney’s Snow White.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Rachel Zegler, Andrew Burnap, Gal Gadot, Emilia Faucher, Ansu Kabia, Hadley Fraser, Lorena Andrea, Andrew Bower, George Appleby, and the voices of Jeremy Swift, Tituss Burgess, Andrew Barth Feldman, Martin Klebba, Jason Kravits, George Salazar, Andy Grotelueschen, Patrick Page.
Dir Marc Webb, Pro Marc Platt and Jared LeBoff, Screenplay Erin Cressida Wilson, Ph Mandy Walker, Pro Des Kave Quinn, Ed Mark Sanger and Sarah Broshar, Music Jeff Morrow; new songs: Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Costumes Sandy Powell, Sound Luke Gentry and Jeremy Price, Dialect coach Elizabeth Himelstein and Sonja Field.
Walt Disney Pictures/Marc Platt Productions-Walt Disney Studios.
108 mins. USA. 2025. UK and US Rel: 21 March 2025. Cert. PG.
