Not since 2023’s Barbie have conservatives found a film they so love to hate. Snow White’s press tour was doomed from the start, with lead actress Rachel Zegler first bashing the source material and then proudly endorsing various progressive shibboleths. If all press really were good press, the film probably wouldn’t have had such a middling opening weekend. The unfavorable reviews certainly haven’t helped.
But despite its infamy, the new Snow White is far from woke. It is deeply inoffensive, leaving one to wonder whether the film would’ve flopped even without the controversy. Perhaps in Disney’s eyes, at least we’re talking about it at all.
In many ways, Snow White had a lot to live up to. Its predecessor, which Disney released in 1937, was the company’s first full-length movie, the maiden voyage of its long line of Disney princesses, and one of the first animated features ever made. Film historian J.B. Kaufman writes of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as “a motion picture whose historical importance is inextricably linked with the magnitude of its artistic accomplishment.”
Anxious to hold on to its existing intellectual property, Disney has made over 20 live-action remakes to date. Of the Disney princess remakes, Cinderella remains the only must-see, though Snow White is a tolerable addition to the mix and updates the original in ways parents may appreciate.
Let’s face it: The Snow White of the 1930s is not the most inspiring. Saved by the huntsman and forced to flee into the dark woods, she literally faints from fright. The new Snow White is made from heartier stock, composing herself in the woods enough to offer food to a deer, which leads her to the dwarves’ house.
In this version, Snow White immediately falls asleep, later cleaning the house with the whistling dwarves after they wreck it in a brawl. Rather than making her a “nagging ungrateful hag,” as one critic suggested, the scene presents her as more of a maternal figure, akin to the mother of seven unruly sons rather than an uninvited housekeeper.
Given that the original film was released nearly 90 years ago and is scant on plot details, Snow White was bound to have some updates, including new original songs (yet it sadly skips the classic “One Day My Prince Will Come”). Snow White now has a longer backstory and clearer motivations, including her desire to make the kingdom free and fair as her parents once did. In the end, she defeats the evil queen by turning her soldiers against her, naming and humanizing them and their families à la Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Other updates are not so welcome. The seven dwarves, who were computer generated evidently in an effort to avoid offending people with dwarfism, seem plucked straight out of the uncanny valley. Most confusingly, a member of an outlaw band is played by an actor with dwarfism, suggesting that in this world, some dwarves are more equal than others. This controversy, and the film’s Spirit Halloween-esque costuming, could have been avoided had the new Snow White also been animated, giving the studio a chance to show how far animation has come over the past century. Instead, we’re left with odd CGI and coloring choices, with some scenes cartoonishly saturated and others bereft of color.
At least the prince, who is actually a (reformed) thieving scoundrel in the vein of Tangled’s Flynn Rider, still revives Snow White with true love’s kiss. This is no “Snow Woke,” and the half-baked “rape culture” discourse of the 2010s is clearly dead. The kiss also belies what Zegler claimed in an early, infamous interview that launched the film into its storm of controversy.
DISNEY’S SNOW WHITE FALLS FLAT WITH WEAK $43 MILLION OPENING WEEKEND
“She’s not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love,” Zegler declared of the new Snow White. “She’s going to be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.”
As it turns out, the modern moral is that women really can have it all. And in Snow White, the heroine does both.