Disney’s Snow White has a major ‘identity crisis’

With its creepy CGI dwarfs and muddled tone, Disney’s latest live-action remake is “not calamitous” but is a “a mind-boggling mash-up”.

Live-action remakes of Disney cartoons aren’t usually given a warm welcome by critics and commentators, but none of them has faced as much hostility as the new remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Are we succumbing to Disney Princess Fatigue? Maybe, but there’s more to it than that. One issue is that the 1937 original was Walt Disney’s first ever full-length animated film, and, while parts of it have aged badly, it still stands up as an exquisite, heart-lifting masterpiece. Remaking a revered, all-time great animation as a live-action film is about as sensible as remaking Singin’ in the Rain as a cartoon.

Another issue is that Disney’s Snow White – to use its official title – has been attacked from both sides of the political spectrum: it has been condemned for being too progressive (“A Disney princess renowned for her pale skin being played by an actress with Colombian heritage? How dare they?”), and not progressive enough (“Caricatured dwarfs in this day and age? How dare they?”). Throw in the pronouncements on the Israel-Gaza war made by its stars, Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, and you’ve got a perfect storm of bad publicity.

The good news for the studio is that the film itself is not so calamitous. It’s not the worst of the studio’s live-action remakes (that’s Robert Zemeckis’s straight-to-streaming dud, Pinocchio), and while it’s not the best, either, it’s undoubtedly the most fascinating. What’s so unique about Disney’s Snow White is that it seems as if some of the producers wanted to make an old-fashioned tribute to a feudal fairy tale, and the others wanted to make a revisionist, Marxist call-to-arms. Rather than settling on one option or the other, the producers apparently compromised by making both versions at once, so the results are like a mind-boggling mash-up of two different films.

For the first few scenes, what we get is the subversive version. In an overlong opening sequence, we hear that Snow White (Zegler) isn’t named after her skin colour, as the traditional story would have it, but after the blizzard that was blowing when she was born. It’s not entirely clear why the King and Queen chose to name their daughter in honour of the weather, but considering  she could have been called Drizzle or Gusty Wind, she should probably count herself lucky. The exposition continues with speeches and songs about the days when Snow White’s benign parents ruled “a kingdom for the free and the fair”, where “the bounty of the land belonged to all who tended it”. This has to be the closest a Disney princess film has got to paraphrasing The Communist Manifesto.

There are more of these radical ideas when Snow White’s mother dies, and the King marries a woman who becomes the Evil Queen (Gadot). She warns her subjects of “a terrible threat beyond the southern kingdom”, and then exploits their fears to nab the realm’s riches for herself. With that, Disney’s Snow White becomes one of the year’s most bluntly political films – Disney or otherwise. And this is all before Snow White meets her handsome love interest, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), who is no longer a prince, but the Robin Hood-like leader of a gang of thieves. After he tells Snow White to “stop thinking and start doing”, she sings Waiting on a Wish, a song about taking action rather than hoping that things will change for the better. It’s a forceful riposte to Disney’s earliest fairy-tale cartoons, and leaves you startled by the boldness of the director, Marc Webb, and the writer, Erin Cressida Wilson. As for those people who complained that the trailer felt a bit “woke”? Well, just wait until they see the film.

Once Snow White flees from her homicidal stepmother and hides in the forest, though, her story suddenly turns into a faithful if robotic recreation of the 1937 cartoon. The forest itself looks like a Disneyland ride, with its artificially bright flowers and big-eyed woodland creatures; Zegler looks like a theme-park employee in Snow White’s trademark puffy-sleeved dress; and the CGI dwarfs look like creepy animatronic puppets of the classic characters. Choosing to use these weirdly photorealistic digital avatars, rather than putting real actors on the screen, was Webb’s worst misjudgement, but this section of the film still works well enough as an homage to the cartoon. Zegler, Gadot and their colleagues all do serviceable jobs, and while Disney’s Snow White never matches the airy, twinkling charm of the original, the same could be said of every other Disney remake.

But then it switches back into a revolutionary drama again. Snow White bumps into Jonathan’s gang of rebels, and the two of them develop a sparky Princess Leia / Han Solo dynamic as they duet on the catchiest of the film’s new songs, Princess Problems. What this means is that Disney’s Snow White now has not one but two merry bands of forest-dwellers. You can only assume that one draft of the screenplay had the human outlaws, and another draft had the time-honoured, cottage-sharing dwarfs, and the producers just shrugged and decided to keep both of them. This was a bizarre mistake. Why introduce seven dwarfs if they then have nothing significant to do? Why introduce a magical mine of precious stones if it’s not used in the story? Webb would have been better off keeping Jonathan’s gang, and cutting the dwarfs – and not just because they look so grotesque.

The film’s split personality problems don’t go away. Half of it is set in a grimy, gloomy land where Snow White wants to foment a peasants’ revolt and restore a socialist utopia, but half of it is set in a chirpy, brightly-coloured fantasy realm of benign and beautiful aristocrats. Half the time, the characters are belting out overwrought, self-empowerment anthems by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the songsmiths behind The Greatest Showman. But half the time they’re trilling the jaunty 1937 ditties by Frank Churchill and Larry Morey.

Perhaps we should appreciate the value for money: the studio is in effect giving us two films for the price of one. But the producers should have picked a lane and stayed in it. As it is, Disney’s Snow White keeps veering between two aesthetics and two eras, so it never picks up momentum. The story is cluttered, the tone is muddled, and the pacing is off. Again, that doesn’t make the film a disaster. In some ways, the identity crisis is what makes it worth seeing. But this muddled production will be enjoyed more by politics and cinema students than by children who are hoping to be enchanted by Disney magic.