An attempt at an objective overview of the extraordinary
backlash against Disney’s Snow White live-action remake

Plus ça change…

In 1937, it was the breathtaking audacity of producing an actual feature film – using more advanced animation techniques than employed in all those short ‘Silly Symphony’ comedies – that was seen as being such a risky venture. The animated comedy short was a very different animal to a feature film. Dear Uncle Walt was determined to prove his naysayers wrong. Well, you could say he just about managed that. Adjusted for inflation based on 2022 ticket prices, the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has made the company over a billion dollars (or just under two billion dollars depending on the AI you choose to believe). Whichever way you cut it, that’s a win. The idea of live-action remakes seemed like a ‘one-armed bandit hold on three cherries’ decision once the tech had enabled it. But cultural shifts over the few decades have encouraged film companies to adopt policies that might render older properties hard as hell to update. Lions still do what lions do so The Lion King came and went with no critical backlash detonating inside YouTube’s walls. Besides, there are plenty of girl-bosses to go around in lion prides. However, Snow White brings with it all manner of fairy tale aspects which simply do not sit comfortably today even between their own book covers. But wait. A little foresight may have avoided all this and yes, hindsight is now synonymous with smugness. But for modern audiences, updating Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was always going to have its challenges; its full title for a start “…and in this sensitive culture, what are we going to do about the dwarfs?” I don’t know. Maybe hire 21 actors with dwarfism? Seven to act, seven lighting stand-ins and seven stunt doubles and then write them as human beings with character and depth? Just a suggestion; white skin as a sign of great beauty… hmmm; the heroine as a cleaning/cooking housewife with a little help from the cutest of forest animals; Snow White’s victimhood and innocence; her falling for the first ‘charming’ male that comes along; the passive nature of the leading lady; the film’s 1930’s attitudes to women and race. Yes, there’s a Dopey inspired gag (now clearly racist) in the original although it’s not half as insensitive as the ‘Song of the Roustabouts’ (the faceless black workers who erect the circus tents) in the original Dumbo. The lyrics will make you cringe and I’m not repeating them here. For 2025’s Snow White audiences, that’s a lot to pack away, a great deal of unsightly lumpy carpets. You could almost say it’s too much to lose in both senses of the phrase. Lose all that lot and how is the tale even Snow White anymore? I’ve not seen it yet but I suspect it will be simply too far from the Grimm reality to claim any association with the original.

In promoting its own chain of cinemas, Cineworld called Snow White – 9 days before its release – Disney’s ‘new blockbuster’. Uh… Something has to happen for any film to actually be a blockbuster. At the very least it has to have opened. At time of writing, two days before it hits global cinemas, the only word on the film is from select sources ever so carefully screened (one imagines) by Disney. One ‘review’ even quoted portions of star Rachel Zegler’s car crash of an interview in 2022 (“dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be…”) which even to a (trying to be) objective observer sounds like corporate fluff and not a ‘real’ review at all.** News of the normally de rigueur red carpet premieres being cancelled and replaced by corporate and highly controlled marquee screenings, were not great optics for showing confidence in the film. God forbid an honest to goodness journalist gets to ask a Hollywood actress a question. But then it’s difficult to see how Disney could damage control in any other way. If journalists and online pundits subscribe to the notion that controversy equals likes and clicks then if I were a public figure these days I’d work on my smile and an entertaining delivery of “I hope you enjoy the film!” and absolutely nothing else. Best to be criticised for not being very interesting than for torpedoing your own project.

That said, Disney might have reined in any pre-publicity that might have caused them headaches. You can bet a Boot Camp for actors is being initiated right now to keep them toeing the corporate line in the future. They tried damage control by pairing Rachel Zegler with another Disney Princess actress, The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey and having a safe, little band-aid corporate chat. There was little of Zegler’s strident enthusiasm present in this encounter but then it was probably heavily stage managed and conceivably scripted. Someone paid very close attention to Zegler’s dark, sombre attire. She was a sitting apology in black. But the colossal twister of negative online opinion marched on and seemed prompted by three things; one, the casting of a Latina Snow White. Skin colour again? Really? Two, the afore mentioned, very unfortunate Vanity Fair interview with star Rachel Zegler; and three, there was the matter of the presentation of the dwarfs. Tyrion Lannister himself, Peter Dinklage weighed in. These were the unfortunate and avoidable roots of what grew to become an unwieldy monstrous tree of negative publicity. There were many more decisions made that may not have been wise but let’s take a closer look at the second and third catalysts.

Zegler dismissed the original film in a round of interviews in 2022. She had robust opinions no doubt shared by many but she could have picked a more appropriate moment to express them given that she would have been expected to promote the remake at this event. She was 21 years old at the time. Remember when you were 21? She had been thrust into the rarefied position of having some power and sway having been a star in a major film directed by Steven Spielberg and she made the mistake of being honest in front of a camera and microphone and by unfortunate extension the online community, most of whom in one-to-one private conversations, would probably have agreed with her. Are the following acceptable statements? The original is an animated technical tour de force for its time but is nonetheless now quite dated in its attitudes; today, women are no longer in thrall to stereotypes that depict them as helpless creatures to be rescued by one man or even seven; women now are regarded with more equality in our society though not in all societies; and risky though it is to say, there may not be a Prince who comes to save Snow White. Like Rapunzel’s hair, that’s right out of the window.

All of these aspects are valid opinions about the source material from a 2025 perspective. But delivered by Rachel Zegler, the comments came across as brash, rash and somewhat easy to jump on and her critical online audience was not going to easily forgive her. Clips from this one interview were shown thousands of times on the channels of the usual suspects of online film criticism and I think it’s their overuse and ubiquity that has bludgeoned Disney into def-con level damage control. As far as those rightly or wrongly critical of Disney are concerned, schadenfreude is now legal tender. And it is a powerful draw. Disney has been paying a financial price for its progressive stance across all their films and TV shows in the last several years. As I mentioned in an earlier piece, are those ahead of their time bound to get some sort of comeuppance in the present? But then, Disney is a mega-company making entertainment films for profit and if their once loyal audience is rejecting them, then something must account for that. Zegler’s interview did the project no favours but I think she was way over-maligned by dint of clips from that interview being endlessly repeated online. Did you say something reckless when you were 21? Did you have YouTubers replaying your words and laying into you for what must have seemed like every day for years? Was it a mistake compounded by going online and having a go at Trump and your detractors? More grist for the anti-Zegler mill. I’m not a great fan of Zegler (she was very good in West Side Story) but she damaged her own project and there’s a bigger price to pay nowadays in the dark eddies of social media’s currents.

Then there was Peter Dinklage who had every reason to bemoan the return of the two-dimensional and caricatured diamond mining dwarfs of the original despite the fairy tale context. While he lauded the casting of Zegler as progressive, he wasn’t thrilled that this progressiveness had not extended to the dwarf characters (who incidentally live in a very nice cottage in the woods and not a cave as Dinklage said). Did he get to read the script? But how would the dwarfs be acceptably portrayed in 2025? Parts like Tyrion Lannister are hardly common. And this is a fairy tale… Having seen the trailers, it seems that the computer generated seven dwarfs are acting much the same as their bumbling 1937 counterparts. Dinklage’s comments lit a fire under Disney at the time and the company backtracked saying that a re-think was on the cards. It was then that something very unfortunate happened.

An unofficial snap of what was (rightly or wrongly) assumed to be the replacement ‘seven’ characters as ‘magical creatures’*** fuelled the fire of Disney’s dithering on the dwarf issue. Now this may have been true at the time. Disney may have planned to replace the dwarfs with these characters so perhaps there was some truth there. This colourfully costumed diverse group includes a dwarf actor, George Appleby, with six diverse, standard sized other people so you can see how this ‘replacement dwarfs’ rumour got started. But they are in fact, according to early reviews, featured in the film as distinctly separate characters. They are the hero’s group of bandits whom, I assume, help Snow White “become the leader she knows she can be.” Even after the dust settles, the truth will still be corporately obscured. I look forward to the tell-all book on the film’s tortured making that someone must be writing as we speak.

Oh, it also doesn’t help that Gal Gadot (the Evil Queen) is Israeli and while safely decrying violence against both sides, unsurprisingly, she supports her home country while her fellow actress has put her star wattage behind supporting Palestine. I’m not going anywhere near that Gordian knot. It’s starting to feel like someone put a curse on this film. Phew. I didn’t think I could dig too deeply into all this regrettable shenanigans without giving my tuppence worth on the film itself and I promise my review will likely be quite a short one. It’s not the sort of film that sits well on this website but I thought given all the brouhaha (front page news in some UK newspapers today) it was worth trying to see the situation from both sides.

Politics! Communism! Non-consensual kissing! Feminism! Big words like ‘liminal’ and ‘narcolepsy’! Snow White has them all! It seems like the only thing it doesn’t have is Snow White. My first unworthy thought while watching this simple but schizoid and overwrought children’s film was “I wonder what kind of a film I could make being able to spend $41,284… per second?” OK, a lot of that overspend was caused by behind the scenes panic stemming from online reactions from popular YouTube critics. But still. It’s Snow White, or is it? Of course it isn’t. That’s just the title as a marketing tool. Snow White is as much Snow White as modern Star Trek is to real Star Trek. It’s the name of the IP and under that cover, you can make anything you think will appeal. Well, Disney’s radar is still strongly attuned to DEI which is laudable but sometimes at the expense of good storytelling. This idea has been trotted out so often online it’s now on the thin ice of cliché.

The original character from the fairy tale and the 1937 animated classic is a million miles away from today’s empowered heroines. She’s a brow beaten cleaner who flees into the woods because some reflective glass has decided she’s hotter than the Evil Queen so she has to be stabbed to death and her heart served up with salt for seasoning. She is about as pro-active as a piece of tissue paper in a gale. She cleans some more in the dwarfs’ cottage, bites into an apple offered by a comically and chronically suspicious old lady, dies and is brought back to life by a kiss in order to ride a horse to her new home, a Prince’s castle in the distance. That story is definitely not going to be remade. Let’s not even go into the dwarfs whose characterisation as bumbling comic sidekicks was never going to be duplicated for modern audiences. But wait! They were. I have no idea what decisions I would have made – if I’d had to – on the way the dwarfs were to be presented. But the CG versions feel like limply offered cries of “Please don’t criticise us for presenting the dwarfs this way.” They just don’t work. And did someone at the Mouse House not get the menu that these were live-action remakes? OK, OK, photorealistic…

Cards on the table, this film is not aimed at me. I wouldn’t have seen it in the cinema were it not for the scars from the backlash towards a company that by and large rules over Hollywood. Yes, four other ‘majors’ still survive but you can’t help thinking that Universal, Paramount, Sony and Warners, while big fish, may yet be caught on Donald’s hook (that’s Duck not Dopey in DC). Disney is a giant umbrella that casts its shadow over what once was 20th Century Fox, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar and their TV acquisitions, ABC, ESPN and National Geographic. I often wonder if there is such a thing as a monopolies commission in the US… No matter. That’s not really relevant but it can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that executives at Disney are not happy bunnies at the moment after some notable creative missteps in anticipating public taste. With Snow White and its dated fairy tale origins, the powers that be seem to have run into a brick wall in adapting it for 2025. Perhaps Mark Kermode was spot on saying that the film would be “…so much better if it didn’t exist.” It was the equivalent of taking a pot of Play-doh and expecting to fashion Rodin’s The Thinker out of it.

Our modern Snow White is named after the weather, a snow storm no less during which she was born, a reason shoehorned in to sidestep the skin colour non-issue. I couldn’t help recalling the joke based on the probably spurious Native American convention of naming a baby after what is first seen when the flap of the family tepee is opened after the birth… The punchline is “Tell me, Two-Dogs Fucking, why do you ask?” I’ll let you work out the set-up. In a perfect Kingdom, Snow White leads a perfect life with her perfect parents happily nestled in what seems like a communistic society where if you grow it, it’s yours and apple pies offered to all and sundry is the height of political favour-courting. Everything is lovely. Then, in a wishing well’s water dissolve, mum dies and dad lets Gal Gadot move in with him. On the face of it, and what a face, a wise decision. Perhaps not. He is persuaded to go off to fight never to return leaving the perfect society in the hands of the Evil Queen (the clue’s in the name) who thinks that being vile is the best way to live a fulfilled life. The Queendom goes to hell and all the farmers are conscripted into soldiers. After the magic mirror recognises someone fairer than her, she sends out an assassin to kill Snow White. So struck by his potential victim’s goodness, he is unable to do his job and Snow White flees deeper into the woods…

Aside from the oft criticised nature of the computer generated dwarfs, their presence is something of a curiosity given that their primary role from the original film has been excised (forcing the Evil Queen off a ledge to her death). Here, they provide an opportunity for two of the original, beloved songs to be sung but that really is it. They mine for diamonds, an activity that has no impact on the narrative at all and provide some slapstick amusement if you find that sort of thing amusing. Of the seven, Doc seems to have hitched a DeLorean ride from today back into middle Europe fairy tale land. He knows words like ‘liminal’ and ‘narcolepsy’. I suspect the contribution of Greta Gerwig handiwork given a shot at solving a few problems with the tone of the script. Dopey gets an arc! Who would have thought it? The seven bandits, led by the substitute for the Prince, Jonathan ‘the Unthreatening’, seem like they’ve all leapt off the in-mouse house DEI Strategy Report, but only one has any lines or character at all. There’s an irony in that he’s a real live actor with dwarfism. Hi ho. His six companions have no dramatic weight and no real presence. That’s not meant to be critical. It’s just the way the film was fashioned. There’s simply no time to spend on peripheral characters.

But it’s Rachel Zegler as Snow White and Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen who’ve hoovered up the very few plaudits and the many roasts. The fault seems to be more the schizoid nature of the screenplay. The heroine is independent and capable and the last thing on her mind is falling in love. But she has to have a love interest. Zegler is a talented and powerful singer but the songs, both old and new, seem to try too hard to evoke some sort of emotional response. And I doubt the new ones will endure long enough to become beloved classics. The slack that this film may ever have had has been well and truly reeled in by now. By far the most brick-bats have been aimed at Gadot which confuses me. Mis-cast? What? Is she too good-looking to be evil? She looks like she’s having a great time but as a character, it’s a one-note role with zero back story and the power she has is never truly exercised for her own benefit. Let’s just say that with being dealt such a hand, there’s not a great deal Meryl Streep could do with it. You can’t play a melody with one note. She is easily defeated by a slip of a girl who happens to have a good memory. It’s all a bit vanilla and shockingly anti-climactic. Despite the dwarfs shouldering the principal arrows of dissent, the astonishing VFX work that goes into making these characters has to be acknowledged despite the artists being forced to replicate their 2D cel progenitors. The VFX team was a hostage to designs 88 years old and what was goofy, comedic and charming as cel animation comes across as a little creepy in 3D ‘photorealism’.

Postscript; Now if Disney had gone back to the source material and not their 1937 animated effort, they would have found, like most of Grimms’ fairy tales, that there is sadism and body horror a plenty. Snow White is only seven when she escapes into the forest and stays with the dwarfs for years. Surprisingly, there’s no true love’s kiss. In one version of the story, the piece of poisoned apple is dislodged from Snow White’s throat by a bumbling pall bearer who drops her coffin. So obsessed with her beauty, the Prince makes a habit of carting her corpse around wherever he goes. That’s stalking 2.0. The nastier aspects of the tale are rich pickings for a David Cronenberg, Ari Aster or a Robert Eggers. The death of the Evil Queen may even become the equivalent to Misery’s hobbling scene. Though if I were about to be married to a man who came up with that fatal punishment, I may need to lawyer up and get my prenups signed off.

* https://www.motionpictures.org/2025/03/snow-white-early-reactions-one-of-the-best-live-action-remakes-to-date/
It’s hard to believe this ‘review’ was not sanctioned by Disney… or even simply written by Bob Iger.

** Writing this footnote one day before the opening and the reviews are… oh boy. Let’s just say they bear little resemblance to Disney’s damage control ‘reviews’…

*** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40TIyyGQA-U
This is the Mayo/Kermode review which very informatively reads out an email from someone who worked on the film who confirms that the ‘magical creatures’ always meant the animal helpers and that the bandits were never intended to replace the dwarfs (or ‘miners’ as they were known during production) as they were always separate, distinct characters. So why seven bandits and with a dwarf character? Who knows?

**** https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20250314-how-the-disney-remake-became-2025s-most-divisive-film-snow-white