A Snow White Review
WARNING: This is a strong critique of this film. I wanted to vent about it, and it will be mostly negative. If you loved this film, or want to go into it without negativity, turn back now. Also, possible mild spoilers.
I also only saw this once. If I am wrong about some detail, please let me know.
The original 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is something to behold. Each shot is a painting. While you may think technically, every shot in an animated film is a painting, this particular film’s shots were like paintings done by the greats. The character design is distinct and iconic. The voice performances overflow with charm and personality. The happy moments are joyous, the action pulse pounding, the horror in your face.
It was accomplished with a dream, for the company to create their first full length animated film, and in color no less. Everyone thought it wouldn’t be successful, that it would be Disney’s folly, and then, it was an instant classic and even won a speciality Academy Award to honor it.
I wish they had at least taken such care with this, using the spirit of that phenomenon to show the world that they can make these live action remakes work.
There are three levels of Disney Live Action reimagining (as they like to call them):
The film is its own thing, based more on the story than on the original film, or from a different perspective. I don’t feel too much of a desire to watch the originals when I watch these. (Cinderella, 101 Dalmatians, Alice in Wonderland, Maleficent)
They exist. They did okay. They flew almost too close to the source material, and didn’t add anything much. It just makes me want to watch the original that does it better. (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid)
Bad. Nostalgia is not even cared for. It lacks in a way that only inspires you to want to watch the original desperately. You almost crave it. (Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Dumbo, Snow White)
As someone who is a fan of the original and been burnt by this formula before, I had low expectations, and hoped to be surprised. Maybe it wasn’t going to be like the trailers. Maybe it would be better. Maybe it would be charming and beautiful.
I was almost embarrassed by how bad it was.
These reimaginings are the opposite of what the company was based on. Walt was all about new and original ideas, how to make something bigger and better, not to walk where he walked before if it could be helped. That is what makes this particular one so painful. It’s coming after a long line of unoriginal things, the company clawing at their old intellectual properties instead of coming up with the new and fantastic. It’s all becoming few and far between, and this film is just a mockery, a magic mirror held up to their face as to what they’ve become. As a former ‘Disney adult’, it hurts to see a company that has made some incredible media, fall like the hag down the cliffside.
I had my mouth dropped open in shock at times, wondering how this quality could be allowed. How could it be that 250+ million dollars have been spent on this? A film that pretends to care about the original, that keeps specks of it and doesn’t do anything new or exciting. A film that fills the screen with bland imagery and uncanny valley?
The original Snow White looked like a painting from one of the greats, and this looked like a painting from a hospital wall. There is a lack of substance, of texture, of real world sensibility. Most of the stuff that stands out is computer generated, and it’s screaming in your face with a lack of groundedness. The dwarves (despite being the most fun part of the film) are also painful to look at, especially when other humans are around to show how glaringly out of reality they are. Their design is also too similar, with Sleepy, Sneezy, and Bashful kind of melding together. The animals hover between realism and being cute enough for you to forgive the effects, but they are in this middle ground. Not impressive, and not overly adorable either, lacking their lovable personalities as well.
When there is something tangible, it lacks any sort of depth. When there were actual sets, they tended to be boring aside from the dwarves’ cottage. The costumes could’ve been spectacular, and yet fell flat. Snow White’s iconic yellow, blue, and red dress is saturated strangely and cut wrong for Rachel Zegler, making it look like a costume store dress that cost a pretty penny, but not something in a movie of this caliber. The Evil Queen’s costumes had some nice aspects, such as the stained glass crown, but most of the time it leaned towards cheap and plastic like. Even the box that is supposed to hold Snow White’s heart looks like the popcorn bucket that was at my movie theater’s concession stand.
Rachel Zegler does what she can. I enjoy her as an actress, but the writing could only get her so far. This is not Snow White, but another version of Disney’s new heroines where their personality type is ‘strong’ and nothing else. There is hardly any other personality there. She doesn’t have the original Snow White’s confidence, optimism or joking nature. While the animals want to do anything for her, she really only talks to them once, maybe twice, and hardly interacts with them except when they are helping her do something, making it a weirdly one sided relationship to me.
While her reliance on waiting for a prince to save her seemed to be the big problematic thing to fix in this retelling, this Snow White is more meek, kinda waiting around for herself to be the person her father wants to be (her mother really never gets mentioned again even though she was also a great leader). Her connection to him is a metal heart with a bunch of adjectives on it (Fearless, Fair, Brave, True), which sums out how the connection between her parents as a child plays out. Bland and full of words but no real heart or meaning.
When she isn’t talking about her father, she is quipping with her new ‘prince’, a bandit by the name of Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) who came off as an off-brand Cary Elwes (no offense to Burnap). Let’s not forget they fall in love impossibly quickly (particularly over one of the forgettable new songs). While I can’t say much else without spoilers, other male characters are also driving Snow White’s path. There was potential for female friends here, like the female bandit in Jonathan’s troupe, but she and most of the other bandits are wordless and just fill the screen. Snow White is surrounded by a plot driven by the men in her life, except for one woman.
The Evil Queen.
Gal Gadot’s performance is most embarrassing of all. While she looks the part, it does not go beyond that. While the original is menacing, she is laughable. She is over the top, moving in strange ways, especially with her fingers, her jeweled hands constantly clinking about. It is comical, and in the future it might be known as one of the great camp performances of the decade, but I could only watch in disbelief that this went farther than rehearsals.
Don’t even get me started on her song. I’d like to say All is Fair is like the big flashy scene in a Disney channel film made for tweens, but that wouldn’t be fair to the magic that is the High School Musical trilogy. If Gal Gadot can sing, then this song is nowhere near her range. It felt like it was going on for eternity.
Going back to the dwarves performance wise, then I would like to shout out to the voice actors (particularly George Salazar as Happy), for doing a great job trying to inject as much of they could into their performances. Their songs (the only two from the original film that make it in albeit rewritten) are highlights of the film, the few sparks of joy I had sitting in the theater. Dopey is also a great part of the film, his dynamic with Snow White lovely and sweet. There’s an endearing part where Snow White teaches Dopey to whistle since he doesn’t speak. I wish they had kept it at that.
I understand the fact that the original film came out in the 30s, and that some may find these songs boring in comparison to now, particularly the more operatic songs in the beginning. I don’t find this to be a strong enough reason to eliminate them entirely.
Disney tends to randomize what reimaginings get the song treatment and at what percentage. Some have the songs left out entirely, others get only a handful, or you get the full soundtrack and then some. For some reason though, they replaced more than half the songs with new ones.
Considering the best musical moments of the film for me are the original songs heavily rewritten, I don’t see why they couldn’t have done the same with Someday My Prince Will Come, I’m Wishing, One Song, With a Smile and a Song, and The Silly Song. I could easily see a merging of Someday My Prince Will Come and I’m Wishing, changing the lyrics from Prince to Wish or Life or whichever word to evoke a similar idea to Waiting on a Wish. The arrangement could’ve been changed ala Disneymania to make it more modern without taking away such iconic songs.
It’s made worse by the fact that the new songs are painfully forgettable and bland. Waiting on a Wish could easily turn into Never Enough from the Greatest Showman (also done by songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul), offering an ‘I want’ song that sounds unoriginal. The Snow White and Jonathan quirky duet Princess Problems is almost nauseatingly modern. A Hand Meets a Hand, the overly stagnant second duet to tell us that Snow and Jonathan are falling in love is something you wait to be over, as it is accompanied by strange stagnant shots. The opening song Good Things Grow exists to show an overly happy kingdom but sounds like a credit song for The Lorax. You already know my feelings about All is Fair, which might have had potential if it had been elevated by a true performer.
In a sea of washed out words and melodies, what stands out like a sore but joyous thumb are Heigh Ho and Whistle While You Work. Music like this doesn’t exist anymore in the mainstream anymore, and when you don’t try to match these songs with a 1930s sensibility, you get a disjointed soundtrack. On top of that, the mise en scene of these scenes have the most movements, the most fun, and the most color. You allow the audience to attach to the nostalgia because that is the only place with grip. Everything else slides right out of memory.
There are a lot of weird things going on plot wise. They push that Snow White’s parents are great leaders, and specifically push that the father was the kindest, greatest guy ever, but then he remarries two seconds after his wife dies to the [Evil] Queen because she is so beautiful and magical. There is no mention that it is good for Snow White to have a motherly figure, there is no scene to show a nice start to their relationship, there is nothing. It just happens. Not long after, of course, he is gone.
In the original film, while it is known the Queen has powers, we have no idea if that was known when she married into the family. In the new film, in this old, happy kingdom, it is easily accepted when the new Queen is open about her powers, power she has because she is so beautiful. Yes. That’s right. She’s so beautiful that she has magical powers. The king and kingdom think that’s awesome, even though she would definitely be considered a witch.
The dwarves are magical. I do enjoy that the dwarves are ancient creatures who have lived a long time. However, they also have the power of gem GPS. During Heigh-Ho it is shown that they have magic hands that show where gems are (which is hilarious since when they show it off, almost every square inch is a gem). I thought this might come back later, in any way shape or form. It doesn’t.
Then, there are the bandits. Jonathan, our ‘prince’, is the leader of these bandits who fight in the name of the king, but they seem to mostly be a thieving troupe ala Robin Hood without giving to the poor. They were a bunch of people living in the woods, stealing occasionally and fighting the guard if they have to. Though there are quite a few of them, all with distinct looks, only Jonathan and the crossbow pro Quigg speak. The rest have no personalities, and don’t do much of anything. They clog up the scenery. I feel like there is a version of the script out there where these people have more to do, more to say, and I would like to see that. The bandits could’ve been more of a way to see how the Evil Queen has affected the kingdom, but all they really serve is to be a reason that Jonathan is around at all.
Jonathan and Snow White’s relationship is a half baked apple pie of a love story. I know we get basically nothing in the original, so I believe they really squandered the opportunity to make something pretty interesting. We could have had the love interest be a boy she was kind to during her parents’ reign, someone she constantly sneaks food to through the gates during the Queen’s reign, a deep friendship turned possible romance that neither can realize until fate requires it. This could’ve also worked if he were a servant boy turned young knight, someone Snow had known her whole life.
Instead we get a Flynn Rider wannabe and a relationship with the same dynamics as a lot of other couples in the Disneyverse. Girl trying her best and a wisecracking life-worn brodude.
The way they tell the story also deeply affects the pacing. Knowing the beats of the story, when they get to the point where Snow is close to eating the apple, I thought the film was almost over. It had felt long enough at that point. Then, my sister who always keeps tabs on the movie’s time, told me we had 50 minutes left. The original ending comes as the second act ‘climax’, without any real climax at all. They do something sacrilegious with Dopey, and then there is a weird, sluggish third act where the Queen is ‘defeated’ and everyone is happy again.
To be clear, I have no qualms about changes to Snow White becoming a leader. I just wish she could have been a leader and also been the Snow White I knew from the original: confident, not afraid to be silly, self aware, optimistic, and so charming she is almost magic herself. In promoting the film, they tried to be big about how they were fixing the dynamics of the first film, but in supposedly doing that, they lost who Snow White is and still had most of the big moments belong to men and the memory of a man. She still has no character development, which works in the original as she isn’t meant to, but in a film that is all about her becoming who she is meant to be, this great leader, she is sort of the same flatline throughout the film.
This is all due to poor writing. I felt myself rewriting the film during watching and still am as I dwell on it. There are many things that could’ve been done better, ideas that could've been incredible.
That’s what makes me saddest of all. The potential.
If the costumes had been period accurate instead of party store, if the sets had been tangible, if the plot had been strong, stable, a little scary, a little joyous. If the music has been plussed, not minused. If Snow White had a personality trait beyond a strong potential leader. If the Evil Queen had been played by someone taking it seriously.
I’ll take my late 90s Snow White: A Tale of Terror over this any day.
My Letterboxd rating: 1.5
Does it spark joy?
Like an apple with a bruise, I gave this film the benefit of the doubt and bit into it anyway, and it was mush.
As someone who loves the original, as someone who knows what the original did for animation and for the Walt Disney company, this was painful.
It has moments of something, but in the end it tries too hard. It is not beautiful, it is hardly inspiring, it is the epitome of a product from a company that has entirely forgotten how they started.
It does not spark joy.
