Disney's Snow White: Not too woke – and better than Wicked

Telegraph

19-03-2025

'And they all lived adequately ever after' is not the fairy-tale ending Disney was presumably originally gunning for. But at this point, the studio will surely take what it can get. Filming began on Disney's Snow White in March 2022, and the intervening three years turned into the sort of ride that makes their Thunder Mountain roller-coaster look like a Stannah stairlift.
First there was the representation problem. Do you cast short actors as the dwarfs, and risk perpetuating stereotypes, or use CGI and cheat the same actors out of high-profile work? (Disney opted for the latter; the studio was picketed.)
Then there was the casting of Rachel Zegler in the title role. The 23-year-old was a blazing breakout star in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, but also went on to mock the original 1937 animated classic at – of all places – a Disney fan convention, enraging devotees. (The actress is also of part-Colombian heritage, which irked the race purists too: the script's workaround has her character being born in a blizzard.)
Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress who plays the wicked queen, recently advocated for her home nation during the war in Gaza, prompting calls for a boycott. Zegler countered by publicly backing Palestine – and, after the US election, posted an anti-Trump diatribe on Instagram for good measure. There were rewrites, rethinks and reshoots, some as recently as last summer. The bad buzz built; the budget ballooned.
Why not shrug the thing off and dump it on streaming, like 2022's awful Pinocchio? First, because to do so would be a very public admission of defeat. (We tried to woke up a classic, and screwed it up instead.) And second, because of the talismanic nature of the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, from 1937: it was Disney's first animated feature, and remains an undisputed masterpiece. So instead, the studio piled resources and creative muscle into turning the potential catastrophe around.
Did they manage? Well, I'll say this for the result: it's better than Wicked. The opening act sets out just how existentially tearing our heroine's existence is under Queen Gal. (With apologies to Milan Kundera, call it The Unbearable Snow-Whiteness of Being.) And for the most part, this section is fairly beige and dull. But once Zegler scuttles off to the forest, where she teams up with two chirpy septets – the digitised dwarfs and a zany gaggle of bandits, who may have been dwarf replacements in an early draft – it really picks up.
The new versions of two classic numbers, Heigh-Ho and Whistle While You Work, are stylishly choreographed and rousingly performed, while a handful of the new songs, from The Greatest Showman's Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, just about keep pace. (I loved Princess Problems, a teasing ode to Gen-Z prissiness which delivers about all the culture-war the film is prepared to wage.)
Andrew Burnap as the handsome not-prince Jonathan proves a real comedic asset. Zegler does not, but her vocals regularly astound. Gadot excels on neither of those fronts, but she at least looks the part, and helpfully in her own songs the orchestration and backing singers do a lot of tactical drowning-out.
The motion-captured dwarfs don't look photorealistic so much as just creepy – pity the visual effects artists; it was a no-win brief – and the reinvention of Dopey as a gentle soul too beautiful for this world did make me retch a little. But otherwise, for all the early talk of Snow White '25 turning tradition on its head, the finished article is keener to strike a soothing neoliberal compromise, in which Zegler gets to lead a rebellion but True Love's Kiss still saves the day.
Think of it as a slightly self-nobbling version of Enchanted, the wondrous (and original) Disney blockbuster that both sent up and celebrated the Disney princess musical tradition in 2007. Of course in the Noughties, the studio could knock out a film of Enchanted's calibre in 18 months, and didn't need to sell it with a 'live-action remake' angle either. Now that really does feel like a land far, far away.