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Euronews
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Euronews Culture's Film of the Week: 'Snow White' - The poisoned apple you're expecting?
ADVERTISEMENT Magic Mirror on the wall, is the latest cynical Disney live-action remake the shittiest of them all? It seems like a fair line of inquiry considering the amount of hatred directed at the remake of the 1937 animated classic Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs . First, there was the casting of Rachel Zegler, the breakout star of Steven Spielberg's West Side Story , whose part-Colombian heritage irked both Disney literalists and race purists. Dogmatic fans and rampant racist abuse would have been easy enough to dismiss had Zegler not embarked on what can only be described in PR terms as a complete catastrofuck, appearing to diss the original tale and indulging in some eye-rolling 'girl boss' posturing on red carpets which turned the whole internet against her. Then there was the representation issue, with Disney initially replacing the seven dwarfs with seven 'magical creatures'. This prompted accusations of 'wokeness' - a term which originally signaled a positive level of awareness and compassion but is now a death sentence due to the political right's disparaging co-opt of the word. Regardless, the ensuing backlash led the House of Mouse to rejig some things (more on that in a bit) and not cast actors with dwarfism to avoid perpetuating stereotypes. Instead, Disney opted for CGI – which cheated the same actors out of work. Lose/lose. As if that wasn't enough controversy for one film, Israeli actress Gal Gadot has advocated for her home nation, while Zegler publicly backed Palestine. This fuelled rumours of a rift between the two leads. Rewrites, reshoots, ballooning budgets, a scaled back press tour, a low-key premiere and an exhausting-to-read laundry list of polemics later, and Snow White finally hits theatres. So, let's get back to the original question: Is it the shittiest of them all? Surprisingly, no. Granted, the bar is so low with the live action likes of Alice in Wonderland , Dumbo , The Lion King and Pinocchio that elevating Snow White above these disasters is damning with very faint praise. However, it's not the cursed slumber it could have been. Just a passably fair reimagining. Snow White Disney Directed by Marc Webb ( 500 Days of Summer , The Amazing Spider-Man ), from a script by Erin Cressida Wilson ( The Girl on the Train ), Snow White ends up sticking to the familiar template – with a few tweaks here and there that aren't as daring or smug as many were led to believe. A princess is born during a snowstorm - hence 'Snow White'. Nice touch. She's beloved by her parents and the kingdom. Sadly, saintly mommy Queen (Lorena Andrea) snuffs it and is replaced by a wicked stepmother (Gadot). Then, benevolent daddy King (Hadley Fraser) mysteriously disappears and the tyrannical harridan effectively lives up to her name by becoming the Evil Queen. She who hoards the riches of the kingdom, leaves the people to starve, and makes Snow her housemaid. Our heroine grows into a young woman (Zegler) with a Lord Farquaad bob haircut. She isn't waiting for her prince to come but wants to be a good leader for her people. Snow does, however, meet a young rapscallion with gorgeous hair named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap). That vanilla dreamboat replaces the prince figure as a Robin Hood-like character who steals food from the rich to give to the poor. Then, a magic mirror informs the Evil Queen she'll never be the fairest of them all if Snow White continues her pesky oxygen habit. In another neat little rewrite, the Queen's magical powers derive from her beauty, hence the threat Snow poses is more existential than pure vanity this time around. Thankfully, the woodsman (Ansu Kabia) changes his mind when it comes to cutting out Snow's heart as ordered, and helps her escape to the woods, where she takes refuge with seven... Oh, the horror... Oh, the CGI horror... ADVERTISEMENT Snow White Disney Despite a committed performance from Rachel Zegler, who almost *almost * manages to make you forget that Gal Gadot simply cannot act or convincingly read a line, there's no getting around the skin-melting CGI monstrosity of the seven dwarfs. Granted, the film was between a rock and a hard place when it came to casting, but the end solution of having creepy digital avatars that are both photorealistic and Uncanny Valley-levels of distracting is misjudged in the extreme. How this nightmare fuel got past the unsharpened pencils in the quality control committee will remain a mystery for the ages. Once you've accepted your new sleep paralysis demons, Snow White snowballs into a tonally discordant and overly long clutter leading to a rebellion that involves Jonathan's bandits – those aforementioned 'magical creatures' who were clearly at one point intended as substitutes for the original septet. It's fourteen scamps for the price of seven in the revolution to liberate the kingdom from Queen Charisma Bypass and restore a time of fairness when "the bounty of the land belonged to all who tended it". Highly commendable though monarchy defiance is - and this is the closest Disney has ever gotten to seeing the benefits of a communist utopia, so well done there - many of the empowerment-by-buzzword beats still land with repeated thuds. Snow White Disney At the end of the day and all controversies aside, Snow White is not the total calamity many expected - or hoped for. So, everyone relax and remember that Tim Burton's Dumbo exists. ADVERTISEMENT However, that doesn't stop it from being another clumsily executed, nostalgia-pandering update that joins a never-ending conveyor belt of inessential Disney back catalogue retreads. It may have its Broadway energy and heart in the right place, but as evidenced by the new tune 'Waiting On A Wish' - which replaces the original film's leading song 'Some Day My Prince Will Come' - it's alright when its playing but completely forgettable once the moment's gone. "Now, a formula to transform my beauty into ugliness," schemed the original animated Evil Queen in 1937. 88 years later and it's clear that Disney could use a new formula too. Unlike that memorable villain, however, the corporate behemoth is in dire need of a potion that transforms their ugly practice into beauty once more. Our advice? Call up Emilie Blichfeldt - she knows how to compellingly and daringly reimagine a fairytale. ADVERTISEMENT Snow White is out now.
Telegraph
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Disney's Snow White: Not too woke – and better than Wicked
'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.
