Disney’s Snow White review: Just don’t call them ‘dwarfs’

Drama? Story? Character? Nope. These are, it seems, decadent tools of the oppressor. The new Snow White movie is a new low — and a crisis point for Disney.

This image released by Disney shows Rachel Zegler in a scene from "Snow White." (Disney via AP)

Snow White (PG)
109 minutes
In cinemas

One star out of five

Believe the anti-hype. It’s that bad. This latest Disney adaptation represents a new low for cultural desecration and for a venerable 102-year-old entertainment company that now looks at its source material with a pinched nose of disgust.

When Snow White star Rachel Zegler, during a now notorious Vanity Fair interview, dismissed the Disney original as a politically retrograde “85-year-old cartoon”, she was merely echoing the same clueless company vandals who had, in previous reboots, made Cruella soppy, Mulan sexless and Maleficent misunderstood.

Tangling with the 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is different, though. The movie was the pre-eminent Disney property, the first animated American feature, and the one that set the tone. Its dismissal has thus oddly mythic implications, like a line crossed, or the end of an era.

Gal Gadot plays the Evil Queen in Snow White.

And so this Snow White, cooked up by The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb and umpteen screenwriters (including Greta Gerwig and Jez Butterworth) through a near decade’s development, emerges as the epitome of Disney’s Pravda-like approach to contemporary adaptation – prescriptive politics first, followed by “inspirational” messaging, followed by more politics. Drama? Story? Character? Nope. These are, it seems, decadent tools of the oppressor.

The film begins with the announcement that Snow White was named after the winter storm raging the night she was born and not because, as the original claimed (quoting the Brothers Grimm and clearly causing huge offence), her “skin was white as snow”. We soon discover that Snow White will not sing the repellent heteronormative ballad Someday My Prince Will Come. In its place is a song called Waiting on a Wish about how Snow White just wants “to start speaking with a fearless heart’’. Sick bags are not supplied with each ticket.

When Snow White flees to the forest to escape the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot) she encounters our “Seven Dwarfs”. These are photorealistic computer-generated versions of the animated characters, only no one here deploys the potentially problematic “D” word.

This image released by Disney shows Rachel Zegler in a scene from "Snow White." (Disney via AP)

Gadot attempts to vamp it up as the Queen, but she has none of the alienated eroticism that Angelina Jolie brought to Maleficent, or even the vocal fury that Lucille La Verne applied to the original role, 88 years ago. It’s hard not to see this as anything other than a crisis point for Disney, a studio that used to make flawless cinematic stories but now infantilises audiences with sanctimonious life lessons culled from the corpses of its murdered movies. Still, who doesn’t love to speak with a fearless heart?

The Times