Disney ruins its crown jewel – and reputation

Rachel Zegler is watery and ineffectual while Gal Gadot attempts to vamp it up in a sanctimonious reboot of Snow White that marks a new low. It opened on Thursday in Australia. Bring a sick bag.

Rachel Zegler in a scene from Snow White. Zegler, in a now notorious Vanity Fair interview, dismissed the Disney original as a politically retrograde ‘85-year-old cartoon’. Picture: Disney via AP

Believe the anti-hype. It’s that bad. This latest Disney adaptation was yanked from pre-release marketing duties – the London premiere was axed – for good reason. It marks a new low for cultural desecration and for a venerable 102-year-old entertainment company that now looks at its source material with a nose pinched in disgust.

When the star of Snow White, Rachel Zegler, in 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.

Rachel Zegler arrives at the premiere of Snow White in Los Angeles. Picture: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

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

And so this Snow White – cooked up by Marc Webb, director of The Amazing Spider-Man, and umpteen screenwriters (including Greta Gerwig and Jez Butterworth), and developed over nearly a decade – 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 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”.

Andrew Burnap and Rachel Zegler in a ‘desultory almost-romance’. Picture: Disney via AP

We soon find Snow will not sing the repellent heteronormative ballad Someday My Prince Will Come. In its place is a new ditty, Waiting on a Wish. It’s about how Snow White wants, more than anything else, “to start speaking with a fearless heart’‘. Sick bags are not supplied with each ticket.

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

Equally problematic, we learn, is calling Dopey (voice by Andrew Barth Feldman) by his name. “Just because his name is Dopey doesn’t mean he’s a dope!” we are warned. We are told not to laugh at Sleepy (Andy Grotelueschen) because of his chronic neurological disorder, narcolepsy.

Gal Gadot as the Queen in a scene from Snow White. Picture: 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 the vocal fury Lucille La Verne gave to the original role, 88 years ago.

It continues like this throughout, including a desultory almost-romance with a limp bandit (Andrew Burnap) and his posse of seven multi-ethnic noncharacters – talk about marginalising minorities!

The tunes, like Zegler’s acting, are watery and ineffectual.

It’s hard not to see this as anything other than a crisis point for Disney, a studio that went from crafting flawless cinematic stories to infantilising audiences with sanctimonious life lessons culled from the corpses of its own murdered movies. Still, who doesn’t love to speak with a fearless heart?

(Disney’s Snow White (109 mins) opened in Australia on Thursday March 20.

This critic’s rating: 1/5)

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