Snow White — like all live-action remakes — doesn't deserve to exist

Jackson Weaver · CBC News

· Posted: Mar 21, 2025 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 10 minutes ago

It is with a dense suspiration that I interruption the news: Snow White, the latest successful Disney's enactment of return-to-the-vault remakes, has crash-landed successful theatres. Starring Rachel Zegler arsenic the titular princess and Gal Gadot doing her champion content of Angelina Jolie's Maleficent, it has already earned capable atrocious property — some for its clunky storyline and its newspaper's worthy of controversies around its characters and actors.

But present I am, acceptable to heap on. Still, determination is an impulse to attack movie disapproval with an unfastened caput and minimal bias. So, let maine uncover mine. 

I judge the microorganism of live-action Disney remakes is, astatine best, lazy. At worst, they're evil.

They are ugly, garish, reductive; successful their attempts to evoke the feeling of hand-drawn animation, they either bump up the saturation and opposition to an eye-bleaching level, oregon worldly themselves with uncanny vale CGI sidekicks to poorly ape the magic of animation. The precise beingness of these remakes serves to devalue animated movies, tacitly assuming that live enactment is someway an upgrade. 

WATCH | Snow White trailer: 

These films request to pull an incredibly wide assemblage to stay economically viable. And due to the fact that they're truthful often based connected older narratives meant for audiences of a antithetic time, they request crippled updates and quality recasts. But the ham-fisted results often incite hatred against their stars, alternatively of the manufacture executives who really merit the backlash.

Other times, they displacement plots to debar the astir problematic remnants of Disney's amazingly racist and tone-deaf past, portion undercutting the themes and worlds that primitively rested connected them: Removing Dumbo's Jim Crow-crows and the underage drinking facet of its Pink Elephants connected Parade song made fiscal consciousness for a 2019 remake looking to suction dollars from protective parents' pockets. It besides led to a sanitized merchandise with small personality, redeeming qualities oregon adjacent crushed to exist. 

So erstwhile presented with this bevy of obstacles, 1 would deliberation the solution would beryllium simple: Instead of a caller Snow White, marque thing archetypal instead. 

But predictably, Snow White falls prey to virtually each 1 of these stumbling blocks, portion offering small to thing successful discourse oregon communicative to warrant obscuring the representation of the 1937 production.

Who's the fairest?

Here, the princess Snow White lives successful a phantasy colony that rapidly establishes the updated taxable successful the musical's opening song: "a kingdom for the escaped and the fair," filled with "fields and the fruits that they bear" and a "beautiful abundance we share." 

In presumption of reworked, progressive Disney themes, this 1 is acold from the worst; it intentionally conflates "fair" — arsenic successful kind-hearted — with the Evil Queen's "fairest-of-them-all" rhetoric, putting into question what truly makes idiosyncratic worthy of adulation.

It's what's wrong that counts, this Snow White aims to teach, while stumbling done the weirdly governmental subtext of onshore rights, colonization and fascism that its opening fig is ecstatic to introduce, but ne'er afloat unties.

From there, the communicative echoes the 1 we each cognize and love: She is formed from the kingdom, stumbles connected her magical wood friends, flirts with a section hunk — until a left-turn ending, veering distant from the damsel-in-distress finale (which Zegler has consistently lambasted, to sizeable contention of her own).

Where it starts to falter is the changes made to region aged messages — including the root of Snow White's name. It is present inspired by a snowstorm she survived arsenic a child, alternatively of her tegument being "as achromatic arsenic snow" from the original. While it works good successful the discourse of the movie itself, Zegler, who is not white, has had to endure done the benignant of insults and attacks that besieged Black histrion Halle Bailey aft she was formed in The Little Mermaid. 

More notably within the plot is the handling of the "seven dwarfs," who, portion lopped disconnected of the title, are near successful the communicative itself. The characters' inclusion drew disapproval — including from Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage — that Disney attempted to fend disconnected by saying they are "magical creatures," not portrayals of radical with dwarfism.

And though the movie included actors with dwarfism (like Martin Klebba, who voices Grumpy), visually, the last characters are an ambiguous integer analogue — CGI monstrosities that blur the enactment betwixt realism and fantasy. In animation, everything is fantastical. In unrecorded action, fantastical things look creepy.

Dopey changes

Nowhere is that proven more than whenever the unnervingly unreal Dopey mugs bashfully astatine the camera, breaking immoderate immersion Snow White had antecedently built up. 

Which is an absorbing capable alteration successful itself. That quality has evolved from, essentially, a trip-prone clown into a shyly smiling, Dobby-esque metaphor for Snow White's ain burgeoning self-confidence. Our caller Dopey isn't a "dope" astatine all, we're reassured; he's conscionable a angiosperm waiting to bloom. But arsenic helium develops from a bashful loner into Snow White's trusted confidante, it does rise the question — wherefore is the different "magical creature," Bashful, present astatine all?

It's a hyper-specific ailment to an already questionable broadside character's lesser flaw, but it shows the pitfalls Snow White stumbles into portion trying to "fix" its story. Why alteration the entire exposition and finale to reenforce Snow White's bureau implicit her ain destiny, lone to inactive person a antheral prevention her and buss her portion she's unconscious? Why displacement the taxable from true emotion to a assemblage overthrowing despotism, lone to support a monarchical ruler? 

And speaking of despots, wherefore centre your movie connected the manipulative powerfulness of a terrifying villain, lone to formed a performer who present proves she can't enactment her mode retired from underneath her costume jewelry, fto unsocial retired of a insubstantial bag?

In astir different regards, Snow White is good enough, and — speech from Gadot's comically atrocious villain opus — boasts amazingly bully euphony for a modern movie musical. But it is besides firmly successful the pantheon of films that spot distant astatine our civilization simply by existing, stupidly forcing a communicative designed for animation into unrecorded enactment wherever it can't assistance but showcase the shortcomings of 1 portion invalidating the other. 

So, should you spot it? If you person kids you privation to instrumentality to the theatre, definite — it's hardly Disney's worst live-action remake.

But should Snow White exist astatine all? To punctuation Once Upon A Time's mentation of the Evil Queen: "Evil isn't born, it is made." And with soul-crushing remake aft remake, Disney is gathering up rather a lawsuit for that argument.