| Worth seeing: | for kids who'll enjoy a traditional fairy tale with a twist, rather than their grown-ups, who'll be irritated by plot changes and behind-the-scenes shenanigans |
| Director: | Marc Webb |
| Featuring: | Rachel Zegler, Andrew Barth Feldman, Andrew Burnap, Andy Grotelueschen, Ansu Kabia, Gal Gadot, George Salazar, Jason Kravits, Jeremy Swift, Martin Klebba, Patrick Page, Tituss Burgess |
| Length: | 109 minutes |
| Certificate: | PG |
| Country: | US |
| Released: | 21st March 2025 |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A beautiful young princess (Rachel Zegler), known as Snow White, because of the colour of her skin the snowstorm on the night she was born, lives a lovely life with her parents, in their peaceful kingdom. When her mother dies, the King falls for a strikingly beautiful, but jealous and power-hungry woman (Gal Gadot), who soon replaces Snow White’s mother.
When the King disappears, in mysterious circumstances, the new Queen banishes Snow White to the basement, except when she’s on cleaning duties – where she disturbs a bandit (Andrew Burnap), stealing the Queen’s potatoes to feed his merry band of men.
When the evil Queen’s magic mirror tells her that she’s no longer “the fairest of them all,” she orders her huntsman to take Snow White into the forest and kill her – but he can’t bring himself to go through with it, instead telling her to run away.
Snow White stumbles across a little house with seven little beds – where she conks out, exhausted. When the seven little men come home from the mine, most of them agree to protect her from the evil Queen. Outside, she bumps into the bandit again; he’s hiding in the forest from the Queen’s soldiers and when they find him and his men, Snow White and the seven dwarfs help them drive the guards away.
When the evil Queen’s magic mirror tells her that she’s still not “the fairest of them all,” she decides to head into the forest to do the job herself – with a poisonous apple, whose only antidote is “true love’s first kiss.”
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
This is one of those films where people might be put off by everything they’ve read about it beforehand. Whether it’s comments by the stars, rivalry between the stars, casting decisions or use of CGI – there is plenty to talk about.
But the key thing is that the target audience – fairy-tale loving children – just won’t care. They won’t care whether Rachel Zegler has been criticising the 1937 animated original – they won’t care whether actors with dwarfism have been overlooked in favour of motion capture animation – they also won’t care that pro-Palestinian Zegler and Israeli Gal Gadot fell out over the war in Gaza – neither will they care that the etymology of the eponymous character has been changed to suit the casting of an Hispanic actress. They probably won’t even be that fussed that elements of the story have been changed, unless they’ve seen the original.
And that’s the bigger thing – does the film work?
You will think you know the story – you’ve read the Brothers Grimm fairy tale and you’ve watched Disney’s seminal 1937 animation – so you know the story – you know that Snow White is ultimately saved by the prince she has dreamed will come, someday. But no – not this time. Rather than a prince, there’s a forest-dwelling outlaw.
They take away the reliance of Snow White on a prince, coming to save her – but they stick to the original notion that the only antidote to the poison is true love’s first kiss? So have they turned this fairy tale into a “woke” feminist fable or not? If she still needs a man to kiss her, why not let him be a prince?
This is probably answered by what happens next. In the original film, Snow White and her prince “live happily ever after” in his kingdom – but our bandit doesn’t have his own kingdom, so Snow White has to win back her own – something that she gets a little help from her new love with, but the princess is in the driving seat.
But if it’s a feminist fable – with Princess Snow White leading the rebellion – that you’re after, 2012’s Mirror Mirror is a far superior take, with a witty script, more nuanced performances and drawing the dwarfs and the bandits neatly into a single gang.
When Disney first announced this version of Snow White, concerns from the Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage that it would mock dwarfs persuaded the film-makers to use CGI dwarfs instead, to make them more closely resemble the animated characters from the 1930s – they even refer to Snow White as a “human” – to further distance them from real-life dwarfs. But rather than backing Dinklage’s stance, the response from real dwarfs was that using CGI did them out of some of the few roles Hollywood has for their community. Oddly, there is a little person in the film – he even lives in the forest – although he’s not one of the dwarfs, but one of the outlaws.
Some of these real-life adaptations of animations take on a life of their own, but – aside from a couple of tweaks to the story – in many ways, Snow White tries to remain quite faithful to the original – from the aesthetics of the kingdom and the forest to the appearance of the dwarfs – even familiar songs ring out, from Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It’s Off To Work We Go to Whistle While You Work – of course, in this telling of the story, there’s no need for Someday, My Prince Will Come. But perhaps the most memorable songs in this film are duets between Snow White and her new pal – clearly aimed at the Oscar original song contest.
For Disney purists, they might find it woke, feminist, pro-dwarf, anti-dwarf, revisionist or otherwise objectionable – but children will enjoy the good-versus-evil fairy tale, the cooky – if a little creepy – CGI dwarfs, the colourful sets, familiar costumes, familiar phrases, songs new and old and some brisk moments of humour – including a fun vocative gag.
Kids will love it – adults won’t – the problem for Disney is that kids need the adults to take them.