The original animated 1937 Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs was branded “Disney’s folly” before release, but soon became a landmark artistic and box-office success. This new live-action version, while similarly plagued with bad buzz and reports of creative chaos, seems unlikely to have such a lasting or significant impact. Despite committed performances from its leads and years of edits and re-edits, it can’t establish a consistent tone through its real and artificial locations.
Director Marc Webb follows the Kenneth Branagh Cinderella playbook closely: he gives his hero a plucky mantra and a love interest with a backstory that goes beyond “charming”. Rachel Zegler’s wide-eyed Snow White doesn’t just hope her prince will come; she wants to be a good leader for her people, restore their faith in the social contract and with it, their empathy for one another. That’s commendable (and politically timely), but the film hits you over the head with it repeatedly; cut through any frame and you’ll find “girl power” etched in the grain.
The dwarves are an unholy VFX disaster.
She’s up against a thoroughly camp Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, cinched tight in jewels and slinking around being unrepentantly evil. So we go through the usual beats of the story: Snow White loses her saintly parents, but not before her father has remarried a thorough baddie. She is then put to work as a maid in her own palace before the queen becomes jealous of her beauty and orders her execution – only for Snow White to escape and take refuge with some small miners.
And of course there are songs, which Zegler delivers beautifully, from the original tunes (not including ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’, which has been judged a little needy) to the largely successful new Pasek and Paul additions. Gadot nails her big showtune and has a lot of fun getting her evil on; the film offers a clever wrinkle that the Queen’s magical powers somehow derive from her beauty, so that Snow White’s growing good looks pose an existential rather than a mere egotistical threat.
That would all be fine, and in fact will probably play gangbusters with little girls everywhere thanks to Zegler’s determined cheer and willingness to take command. In true ‘manager’ style she whistles while everyone else works; she’s cute but not overly focused on being likeable. If her Snow’s pronouncements sometimes feel like self-empowerment by numbers, at least she shows that Zegler was right when she promised that this hero would be more of a leader, and her relationships more developed, than the undeniably passive original.
But then there are the dwarves. An unholy VFX disaster, they slow the film to a crawl every time they appear and there’s no sense of their glowing enchanted forest meshing with scenes shot in real woodlands, or of the dwarves themselves belonging alongside live people. The original Disney designs showcased the squash and stretch of classic animation, but echoing the same look in ‘live’ action is alienating. The film was criticised for proposing to use actors with dwarfism in the roles and also for denying them work, so you can understand that the filmmakers might have felt caught in a trap, but this is no solution. It feels like Jonathan’s bandits were at one point intended as substitutes for the original septet, but instead they now stand alongside patently fake characters who don’t feel or look right.
It's no shame on Zegler, Gadot or even Webb, who you can feel straining for impact in bits of zippy dialogue or a fun comic moment. There are scenes and sequences here that work beautifully, thanks to them. But the film feels compromised and so small; like it’s been Frankensteined into submission in the edit and cut and recut 100 times. You can sense studio interference, scared to put dwarves in the film but also frightened to leave them out; afraid to focus on a princess but reluctant to reimagine her too far; terrified to lean into cartooniness or to rely on realism. Disney has attempted to just replicate the past instead of trying to do something new. That’s the greatest folly of all.
