Disney’s Remake Is Better Than Expected But Still Dopey

It was going to come to this eventually. Beginning in 2010 with the release of Tim Burton’s not-at-all-good “Alice in Wonderland,” the Disney Entertainment Complex discovered they could make billions merely remaking their most popular animated films using live-action actors and modern-day CGI. In the last 15 years, the company has gleefully cannibalized its own catalogue, siphoning nostalgia from the brains of millennials like so much cerebrospinal fluid. This was a curious practice, as the bulk of the films they were remaking were already based on folk tales, ancient stories, or children’s literature that is adapted frequently by filmmakers the world over.

The raison d’être of these remakes (apart from the nostalgia money) was seemingly to allow Disney to keep their flag of ownership deeply planted in tales like “Cinderella,” “Aladdin,” and “The Little Mermaid,” assuring audiences that, yes, their version was the “official” version. Hans Christian Andersen is just some old hack, and there’s no need to re-adapt the source material. Disney cannot own stories in the public domain, but they can use their powerful, octopus-like marketing department to ensure the public thinks of their own movies as the default version. This ethos applies mostly to features, however, and their many mythic short films from the 1930s tend to be overlooked.

Case in point: the first feature film released by Disney, back in 1937, was “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” adapted from the 1812 story published by the Brothers Grimm. That film, directed by David Hand and starring (the unfairly treated) Adriana Castelottiwas a massive success and set the standard for all future visions of the Grimm character. Disney kind of “owns” it, despite the dozens of “Snow White” adaptations that have come since.

With Marc Webb’s 2025 remake of “Snow White,” Disney is once again asserting their ownership over their own material, updating it for a modern audience. The result is, despite the mercenary motivations, affably watchable. It’s hollow, but unlike some more recent remakes, it seems to have thoughts in its head.

Another raison d’être of Disney remakes has been to address the online criticism of their films. “Beauty and the Beast” was often (somewhat lazily) criticized as a story about Stockholm Syndrome, which Disney’s remake addresses. Some complained that the Beast’s servants didn’t deserve to be cursed in the 1991 animated version, so the live-action/CGI remake explained that, yes, they did. Some critics took exception to the fact that “Aladdin” was about Middle Eastern characters, but featured largely white actors, so Guy Richie’s remake fixed that. Disney fans complained that Cinderella and Prince Charming didn’t have any romantic chemistry in the 1950 animated film, so Kenneth Branagh’s remake gave them some. And, thanks to Tim Burton, we now have an authorized version of “Dumbo” with no racist caricatures.

The criticism that Marc Webb seems to be addressing in “Snow White” is that the story previously mainstaged the title character’s beauty. In the 1937 film, Snow White was gentle, innocent, almost childlike in her naïveté, and her most notable character feature was her beautiful pale skin (hence the name). Webb not only gives Snow White (Rachel Zegler) more agency and activity — she takes part in a largely bloodless revolution — but bends over backwards to re-define her name and what it means to be “the fairest of them all.” In this version of things, Snow White was born during a snowstorm, a situation that her royal parents deemed miraculous. They named her after the snow. She no longer has the burden of being named after her fair skin (which, to remind readers, was a beauty standard left over from early 19th century European aristocracy).

These redefinitions allowed Webb to cast a charming and talented lead actress who didn’t have a pale complexion. Zegler is perhaps the highlight of “Snow White,” bringing a great deal of cheer and charm to a pretty thinly written part.

Webb also aims to re-define the word “fair.” When the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot) asks her magic mirror (Patrick Page) who the fairest in the land my be, the mirror points out that “fair” can mean “beautiful,” but also “just.” The Queen is the most beautiful, but Snow White, having been raised by her kingdom’s benevolent royals, has a stronger sense of justice. She also celebrates a kingdom based in mutual kindness and sharing of labor. Snow White promotes a communist ideal, while the Evil Queen hoards the kingdom’s wealth and turns its denizens from bakers and farmers into soldiers. It’s peace, community, and the proliferation of apples vs. vanity, greed, and violence. These aren’t revolutionary ideas, but Webb at least folds them somewhat gracefully into a fable that had previously been about vanity exclusively.

The plot of “Snow White” is more or less the same as the 1937 film. Snow White, a princess, loses her mother to disease, only to see her replaced by a wicked stepmother. The new stepmother instantly turns the kingdom into a violent and draconian place, sending the King (Hadley Fraser) out on a dangerous mission of war from which he shan’t return. Snow White becomes a servant in the castle, only attracting the Queen’s ire when her magic mirror informs her that Snow White is fairer than she. Snow White flees the Queen’s inevitable assassin attempt and ends up hiding deep in the woods with a septet of miners. In that way, “Snow White” is a gender-flipped remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 film “The Beguiled.”

Webb’s additional wrinkle is that Snow White’s Prince Charming, a new character named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), is also hiding in the woods with a ragtag group of misfits and burglars. Like Robin Hood, he causes mischief for the Queen’s itinerant soldiers and claims to fight in the name of the King, hoping to restore the communist idyll through violent revolution.

Webb doesn’t lean into the politics of “Snow White,” but it’s kind of refreshing that the film does have a political point of view. It stands for equality and speaks out against greed. Kindness is a revolutionary tool. The dialogue is clumsy and mawkish, and “Snow White” is very frequently distracted from its political points (mostly by prolonged scenes of Dwarven whimsy), but it’s more than the remakes of “Alice in Wonderland,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King,” or “The Little Mermaid” had to say.

The Seven Dwarfs of the 1937 film are present here as well. They get to sing an extended rendition of “Heigh Ho,” which still doesn’t match the glories of the Tom Waits cover. This time, however, the seven characters are CGI creations with magical powers; the gems they dig out of the mines have undefined magical properties that have no bearing on the plot. They have realistic flesh textures, but outsized cartoon features, making them human and nightmarish in turns. Dopey (Andrew Barth Feldman) looks so much like Alfred E. Neuman, one might think MAD Magazine could sue. They are not human little people, but mystical gnomes, a change made presumably to side-step any uncomfortable mistreatment of little people actors; Peter Dinklage famously objected to a “Snow White” remake for this very reason. Now the miners are no longer human, unlike the very real (and very funny) George Appleby, a little person actor who plays a masterful crossbow hunter.

The seven mystical miners don’t seem to have a lot of personality until they start to interact with Jonathan and his retinue. They function better as background figures, and not the stars. It’s a pity that Dopey is given an emotional story arc, as it’s hard to care about him.

Despite all the above-mentioned politicking, though, “Snow White” is ultimately a middling drama. Gadot, as the Evil Queen, tries to ham it up to the best of her abilities, but her scenes are too mannered to become truly deliciously evil. She’s legitimately bad in the role. Some of the new songs are amusing — I was fond of “Princess Problems,” a whiny anthem that Jonathan shares with Snow White — but others sink into the background. The production design is drab, relying on an animated film’s palate of plain primary colors. Only the Evil Queen is permitted to dress in mostly black and purple.

The additional potlines and characters also make “Snow White” too busy by the end. The scene wherein the Evil Queen uses dark magic to turn herself into a crone happens incredibly quickly, serves a single function, and then is just as quickly undone. The poison apple from the 1937 film becomes a footnote in the remake. A pity, as Marc Webb had every opportunity to toy with Edenic imagery. It almost felt as if the poison apple scenes could have been cut for pacing. That’s a bad way to feel about a scene that had, in 1937, defined the picture.

Ultimately, “Snow White” is better than “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Little Mermaid” — by a long shot — but it’s not as good as Branagh’s “Cinderella” or Burton’s “Dumbo.” And, sadly, it overall still bears the boring sheen of a corporate mandate. This is another cynical enterprise, tapping into certain nostalgic images in the hopes that we’ll pay for the same high we had as children. Marc Webb does what he can to bring thought and personality into the mix, and Zegler is a definite movie star, but at the end of the day, “Snow White” feels like a Dopey little trifle. It didn’t make me Happy, but at least I wasn’t Grumpy.

/Film score: 6.5 out of 10

“Snow White” opens in theaters on March 21, 2025.