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Five years ago a $250m remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney’s first full-length animated feature film, must have seemed like a fine idea to corporate executives, who were going all out on remaking the studio’s dated classics into contemporary live-action movies.
But the film – its title trimmed to Disney’s Snow White, set to be released in cinemas this week – has turned into a massive headache for the studio. The press have barely been let near the remake’s stars, Rachel Zegler, who is of Colombian-Polish descent and plays Snow White, and Israeli actor Gal Gadot, playing the Evil Queen. And there are no dwarves.
The film is forgoing a traditional Leicester Square red carpet opening this week; advance ticket sales projections are lacklustre and it hasn’t been shown to reviewers.
But why should a film based on an archetypal fairy tale – of a wicked queen, jealous of her stepdaughter’s beauty, who orders her murder, only to discover that she is hiding in a cottage with seven dwarves, then poisons her with a drugged apple, causing her to fall into a deep sleep, to be awakened only by the kiss of a prince – cause so much bother?
Good or bad, Snow White is destined for a reaction. “It’s a complete quagmire but, realistically, what did they expect?” says Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts in California and former executive editor of the Hollywood Reporter. “You’re going into this with a movie called Snow White. It’s hard to imagine a picture in this DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion], or post-DEI, post-woke age could be more controversial and polarising – and Disney is all about not being polarising, bringing people together and avoiding controversy at all costs.”
Disney embarked on a programme of reinventing its animated back catalogue as live action with Alice in Wonderland in 2010, continuing with Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016), and Beauty and the Beast (2017). But the release of Mulan in 2020, a remake of the 1998 animated film based on a Chinese folklore tale, signalled that folk tales carry contemporary political and cultural trapdoors. There were false rumours that Disney had cast a white lead actress, and calls for a boycott after Mulan’s lead actor Liu Yifei expressed support for the Hong Kong police. The credits revealed that film-makers thanked eight government entities in Xinjiang, where Uyghur Muslims have been detained in internment camps.
Actor Halle Bailey, who is Black and starred in the 2023 Little Mermaid remake, faced racist backlash after being cast as Ariel, who was white in the animated film in 1989.
Zegler, the star of Snow White, who is Latina, has suffered similar abuse. But Snow White also arrives on our screens with a different set of issues. Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson said the 1937 classic had been gently fleshed out for a more contemporary audience and that she had “massaged the theme of her discovering and trusting her own voice and her own purpose with compassion and strength”.
Zegler told Vanity Fair in 2022 that people were making jokes “about ours being the PC Snow White, where it’s like, yeah, it is – because it needed that. It’s an 85-year-old cartoon, and our version is a refreshing story about a young woman who has a function beyond Someday My Prince Will Come.” She has also been criticised for saying the prince “literally stalks” the princess in the 1937 original.
Disney possibly saw controversy coming. When it reopened its renamed Snow White’s Enchanted Wish ride at Disneyland in 2021, it was hit with criticism that the upgraded experience still included Prince Charming kissing a sleeping Snow White – without her consent. The kiss was one of true love, not lust, because the prince thought she was dead, it was explained.
Both Zegler and Gadot have run into trouble with political statements. Gadot, who served in the Israel Defense Forces, spoke at an Anti-Defamation League summit on antisemitism, and her stance on the Israel-Hamas war triggered calls by Palestinian groups for a boycott of the film.
Zegler, on the other hand, has posted “always remember, free palestine” on X. After the US election, she wrote “may Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace” on Instagram. Zegler later apologised, saying she was “sorry I contributed to the negative discourse”.
R&B legend Brandy, who played Cinderella in a 1997 remake starring Whitney Houston as the fairy godmother, has advised Zegler to remember her true audience. “You’re not taking on this role to fit the mould of the critics,” Brandy told Variety. “You’re doing this for every little Colombian girl who has yet to see themselves in a role like a Disney princess.”
And then there are the notorious dwarves, created using CGI animation. Cyrano star Peter Dinklage, who has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, questioned why the characters were included while Snow White was cast diversely. “It makes no sense to me. You’re progressive in one way, but then you’re still making that fucking backward story about seven dwarves living in a cave together?” he said on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast in 2022.
Disney said it has consulted members of the dwarfism community “to avoid reinforcing stereotypes” and, later, that it would replace the seven with “magical creatures”.
Peter Kunze, a historian at Tulane University in New Orleans and author of Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance, says Disney has sometimes struggled to manage the transition from animation to live action, just as Walt Disney managed to make animation more realistic with Snow White than it was with Mickey Mouse.
“There are questions of authenticity that come with the shift,” Kunze says. “In some ways they’re moving away from the principles of the animated film, of fantasy or embellished reality, and getting more realistic. The interesting question is not whether it’s authentic, but in what ways does Disney think it’s being authentic and how audiences respond?
But updating for contemporary audiences and hiring consultants to say how authentic it is, does not necessarily resonate with audiences “who maybe are not looking for Disney to have a culturally rich, in-depth storytelling in a fairytale space. A film can only do so much to capture a culture, and then there’s the question of: whose version of that culture do you capture?” Kunze says.
“In attempting to speak to more diverse audiences by putting a Latina into a Germanic narrative without acknowledging certain elements of what it means to be Latina potentially does little to make space for more Latina stories and just presents new bodies in old stories as progress,” Kunze adds.
It may be that Disney is a touchstone that makes for a big, easy target in the culture wars, and Snow White is the fairest target of them all in its archive. If the movie is good enough, it could cut through the cultural flak. “From the beginning Snow White had red flags waving – a whiter-than-white heroine at a time when Hollywood is moving away from that, rescued by Prince Charming, when that’s a chauvinist trope, and seven dwarves, when the word dwarf is a negative. It’s not like any of this crept up on Disney unawares. But Snow White is also the classic of classics – it is to animation what Hamlet is to the theatre.”
