Ever have one of those days when no
matter how hard you try to be rational, pleasant, and productive, the universe
seems to hate you? You walk out the door and a pigeon poops on your head? You cross the street and a cab
splashes you? You show up for work and everyone blames you for every snafu?
Relax. At least you are not the 2025 film Snow White.
Snow White is a musical fantasy produced by Walt
Disney Pictures. Marc Webb directs. Erin Cressida Wilson wrote the screenplay.
Her best-known work is Secretary, an explicit exploration of a
sadomasochistic relationship between a submissive secretary and her dominant
boss. The songs "Heigh ho," and "Whistle While You Work,"
from the 1937 Snow White, but with new lyrics, re-appear. The song "Someday
My Prince Will Come" is cut. Lyrics to new songs in the film are by EGOT-winners
Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Snow White is 109 minutes long. It opened in
the U.S. on March 21, 2025.
Some scenes in Snow White put a smile on my face and made me laugh out loud. I'd rate the film three out of five stars. What handicaps Snow White is not so much Woke, as it is the Disneyfication of the source material. More on that, below, after a bit of background.
There appears to be a competition out
there to hate Snow White more than the next guy. The Daily Wire's Michael
Knowles hates the film
because, he argues, it undermines masculinity and femininity. Disney
"changed the story from … the original Grimm Brothers Fairy Tale" to
make it "far-left woke terrible … really bad … extremely leftist on every
political dimension: racial politics, sexual politics, class politics, regime
politics." At the opposite end of the spectrum, Nick and Joseph, the two
self-identified "gay homosexuals" at Fish Jelly Film Reviews, hate Snow White
even more than conservative, Catholic Michael Knowles hates it. Joseph says
that Snow White is "nightmare fuel." Right-leaning National
Review hates Snow White; left-leaning National
Public Radio hates Snow White.
Naysayers hate Snow White for contradictory
reasons. I got whiplash listening to the Next
Best Picture review of Snow White. Some loved Gal Gadot as the
Evil Queen and were less impressed by Rachel Zegler's Snow White; others hated
Gadot but luvved Zegler. One critic said Snow White is not Woke enough –
it "whitewashes" Tituss Burgess, a black actor, who plays Bashful, a
white dwarf. WatchMojo.com
has it both ways. It accuses Gal Gadot of both "overacting and
underacting at the same time." Snow White has a meager 40% rating
at review aggregator site RottenTomatoes.
New Jersey's own Rachel Zegler was
tapped to play the title character. Zegler was born in 2001. She was named
after Rachel Green, a character on the TV show Friends. Zegler's mother
descends from Colombian immigrants. Her father may or may not be Polish-Jewish;
the "Jewish culture site" HeyAlma is not
sure about the Jewish part, but Poland
Daily 24 is sure about the Polish part. Zegler identifies as a "white
Latina." Some viewers felt that a paler actress would be better suited to
playing a character named "Snow White" who is "the fairest of
them all." Others accused those viewers of racism. How can one object to
the race of a fictional character, they ask.
The answer is easily recognized. Imagine
a film based on the fictional African diaspora characters of Anansi, John
Henry, John the Conqueror, T'Challa, or Mami Wata. Cast a white actor, or in a
remake of The Color Purple. Or cast a white actor to play the fictional
La Llorona, Coyote, Corn Mother, Sita, Rama, or Moana. Casting a white actor in
these roles would be impossible, and no one would label those objecting as "racist."
In 2022, actor Peter Dinklage, a dwarf,
excoriated the film, not yet released, as not "progressive" but,
rather, "backward." "There's a lot of hypocrisy," he raged.
"They were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White … You're
progressive in one way but then you're still making that f---ing backwards
story about seven dwarfs living together. What the f--- are you doing, man?"
Perhaps because of Dinklage's pre-emptive canceling of the film on Woke
grounds, Disney decided not to hire dwarfs, and instead used CGI. Other
activists then complained that Disney was denying work to dwarf actors.
In 2023, the Daily
Mail published leaked photos of the film's production. A ragtag
group of weirdly costumed men and women march about a meadow. One is a dwarf.
Three are black. Two sport Afro hairdos. The multi-colored and patterned
costumes evoke, not the pre-modern Europe of fairy tales, but rather hippies at
a Grateful Dead concert. The costumes are ugly and they stink of pot and patchouli.
These leaked images broadcast why
color-blind casting and efforts at Woke tweaks fall flat in fairy tale retellings.
Fairy tales are rooted in pre-modern, agriculture-based, monarchy-ruled
European villages. Fairy tale staples like kings and queens, witches and
dragons, cows, goats, geese, wells, castles, peasant huts, perpetual hunger,
and life-death conflicts over inheritance, don't make a lot of sense outside of
that milieu. In fact, fairy tales don't make literal sense at all. Trolls don't
menace goats trying to cross bridges, and giants don't live in the sky above
our heads, hoarding fabulous golden treasure.
Fairy tales, like dreams, demand that we
abandon common sense, modern science, and rigid concepts of how truth can be spoken
and heard; fairy tales demand that we accept the genre's unique reception and
rewards. Inserting genuflections to current cultural or political demands –
like thrusting a black character with an Afro into a medieval European setting
– aborts willing suspension of disbelief. Rather than surrendering to fairy
tales' unique logic, we are derailed to another chore. We are jolted into recognizing
that what matters here is not immersion in the different, demanding, alternate
reality created in the hearts and minds and disseminated, in spite of poverty
and powerlessness, by the courage and voices of long dead European peasants –
no, those creators are not to be honored. Rather, we are to honor Woke; we are
to submit to all that Woke demands of us. Thanks to Woke, we are not temporarily
to inhabit the all-too-real world of a hungry fatherless boy, Jack, and his
widowed mother who is so desperate for her next meal that she sells her only
cow. We are not to feel compassion for the, yes, white peasants who composed
this compensatory tale, in which Jack sells the cow and gains a giant's fortune
thanks to a handful of beans.
Woke declares that white peasants'
hunger, and white peasants' survival through art, doesn't merit our respect.
Rather, we are to pat ourselves on the back because we really, really liked
seeing an Afro hairdo in a medieval European village. Wow, we are so tolerant
and diverse. Our tolerance and diversity blinds us to anything else the tale
has to offer us. And what tales have to offer us is so much richer, and often
so much harder to accept, than our own validation of our own virtue. Our "tolerance"
and "diversity" are in fact arrogant ideologically-imposed blindness
and deafness to the European peasants who kept fairy tales alive for hundreds
of years.
I'm not arguing here for never changing
tales. Bring on a Cinderella with an all-black cast set in my city, modern-day Paterson,
NJ. I'd love to see it. But that one black character inserted in an otherwise
all-white medieval European setting is not that.
People hate Disney's new Snow White because
its star, Rachel Zegler, made disparaging comments about the film's 1937
predecessor, the animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. "The
original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so," she said. "There's
a big focus on her love story with the guy who literally stalks her. Weird,
weird … People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White...
yeah, it is … Our version is a refreshing story about a young woman who has a
function beyond [the song] 'Someday My Prince Will Come' … She's not going to
be saved by the prince, and she's not going to be dreaming about true love; she's
going to be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be."
Gruesome and terrifying world events
also factor in the hate for Snow White. On October 7, 2023, terrorists committed
atrocities and mass murder against defenseless Israeli civilians. That same
month, October 2023, Zegler signed "Artists4Ceasefire"'s letter
demanding that Israel cease operations in Gaza. On August 12, 2024, Zegler
tweeted, "and always
remember, free palestine." In November, 2024, Zegler wrote, "there
is no help, no counsel in any [Trump supporter] … may trump supporters and trump
voters and trump himself never know peace … f--- donald trump." One does
not have to be a Trump supporter to take exception to this perpetual curse
directed at tens of millions of Zegler's fellow citizens.
Gal Gadot is Israeli. Those who don't
hate Snow White because of Zegler hate Snow White because of
Gadot. They claim that they hate her because she is a bad actress. Gadot is a
fine actress and plenty of the hate directed at her is antisemitic. Journalist
Diana Wilson surveyed online reviews and compiled
comments:
"The movie didn't tank because
Rachel is against genocide. The movie tanked because Gal Gadot was committing
it."
"We don't bully Gal Gadot enough."
"Snow White flopped because
Gal Gadot is an Israeli terrorist."
"Gal Gadot's acting israelly bad."
Variety
reports that Gadot received death threats and Disney needed to pay for
extra security, and that Disney also had to pay for a "social media guru"
to tutor Zegler.
As of this writing, Snow White has
taken in about $144 million, according to The
Numbers. That's a lot of money to you and me, but estimates are
that, given production and marketing, Snow White will have to make $500
million to turn a profit, and the film's ability to reach that is in doubt.
People hate Snow White because
people almost worship Disney's 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs is the first cel-animated feature film. Cel
animation involves artists inking and painting scenes on transparent sheets.
Celluloid was sometimes used, thus the term "cel animation." Over
three years, 750 artists produced an estimated two million cels; 362,000
made the final cut.
A small number of animated feature films
made
before Snow White have been lost to time, or had limited
distribution and success. No animated feature film before Snow White was
as artistically ambitious as that film, and none had anything like the
commercial and critical success that Snow White enjoyed. To get a sense
of how different Snow White was from its predecessors, check out The Adventures of Prince
Achmed (1926), the oldest surviving animated feature film
and the most recent one before Snow White using traditional animation,
as opposed to stop motion.
Audiences were astounded by Snow
White's beauty, depth, and innovation. It cost $1.5 million and made $8
million during its initial release; it was the year's top money-earner.
According to Box Office Mojo, all releases have racked up $184,960,747.
Adjusted for inflation, the box office becomes $2,297,000,000; the film is one
of the top
ten money making films in American box offices.
Critics from the New York Times and
Variety gushed. The New Republic's Otis Ferguson – who would die
in uniform in World War II – was head over heels. He called the film "among
the genuine artistic achievements of this country." The long
quote, below, gives the 2025 reader an idea of how breathless 1937 fans
were. The film is
practically
zoological, nearer to the actual life of animals … Take the young deer … shy
but sniffing forward, then as Snow White starts to pat it, the head going down,
ears back, the body shrinking and tense, ready to bound; then reassurance, body
and head coming up and forward to push against the hand … Or take the way the
same deer moves awkward and unsteady on its long limbs in the crush of animals
milling about, as it should, but presently is graceful in flight, out in front
like a flash. Disney has animals that are played up for comedy, like the turtle
here, the lecherous vultures, the baby bird whose musical attempts are a source
of alternate pride and embarrassment to his parents … Walt Disney is a pioneer
… the best and most important picture for 1938 is called Snow White.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs still wows. It has almost 13,000 Amazon
reviews, averaging 4.8 our of 5 stars. A typical review from 2024, "Had
never seen it growing up, I can't believe how good it is."
Given the worship of the 1937 Snow
White, it is inevitable that the 2025 version would be harshly assessed.
Conservative critics are correct on some points. The earlier Snow White is more
passive and meek; the 2025 Snow White is more active and assertive. Zegler's
Snow White overthrows the Evil Queen in a bloodless coup and restores a
socialist economic structure.
Conservative critics are incorrect on a
couple of points. Changing tales is normal. Tellers have always altered tales
to suit perceived audience tastes. And traditional folklore features many
spunky, active, and even warrior heroines. For this critic, the problem in
2025's Snow White is not so much Woke as it is the film's botched
attempt at Disneyfication.
Bambi epitomizes Disneyfication. In this 1942 film, Thumper,
a rabbit, teaches Bambi to walk. A great horned owl teaches a rabbit and a
skunk the facts of life. In real life, of course, great horned owls, the "tiger
of the woods," eat rabbits and skunks, and even attack
humans. Birds serenade Bambi. In real life, deer eat adult birds, their
chicks, and their eggs.
The Disneyfication in Bambi is
powerful enough to create "The Bambi Effect." Humans don't want cute
animals they've seen anthropomorphized onscreen to be killed. Absent predators
like wolves, deer erase the underbrush necessary for ecological health and
diversity. Any effort to cull this population, not even for the meat, but just
to restore habitat, is vigorously resisted. A 2023 USA Today headline
asks, "The Bambi effect: Are deer a bigger threat to NC forests than
climate change?"
Disneyfication doesn't just bowdlerize
nature; it bowdlerizes source material. Bambi is based on Bambi: A
Life in the Woods by Austrian novelist Felix Salten (1869 – 1945). In
Salten's 1923 work, starvation and predation are inescapable aspects of
ecology. Humans are not evil for eating, yes, Bambi's mother. Salten was
himself a hunter who claimed to have killed two hundred deer. "Salten
insisted that he wrote Bambi to educate naïve readers about nature as it
really is: a place where life is always contingent on death, where starvation,
competition, and predation are the norm," writes
journalist Kathryn Schulz.
Salten knew that, without predators, as
ecologist extraordinaire Aldo Leopold points out, deer overrun and destroy
environments. See here
and here. The first
link takes you to Leopold admitting that he had once thought that wolves should
be shot on sight because they kill deer, and human hunters want lots of deer.
One day his gun extinguished the "green fire" in a mother wolf's eyes.
He came to realize that an overabundance of deer results in destroyed habitat
and starving deer. The second link is a short documentary dramatizing how the
return of wolves to Yellowstone resulted in healthier rivers.
Felix Salten wasn't always named Felix
Salten and he wasn't always identified as "Austrian." Siegmund
Salzmann was the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi. He changed his name to escape antisemitism
and Nazism. Some read Bambi as a political protest. Salten writes about "Man,"
that is the man who controls the natural world Bambi inhabits, in a way that
readers have interpreted as a critique of Hitler-worship. For example, a
brainwashed animal says of "Man," "Everything belongs to Him,
just as I do. But I, I love Him. I worship Him, I serve Him. Do you think you
can oppose Him, poor creatures like you? He's all-powerful. He's above all of
you. Everything we have comes from Him. Everything that lives or grows comes
from Him … He isn't wicked. If He loves anybody, or if anybody serves Him, He's
good to him. Wonderfully good!" Nazis burned Bambi the book. And of
course Disneyfication scrubbed any anti-Nazi protest out of the 1942 movie.
Changing stories to meet current demands is nothing new.
Disney studios Disneyfied both Bambi and
both the 1937 and 2025 Snow White for comparable commercial reasons. In all
cases, Disney served up superficially attractive Utopias that are unsustainable.
Before we talk further about the Disneyfication of Snow White, it will
be helpful to address misconceptions about fairy tales, misconceptions too many
who condemn Snow White as Woke fall prey to.
Imagine that you are what most people
have been throughout most of history. You make your living from your hands
doing backbreaking labor. You wrest calories from the earth, the sky, or the
sea. You work with others; otherwise, you would not survive. Winter drives you
indoors, where you perform monotonous tasks by dim light. You mend fishing
nets, card wool, weave linen, embroider. A community member has a way with
storytelling and makes the winter nights shorter and the burden less onerous.
The teller's tales are common property. Everyone knows them already; they've
heard them before. The storyteller tells them anyway. There is no such thing as
the "original" or "authentic" tale. The storyteller tells
the tale in a way that will please the audience she faces. If the audience is
all men, there will be lots of explicit ribaldry. A king does not break a shepherd's
flute in the all-male version; rather, the king cuts off the audacious shepherd's
penis. If there are children and women in the audience, the X-rated material is
disguised – an amputated penis becomes a broken flute. If the audience is mixed
sexes, the protagonist of the tale will be a male. As folklorist Bengt Holbek
remarked, "Men very consistently preferred tales with male protagonists,
whereas woman gave approximately equal attention to tales with male and female
protagonists."
If the audience is all female, the
protagonist may be a female, and that female will be bold, crafty, and
victorious. Given the pressure women feel to be beautiful, and the fear that
they are loved only for their beauty, this female protagonist may present an
ugly façade. She will be Cinderella, covered with cinders, or Tatterhood, who
wears ugly clothes and rides a goat, or Donkeyskin, who wears the skin of a
donkey. The male protagonist must learn to love her beyond her disguise. There
are active females who rescue males, including the maiden who saves King
Wyvern, the princess who saves her six swan brothers, Janet, who saves Tam Lin,
and Gretel, who saves Hansel. There are women warriors, the Valkyrie, Boudica,
Dihya, Zenobia, and Marya Morevna; and women leaders, like Libuse and Wanda.
Heroines in tales told by women for
women audiences strive, survive, and triumph. This is especially noticeable in
tales told in Muslim countries. In an Egyptian tale, parents abandon a newborn baby
only because she is a girl, not a boy. The girl is raised by a falcon. Later,
the girl's mother-in-law chops her to pieces. Thanks to fairy tale logic, she
survives being cut up into "only a lump of flesh" that gets thrown
out of a window. A magic ring reconstitutes her, her husband returns, and he
burns his mother to death. In a Persian tale, a sultan locks his wife in a box,
places it in front of a mosque, and encourages passers by to spit on her. The
abused sultana's daughter, Parizade, after her brothers fail at magical tasks,
dons male attire and succeeds at these manly tasks herself. She thereby rescues
her mother from the box.
The Grimms' anthology, Kinder und
Hausmarchen, translated as "Children's and Household Tales," was
Disney's source. The Grimms, no less than Disney 1937 or Disney 2025, changed
the tales across the seventeen different editions of their book, and they did
so to adhere to audience tastes and their own ideological agenda; Ruth
Bottigheimer is one of many scholars to point this out. Bottigheimer
demonstrates, for example, that as time went on, the Grimms reduced speech
allowed to female characters and increased speech allotted to male characters.
Female characters are punished with increasing sadism, while male characters get
off scot-free for comparable deeds.
Disney is not the most powerful or
prominent force that has altered tales to serve the most marketable ideology.
Nazis also exploited tales. That an ultra violent movement would adopt Grimms'
tales is not surprising when the Grimms' raw material includes titles like
"How Children Played Butcher With Each Other." In the Nazis' hands,
the wolf threatening Red Riding Hood is Jewish; she is, of course, pure Aryan.
In an October, 1939 film, Snow White's father wants to invade Poland. Allies
responded by "temporarily
banning" the tales as part of post-war denazification.
In short, the problem is not that Disney
"changed" an "authentic" tale. Tale tellers have always
changed tales to suit audience tastes. And the problem is not that Disney made the
2025 Snow White more active than she was in 1937. Folklore has always included
spunky heroines.
What, then, is the problem? Let's
revisit Snow White as she appears in the first, 1812 edition of Kinder und
Hausmarchen. In that 1812 version, a beautiful queen wishes for a
"designer baby," that is, a girl with black hair, white skin, and red
lips. At age seven, this daughter's beauty surpasses her mother's. Her mother –
not her stepmother but her biological mother – orders a huntsman to
murder seven-year-old Snow White, and to bring back her lungs and liver. The
huntsman, entranced by the child's beauty, can't bring himself to kill her, and
rationalizes that wild animals will eat her soon enough. He brings back a
boar's innards. The queen eats the boar's lungs and liver, believing them to be
those of her daughter.
Dwarfs take Snow White in because she is
so beautiful. The queen discovers that Snow White is still alive, and then
attempts to murder her daughter by visiting her in disguise. The queen attempts
to suffocate her daughter with a corset, to stab her to death with a comb, and to
poison her with an apple. Because Snow White is so beautiful, the dwarfs do not
bury the now comatose girl, but place her in a glass coffin. A prince happens
by, and he is entranced by her beauty. He orders his servants to carry her around
so he can stare at her all the time, wherever he goes. A servant is annoyed by
this and smacks Snow White. The smack dislodges the half-swallowed apple. Snow
White revives. The happy couple invite mom to their wedding. "They put a
pair of iron shoes into the fire until they glowed, and she had to put them on
and dance in them. Her feet were terribly burned, and she could not stop until
she had danced herself to death."
Now that's a fairy tale! This
tale is unapologetic in speaking truths almost too harsh to hear. Beauty
exercises amoral power. The beautiful queen is a would-be filicide; the
beautiful daughter participates in torturing her own mother to death. Beauty
also makes women vulnerable to deadly mistreatment, including literal or
metaphorical suffocation, definitely literal penetration, and poisoning by the
very fruit Eve is said to have eaten in Genesis. Women engage in fierce
competition to receive a third party's – in this case a mirror's – approval of
their appearance. Snow White's rescuer is a fetishist who stares at her
lifeless form. He "honors her as his most cherished thing on earth."
Get that? "Thing."
What we can immediately discern is that
Disney wouldn't put those dark truths onscreen in either 1937 or 2025. Both
versions of Snow White are bowdlerized, just as Bambi was.
Audiences want happy animals living in harmony, even though that world would
rapidly produce starvation and disease from overpopulation and over-grazing.
Audiences in 1937 wanted a sweet, timid, naïve Snow White. Someone decided that
audiences in 2025 wanted a Snow White who leads a bloodless socialist coup.
In short – the 2025 Snow White is
not a bad movie because the heroine displays feminist agency. It's a not a bad
movie because it changed the "authentic original" because fairy tales
have long been community property, changed by tellers to suit audiences. Its
failures are failures of narrative motivation and flow.
I don't think Snow White is a
terrible movie, just a botched one. There's a lot to like in it. My favorite
feature is the Seven Dwarfs "Heigh Ho" number. The dwarfs were
created using motion capture and CGI. Some viewers found their appearance
repellant. In "Heigh Ho" they made me smile and even laugh out loud.
I'd watch the movie again just to watch that scene. Dopey is given extra depth
in this version. Yes, he looks really weird, but yes, I found him moving, sort
of like E.T., who also looked weird but who also moved audiences. I liked the
overall look of the film; to me it was a visual feast, from the gorgeous pages
of the illuminated manuscript to the Thomas-Kinkade-inspired dwarf dwelling to
the "golden hour" light in the forest. Again, I would watch the film
again just for its visuals.
Rachel Zegler is either miscast or
misdirected. She'd do better playing someone like herself – an opinionated,
twenty-something career girl in twenty-first century, social-media drenched,
urban America. Zegler belts out "Waiting on a Wish" here. The song would fit
better in a Bridget-Jones-inspired musical. While watching
Zegler, I kept thinking of the actresses in previous films who vivified magical
dispensations. Judy Garland in Oz, Josette Day in Beauty and the
Beast, Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins, Amy Adams in Enchanted. These
actresses mustered the wide-eyed, "Gee whiz" innocence, wink-wink
wit, and dimpled charm to make magic believable. Zegler tries hard but she
never really hits the sweet spot.
Andrew Burnap, as Jonathan, Snow's love
interest, is a dud. In 2023, Burnap played King Arthur in Aaron Sorkin's Woke
re-write of the Broadway musical Camelot. Since, in Snow White,
Burnap plays a thief leading a band in the forest, I thought of Errol Flynn as
Robin Hood, and, more recently, Cary Elwes as the Dread Pirate Roberts in Princess
Bride. To play these kinds of charismatic rascals requires qualities Rafael
Sabatini assigned to his hero in Scaramouche. "He was born with the
gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." Burnap's not there.
A gay actor can play a straight lead. Jonathan
Bailey is gay but his characters are super hot heteros in fantasy productions
like Wicked and Bridgerton. Burnap waffles about his own identity.
In the past, he says, "I very much … identified as a straight man. I think
I've benefited from the privilege of being assumed as straight … but I don't
identify that way … I am in a place in my life where I feel like I'm in a space
of expansion and stepping into the full version of myself … I'm sort of falling
into the category of curiosity, questioning and trying to understand my full
self, and that's a really vulnerable, scary but also beautiful place to be."
Grad school encouraged Burnap to realize that "some ideas of masculinity
are a false construct." His goal is to "to transcend that false
construct." This
interview is headlined "Andrew Burnap's powerful words on sexuality
and masculinity will make you rethink your definition of a 'man.'" The
scare quotes around the word "man" don't bode well for a male lead in
a fairy tale adaptation.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is superior to Snow White 2025
not because the earlier Snow White is more passive, not because the Prince is
more masculine, not because the overall message is less Woke. In fact, no less
than Bambi and Snow White 2025, the 1937 adaptation
changes the original tale, and it does so to please the audience and for
ideological reasons. Also, no less than Bambi and the 2025 Snow
White, the Disneyfied 1937 film markets an unsustainable Utopia. In the
1937 film, Snow White is a naïve child, completely lacking any self-protection
or self-assertion. She's a doormat who is naïve enough to allow her murderous step-mother
to feed her a poisoned apple. She's also attractive because of her physical
perfection. No less than the Evil Queen, this Snow White will grow old and
wither. She will also mature into self-protection. Those who love her for her
meekness and her physical perfection will reject an old, wrinkled, worldly-wise
Snow White. Bye-bye perfect girl living in an unsustainable Utopia.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a superior film because the
filmmakers, from the set designers, screenplay authors, song lyricists and
performers were working together, uniformly, to create a coherent narrative
driven by consistent characters. They wanted a good-looking movie that would
delight children and wow adults. Check. They had to excise the grim truths in
the Grimms' 1812 original. Check. They wanted a single-strand narrative that
flies like an arrow away from what folklore scholar Vladimir Propp called
"lack." Lack, as per Propp, is the bad thing that happens that the
story protagonist must fix. In this case, Snow White wants her true status as a
loved princess who has escaped her parent's murderous oppression, and achieved
the autonomy of a matriarch in her own castle. This is what Propp called
"lack liquidated." Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a better
movie not because it has a better message – in a way, the message, on the
amoral power of beauty, is itself free of morality. It's a better movie because
it obeys the dictates for successful narrative art. This narrative high-speed
train has no transfers, no extra stops, no long waits to refuel – the film is
only 83 minutes long.
2025's Snow White tries to
attach, as if applying wall paper, motifs to a tale that cannot support them. As
Zegler stated, the filmmakers decided that 2025's Snow White needed to be a
political leader and a victim of "tradition" and
"patriarchy." This ideological agenda is voiced in the lyrics of Snow
White's "I want song." The "I want song" occurs early in a
musical. The lead character expresses what she wants from life. Her desire
propels the narrative. Snow White 2025's "I want" song is
"Waiting on a Wish." In this song, Snow White does not sing, unlike
her 1937 incarnation, "Someday My Prince Will Come." Rather, in the
2025 version, she bemoans being a victim of patriarchy. The patriarchy
oppresses Snow White through the "story" and the "tale"
they tell her. In other words, Previous versions of Snow White, that show her
as a passive victim requiring salvation by a prince, keep her down.
"Little
girl at a lonely well
With
the same little tale to tell
Feeling
trapped by the walls that hold her
Feeling
stuck in the story they've told her
Another
day where she fades away
Never
daring to disobey…"
She wants to be a brave leader, she
says. She wants to bring back "fairness" to the kingdom. She wants to
be
"Someone
who just might be brave
Someone
no one needs to save."
At the end of Snow White 2025,
Snow White stages a bloodless coup and overturns the Evil Queen. Snow White
restores socialism to the kingdom. People again share all their crops. You
could tell this story in a fetching way if that's the story you start with, but
shoe-horning that story into the Snow White narrative frame makes no sense and
you end up with garbled misfires. The scene where Snow White overthrows the
Evil Queen is simply empty.
Zegler and these lyrics want us to know
that the brothers Grimm, the songwriters from the 1937 version, and Disney all
oppressed women with their tellings of the tale. We have been liberated by new
lyrics that celebrate a Snow White who restores feel-good economic policies. Au
contraire. The 1812 version of Snow White is braver than 2025's Snow
White carrying out a bloodless coup. The 1812 tale tells who really oppresses
women, and that oppressor is a metaphorical woman. Our oppressor is Mother
Nature, who makes all of us slaves to beauty, no matter how amoral it is. Mother
Nature drives us all into competition with each other. No less than in Bambi's
forest, there are limited goods and we all joust for them. That's harsh, but
without that competition, we harm our species' survival. We are DNA and that
DNA wants to mate with good genes, the good genes that beauty telegraphs.
Disneyfication in this case doesn't just
demand that we insert black people into a medieval European village. We must
also insert socialism. The movie opens with Snow White as the daughter of a
king so progressive that crops are shared in common. Watching these opening
scenes of a clumsy amalgam of monarchy and socialism, I thought of Bambi. In
the case of Bambi, Disneyfication demanded a rejection of natural
competition and predation. It presents an unsustainable Utopia where owls don't
eat skunks and rabbits, deer don't eat birds, and only a purely evil human
would shoot Bambi's mother. In that woodland, deer would very quickly diminish
the underbrush required by the rabbits, skunks, and birds. Bambi himself would deprive
Thumper of the undergrowth Thumper requires for food and for shelter. Bambi
would devour those pretty blue birds. In Snow White, where goodness is
defined by everyone sharing everything in common, that ideal would rapidly
result in the same economic breakdown experienced in the Soviet Empire.
Disneyfication wants things pretty on the surface, but unreal, and that retreat
from reality, in the long run, quickly gets ugly.
Fairy tale truths transgress boundaries
erected by both the left and the right. The Grimms' 1812 audience was
scandalized that a tale told by peasants in huts achieved publication and mass
circulation. The Grimms rapidly worked to tame and pretty up the tale. In 1937,
the Production Code would never have allowed the raw conflict in the 1812
version to reach the screen, and that version would never be profitable. In
1937, Disney turned the Snow White character into a girl only a tad more
animate than a doll. In 2025, the left would not applaud a Snow White where
mother and daughter fight to the death over the contested commodity of beauty. So
they muddled the plot and closed with a socialist coup, which has nothing to do
with the underlying story. Disney could have started from scratch and
dramatized any of the above-mentioned active, heroic, female folk heroes, from
any number of countries, white and non-white. Disney took the coward's way out,
and exploited a marketable name and slapped it on a botched story.
Folklorists like E. Tang Kristensen and
Oskar Kolberg, unlike the Grimms, did not polish the folktales in their
collections to comply with popular tastes. The raw fairy tales told by
peasants, and preserved in these and other collections, prepared their
listeners for life's real problems by stating harsh truths in images both
disguised and unforgettable. Fairy tales as told by peasants armed their
listeners with the balm of fantasy and the weapon of truth.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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