Disney is producing a live-action remake of “Snow White,” slated to come out next year. The original, which came out in 1937 and was Disney’s first in a long line of princess films, was characterized by its catchy music, whimsical animation, and, of course, the iconic kiss from the Prince.
Now that Disney is literally and metaphorically attempting to bring the film into the 21st century, the company seems to think it has a lot to change to please modern sensibilities.
Actress Rachel Zegler, who plays Snow White in the upcoming film, has repeated in a couple of recently resurfaced interviews that the old film is “extremely dated,” as if “old” automatically equals “bad.”
“It’s no longer 1937,” Zegler says in one interview. “[Snow White is] not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be … It’s just a really incredible story for I think young people everywhere to see themselves in.”
Zegler’s first mistake is misinterpreting the age of the story: The Disney cartoon came out more than 85 years ago, yes, but the story is timeless: It appeared in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale collection in 1812, but some speculate that the story may have predated the Grimm brothers by hundreds of years. In other words, it’s too old to be dated.
And unfortunately, it makes sense that the focus on the Prince was one of the first things to go: Considering that commenters have decided that the Prince’s kiss of a sleeping Snow White (which saves her, by the way) reveals a lack of consent, it’s no wonder that romance in this adaptation has been sidelined.
The sad thing is that longing for romance is universal, and timeless: Just because this Snow White is apparently a fourth-wave feminist, that doesn’t mean she can’t still long for love.
And topping off the early press for the film, all of which has made it sound pretty dismal, is the Daily Mail’s release earlier this month of photos taken during its production. Apparently, the “dwarves” in this version are not little people at all. Well, one is. The others are a diverse array of actors seemingly much too tall for their roles, and just to round out Disney’s diversity quota, one of them is a woman.
The photos drove so much backlash on social media that Disney representatives disavowed them, saying they were fake — before backtracking to admit that they were real but hadn’t been released officially. It’s like Disney knows that no one asked for these endless revisions of its popular stories.
Gal Gadot, who plays the Evil Queen, says the changes to this new “Snow White” make it “relevant,” and in a sense she’s right: This movie will fit in with Disney’s other identity-obsessed offerings and our culture in which DEI initiatives abound.
Who knows, it could turn out that the new “Snow White” is not so bad after all. But its proposed updates seem largely superfluous; Disney doesn’t need to shame little girls for wanting to look beautiful and find a handsome prince, and it doesn’t need to update the message of the film’s predecessor.
The moral of the original story is that beauty is more than skin deep. The moral of the “reimagined” version seems to be that beauty doesn’t matter at all, and neither does love. What does matter is being a “leader” and having an appropriately diverse friend group. Somehow, that just doesn’t have the same sparkle.