Snowing hate on ‘Snow White’

Welcome to the upgraded fairy tale nobody needed

Continuing its quest to torture millennials, last week Disney hurled the Snow White trailer at its hapless unsuspecting fans. Coming to a cinema near you starting March 21, 2025, brace yourself for the uglified, unwanted, upgraded warrior princess remake of Snow White absolutely nobody needed.

After a tortuous 2 minutes and 24 seconds, we have been threatened with the following: instantly forgettable music (picture the score as water and your brain as a colander), vermin roped in to do some mindless cleaning, nightmarish dwarfs, and a pointless new princess anthem. Keeping in line with this pointless anthem, we also have an impassioned mission statement by our eponymous heroine (whose hair appears to be styled by sarson ka tel) to reclaim the kingdom from the clutches of her no-good stepmother. Where the animated evil queen had no interest in a dictatorship (at least none that she hinted to us), her modern live-action version yearns to spread tyranny far and wide in addition to looking pretty. There is a prince in there somewhere, too, but other than providing mediocre eye-candy and a handy echo chamber for his leading lady, his purpose is unclear.

In just under two-and-a-half minutes, therefore, we know what we are in for: an irritating heroine with zero sense of humour, an inescapably dull villain, and musical that gives heartstrings such a wide berth that said any heartstrings in the vicinity may as well be radioactive waste. It is difficult to convey just how far below average this incoming monstrosity looks to be, although if anyone can be counted on to try, it is YouTube commenters.

“This trailer saved my dad,” pens one user with feeling. “He has been in a coma for eight months, and when I played this trailer, he woke up and got out of bed to turn it off. Thank you, Disney.” As another commenter astutely noted, “If I saw this movie on a plane, I would still walk out.”

A quick recap

To truly appreciate the pain of a mediocre remake, it is necessary to take a quick look in the rearview mirror to remind ourselves how the original Snow White unfolded. Released in 1937, Walt Disney’s classic animation was the first feature-length production of its kind. Cherry-picking the salient features of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Disney’s cartoon sets the scene via a wishing well, a vain evil queen for a stepmother, a conveniently dead father (good Disney parents are an endangered species), and a compliant princess who sounds like she has sucked on a helium balloon. Our high-pitched princess believes in the power of wishing wells, sings her troubles away and, like her maligned princess cohorts of that era, cheerfully engages in housework. Snow White flees from the evil queen when the latter flies into a murderous rage after being informed by a talking mirror that Snow White is the more attractive of the two. Living on the run, Snow White befriends cute woodland creatures who can help with the housework. She seeks refuge in an abandoned cottage which turns out to be the property of a set of diamond-mining dwarfs. The dwarfs are over the moon when they realise their intruder can cook and clean. The evil queen, meanwhile, figures out Snow White’s hiding place thanks to her mouthy mirror, disguises herself as a hideous old woman and palms a cursed apple onto her stepdaughter. The stepdaughter takes a bite and falls into a coma, devastating her dwarf housemates along the way. In a fit of rage, they inadvertently shove queenie off a cliff. Some time later, a prince who was last seen by the wishing well in the wanders over,and kisses Snow White awake. Together, they ride off into the sunset. The end.

Unchartered territory

The trailer for the remake skims through nearly all of this. Within the opening seconds, we are given the highlights of any Snow White story. A wishing well, a castle, a talking mirror, a dead father and a disgruntled stepmother. The sun burns with a warm glow. The evil queen has a mania for her appearance to the point where she is pestering her mirror to talk her up. So far, so accurate. With five seconds in, not much has gone awry. Even the costumes look the same.

By the sixth second, we veer into unchartered territory. “We are going to take back the kingdom,” Snow White is seen gravely announcing to the eye-candy prince. “The people need some kindness,” our heroine implores the queen during an earlier encounter, as if tyrants ever pay heed to this brand of unsolicited advice. Later, Snow White sings – or rather, belts – her rage away in a never-before-heard song. And judging by the snippet we just heard, it will be as painful as Jasmine’s shrieky Speechless from the new and unimproved Aladdin. Zegler already showed off her songbird-like vocals in West Side Story, so quite why her voice had to be misused so criminally here is a mystery.

Snow White’s boring bravado would still be palatable had the remake not slipped into a shot-by-shot remake of the source film, reminding us of magic lost. Our princess has the same iconic yellow dress, a short (but oily) hairstyle, and an uncanny ability to get woodland creatures to do her bidding. Sadly, photorealistic woodland creatures are far less cute than animated ones, meaning that actually, Snow White is just inviting rodents into the house. What is cute in an animation is downright creepy in photorealistic live-action format.

In defence of change

Of course, you are never going to encounter a Disney fan who adored the original cartoon. Sweet-natured though she may be, Snow White is an insipid heroine who merely reacts to whatever fresh hell lands before her. The closest she gets to taking charge of her destiny is electing herself as the dwarfs’ de-facto housekeeper. She has the wide-eyed innocence of Bambi and the street smarts of a baby koala. The helium-balloon voice does nothing to bolster her image. So uninspiring is Snow White that when Rachel Zegler took on the lead role in the remake, she almost immediately informed us she “hated” the 1937 film. The prince’s stalkerish actions appear to have been a particular trigger point. Zegler’s unimpressed take on the old animation is a common view uniting Disney fans, which explains why the studio felt it necessary to give this yellow-skirted princess a purpose in life beyond menial housework.

Pointless and futile

What is confounding is that the Disney-owned ABC network has already brought to life the perfect Snow White. Once Upon A Time (2011-2018) reimagined her story with exquisite detail, ran for seven seasons and gifted us a princess who was a subliminal blend of heroic and hopeful. There was no gap in the market crying out for a modern Snow White; she already existed. It would be as if five men bearing business suits, sensible haircuts and Broadway voices announced they were the rebooted Backstreet Boys. Just like this trailer, they would be something so far from the original that they would be another species altogether. Unwanted, unnecessary, and ultimately, unrecognisable.