TMS Movie Review: Snow White

(Walt Disney Pictures)

After half a decade of two sets of reshoots, pandemic delays, heavy editing and so many rewrites co-screenwriter Greta Gerwig doesn’t even appear with a proper screen credit, Marc Webb’s infamously reported new take on Disney’s Snow White is finally in theaters. One of the most important movies in film history and maybe the most iconic of animated musicals, David Hand’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) is up there with Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music (1965) when it comes to beloved family classics. While naysayers were expecting this new Snow White to be another girlboss, girl power pandering mess, it actually stays fairly close to the original 1812 Grimm fairytale plot wise. Unfortunately, even with the best intentions, it’s not without flaws.

In a magical fantasy kingdom, a young princess named Snow White (Emilia Faucher) lives a happy childhood with her royal parents who are fair and caring leaders. When her mother suddenly dies of a fatal illness, her father marries a dubious noblewoman (Gal Gadot) who becomes tyrannical when The King fails to return home from a battle. A decade later, Snow White (Rachel Zegler) meets a charming, handsome bandit, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) and a group of seven dwarf diamond miners after escaping a secret assassination set up by the Evil Queen. Jeremy Swift, Titus Burgess and Andrew Barth Feldman voice some of the CG animated dwarves and Patrick Page voices the Queen’s psychic magic mirror.

(Giles Keyte / Walt Disney Pictures)

Erin Cressida Wilson receives full credit for the script of Snow White after all the alleged altering, and most of Larry Morey & Frank Churchill’s soundtrack from the 1937 film are replaced with new songs by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul. I’m not going to bother going into things wrong with the writing of this very flawed musical, since this is obviously going to be a huge talking point within the film fan community. What I want to focus on are two big things that didn’t work for me: the special effects and the new soundtrack. Whether real actors playing the dwarves were supposedly replaced by CG animation, I do not know. But I do know that the final product looks way too reminiscent of the uncanny valley in Robert Zemeckis’ mo-cap films from the mid/late 2000s and Dopey in particular looks strikingly similar to the Mad Magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman. And while I wasn’t exactly expecting all the forest animals to be real either, their cartoony animation comes off too artificial opposite the human actors and practical sets and props, as well as the strange ‘realistic’ style for the dwarves’ faces.

But really, what bothered me the most is producer Marc Platt recruiting his ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ songwriters instead of honoring the original soundtrack like he did with Rob Marshall’s interpretation of The Little Mermaid (2023). Maybe Platt or the heads of Disney felt the original music might be too old fashioned for young viewers or they just wanted to capitalize on the success of Pasek & Paul post-EGOT wins, but the new songs just don’t mesh well with the material and feel too trendy. This could be my bias speaking, since I’ve always enjoyed the original Disney classic and haven’t cared for any Pasek-Paul penned musicals outside of Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016). But I think Webb, Platt and co. really missed the mark on Snow White despite the decent elements. Zegler is great casting as a Disney princess with her beauty and musical training, and substituting The Prince from the fairytale with a commoner for the love interest had a lot of potential for a fresh subversion, especially as a fan of the royal female/peasant male trope myself. I even preferred the lighting and art direction here over Jon Chu’s Wicked (2024). But ultimately, Snow White mainly feels unnecessary. [And for the record, my two-year-old nephew loves the original songs.]