[This story contains spoilers for the live-action Snow White remake.]
When Rachel Zegler spoke out after being cast as Snow White in the 2025 remake of the same name from Walt Disney Pictures, she courted controversy by pointing out how the 1937 original is not exactly a flattering depiction of a strong young woman.
But while some of the loudest members of the social-media universe were mad at her for daring to point out some of the flaws of a nearly 90-year old film, she was far from wrong in noting that any remake would be in need of distinctive overhauls to ensure that it would resonate with a 21st-century audience. And when actor Peter Dinklage criticized Disney for redoing the story in which a fair maiden teams up with seven little people, known familiarly as dwarves, he also wasn’t wrong.
The new Snow White, like a number of the other Disney live-action/CG remakes of its animated classics, tries hard to thread a creative needle. The film wants to pay enough fealty to the past while also carving out something new for the future. Or, to put it more directly (and to nod to this film’s love of a specific fruit), it tries to have its apple pie and eat it too. It’s almost surprising that at least one specific change in Snow White works; it’s less shocking that another specific change is particularly painful to experience.
While it’s true that this Snow White follows the same basic story structure as the 1937 original – the eponymous heroine is terrorized by a vain and evil Queen (Gal Gadot) for being more beautiful, leading Snow White to befriend the dwarves, get brought back to life by her true love, and thwart the Queen’s villainy – the love story is greatly expanded upon. Most notably, this time Snow White doesn’t wait for a prince to come (nor does she even sing “Someday My Prince Will Come”). Instead, her love interest is a charming bandit named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), cut from the same cloth as the animated Flynn from Disney’s Tangled.
Zegler and Burnap have a moderate amount of charm together, doing their best to build upon the extremely, almost laughably basic romance between Snow White and her nameless Prince in the animated film. The fact that Jonathan still has to bring a cursed Snow White back to life courtesy of true love’s kiss (after she eats the poisoned apple handed to her by the evil Queen in disguise) is honestly shocking. Considering that the romance is so drastically different, and for good reason, having Snow White come to life via a chaste kiss feels almost too old-fashioned.
The flip side of this kind of reasonable and mildly successful change is Dopey. Not the concept of being dopey, mind you, but the actual character. It’s true that while all seven of the dwarves are in the film, the word “dwarf” is never uttered. (Unlike in the original film, Snow White doesn’t refer to them as “little men.”) The way the dwarves are visually depicted, in garish “photo-realistic” CG, is the most troubling and unpleasant aspect of Snow White, but it’s also something that audiences have had the chance to prepare for since Disney released a production still last year.
No, the big change comes with Dopey, whose primary trait in his animated form – that he does not speak – isn’t the case anymore. When the film opens with the classic Disney-storybook image, we hear a young man narrating, so the audience can learn Snow White’s backstory. It’s only late in the film when the obvious becomes dreadfully clear: that narrator is Dopey himself (Andrew Barth Feldman), since it’s through Snow White’s kindness that Dopey is brave enough to speak, shocking both her and the other dwarves.
There are other, smaller changes to the story in this Snow White, such as the fact that Jonathan isn’t just not a prince, but is also joined by a group of would-be bandits/theatrical performers who fight in the name of Snow White’s father and attempt to encourage her to be as brave as her late dad was.
There are also plenty of new songs (even the trio of musical numbers carried over from the original have extensive new lyrics from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul), though none of them have the same special, ineffable quality of the originals. But it’s those two key changes – turning Snow White’s happily-ever-after into something with detail and dimension, and giving Dopey a literal voice – that serve as a fascinating, if frustrating, depiction of the creative whiplash of the Disney remakes as a whole.
When Disney decided to remake Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, it was trafficking in nostalgia, but it was also stepping into the same minefield as when it remade Lady and the Tramp and Dumbo. Each of those originals have offensive depictions of non-white characters (like the Siamese cats in Lady and the crows in Dumbo), and each of their 2019 remakes rightfully remove those depictions.
But the difficulty with doing right by an older film that may still boast fans thanks to positive childhood memories, while also grappling with those films’ more awkward and potentially embarrassing aspects, is that you end up with something that’s meant to please everyone by challenging no one.
Snow White definitely wants to upend our expectations based on our memories of the 1937 original. But it still wants to conclude with Snow White falling for a prince, and having been helped to her happy ending by seven little men whose singular traits are in their respective names. This movie, like the other remakes, wants to have it both ways and ends up going nowhere.
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