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Snow White returns: A live-action remake that struggles between innovation and tradition

2 Apr 2025

With Snow White, starring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, the Disney live-action remake machine has just attempted a flesh-and-blood take on the animated film that started it all. And it actually kinda works.

It’s difficult to encapsulate how much the film industry, and indeed the entire world, owes to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Walt Disney’s 1937 release was a true landmark that not only fired the starting gun for theatrical animation, but left a mark on Hollywood that persists to this day. And that was just the background story of the movie’s making and release. The actual animated film Snow White tells a tale that is as old as time, and set the archetype for on-screen fairy tales.

Fast forward 88 years and the idea of a live-action remake of Snow White is difficult to conceptualise.

Sensibilities regarding certain plot elements have changed. Audiences expect more sophisticated and nuanced storytelling. Heck, the narrative of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has already been revisited countless times over the past near century, but usually leaves an impression when it takes the form of genre subversion or satire (this author would argue that the best Snow White adaptation we’ve received, to date, is 2007’s Enchanted).

And so, after many years, criticisms and controversies, Snow White is back in cinemas, but now in (mostly) flesh and blood as opposed to hand-painted celluloid. The new film, amazingly, almost succeeds in balancing adaptation with reinvention. However, its successes are thrown by off-brand sights and sounds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV46TJKL8cU

Born to royal parents of a faraway kingdom, Snow White (played by West Side Story and The Hunger Games’ Rachel Zegler) lives under the icy rule of her stepmother, the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot), who relegated the young princess to servanthood following her mother’s death and father’s disappearance.

When the queen becomes threatened by her beauty, bravery and kindness, Snow White is forced to flee into the forest, taking shelter with seven dwarfs of different titles and personalities, and grabbing the attention of a young man named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap). Together, they all set out to overthrow the Evil Queen before she catches up with the princess.

The most impressive thing about Snow White (2025), also known as Disney’s Snow White, is its faithfulness to its source material. Though it may seem pointless to provide the film’s synopsis just now (what human of a certain age hasn’t seen Snow White?), the remake has left its very simple story largely intact, save some tweaks and additions that help it meet current film runtime expectations, and transform Snow White and not-prince Jonathan into characters with actual depth.

Surprisingly, for the most part, it holds up, even succeeding with its refitting of some of the more dated elements from the original film.

Snow White also benefits from a strong sense of sincerity. Rachel Zegler is a confident and captivating title character who manages to bring equal amounts of naivety and motivation to a very undefined role. Along with the rest of the cast, Zegler never rolls her eyes or winks at the audience, reinforcing the film’s fidelity to the original and exemplifying the ambition that’s clearly on screen.

Director Marc Webb knows what kind of movie he’s making, and while the film carries all the hallmarks of previous Disney live-action remakes, a combination of strong visuals and some standout musical performances gives it legitimacy in its field.

However, it’s within the arenas of audio and visual that the remake falters. It starts with the fact that Wonder Woman star Gadot cannot sing. Burnap can’t sing either, but Gadot deals a fatal blow to her performance as the Evil Queen that, as much as she’s strikingly visually accurate to the character she’s playing, she’s unable to recover from. Following her introduction, it’s impossible to take her seriously. Burnap, meanwhile, can get by with his charm, but his new backstory does little to elevate him beyond being there to deliver the kiss of true love... And participate in some action scenes.

The film is very pretty, complete with costumes, locales, and colour schemes that lean heavily into the fairytale aesthetic. It’s all vividly rendered and features delightful details pulled straight from the 1937 film.

It’s a small thing, but I especially like the Evil Queen’s magic mirror, an apparition that commands the space it sits in. But then the seven dwarfs appear and audiences are left questioning the creative choices of the filmmakers. While the dwarfs boast impressive CGI, they are highly reminiscent of Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture animated films from the mid-to-late 2000s, such as The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, just with more cartoonish facial features. Teetering on the brink of uncanny valley, it’s noticeably distracting from the rest of the visual execution.

Ultimately, Snow White is an ambivalent movie recommendation.

It does little to justify its existence as a live-action Disney remake other than being a starring vehicle for Zegler, but following almost a century since the release of its predecessor, it still honours and does good by the groundbreaking animated original — and that’s admirable. Nonetheless, for every few bites of this shiny apple, you’re likely to encounter a rotten taste in your mouth. DM

Snow White is in cinemas, including IMAX, from 21 March.

This article was first published on PFangirl.

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