In a movie climate where remakes tend to draw sneers of derision and claims that people have just gotten too lazy to invent anything new, Disney’s remakes of its own products are always a chief target. It should surprise no one that a media behemoth would try to make big bucks recycling past hits. Barry Jenkins’ Mufasa: The Lion King, conceived as both a prequel and sequel to the 2019 live-action version of The Lion King, itself a reimagining of the 1994 animated film, may be the best example of the hall-of-mirrors nature of this type of filmmaking. And because Disney remakes of one sort or another just keep coming, from Mulan to Pinocchio to The Little Mermaid, the temptation to be cynical about them is enormous.
Yet a surprising number of the Disney-remaking-itself projects have been wonderful, or at the very least, have found inventive ways to build on the appeal of their source material without slavishly duplicating it. Kenneth Branagh’s vivacious and clever Cinderella (2015), Bill Condon’s joyous, gonzo Beauty and the Beast (2017), Rob Marshall’s practically perfect Mary Poppins Returns (2018): all of these films stand proudly on the shoulders of their predecessors rather than noisily trying to improve upon them. Some of the Disney reinventions, like the 2018 Christopher Robin, Marc Forster’s almost-melancholy meditation on how easy it is to be crushed by the pressures of adulthood, are deeper than you might expect them to be—though even then, there’s always a Pooh Bear or a Piglet padding through the landscape to remind us what really matters.
Now Marc Webb’s Snow White, a live-action reimagining of Walt Disney’s enchanting 1937 animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, joins the ranks of the surprisingly pleasurable Disney remakes, thanks largely to the no-nonsense charms of its star, Rachel Zegler, whose Snow White dreams less of finding the right princely guy than of building a better world for everyone.
Read more: Every Disney Live-Action Remake, Ranked
You already know the essence of the story: Snow White is an orphaned princess forced into servitude by her vain wicked stepmother, played by a slinky-icy Gal Gadot. Webb, director of pictures like The Amazing Spider-Man and 500 Days of Summer, working from a script by Erin Cressida Wilson, begins with the backstory of the kingdom over which Snow White’s parents ruled, a place of singing, dancing peasants who celebrate not just tending the land, but sharing its riches equally among themselves. Snow White’s mother dies; her father remarries, making Gadot’s evil enchantress the new queen of the land. Then Snow White’s father leaves her behind as he embarks on a journey, never to return. The evil queen seizes the opportunity to turn the kingdom into a place of hardship and fear, and to turn Snow White into a servant-prisoner: Zegler plays her, at this stage, as a lonely young woman filled with longing for something she can’t name.
Jealous of Snow White’s beauty, the evil queen orders her killed. The footsoldier charged with the mission can’t bring himself to do it, and she escapes into the surrounding haunted forest—a terrifying place, where gnarled black tree branches grab at her as she tries to run, a detail handily re-created from the original—eventually landing at the quaint home of a group of hardworking dwarves.
The dwarves may be the biggest misstep of this Snow White: rather than being played by real actors, they’re computer-animated figures, and though their characters are vested with appealing attributes—Grumpy is suitably crabby, and Doc is the loquacious, brainy one—there’s no getting around the creepiness of their almost-alive-but-not-quite-verisimilitude. But reimagining an old story also means new opportunities to tweak details that may have rankled in the past. In the Brothers Grimm version of Snow White most of us are familiar with, Snow White ingratiates herself with the dwarves by tidying up their living space; she’s happy to make up their small rustic beds and sweep away the crumbs from their dinner. No wonder they adore her: who doesn’t love a housekeeper who works for free? In the animated version, the animals of the forest, in thrall to Snow White’s gentle, generous nature, gamely help out—a moderate improvement. In this version, Snow White puts the dwarves to work, giving them each a job and acting as a kind of foreman. The 2025 Snow White has enough work to do, getting her kingdom back. The dwarves can make their own damn beds.
Read more: Why Disney’s Snow White Remake Is Creating Controversy
This is where the real value of a remake comes in. It’s convenient to grumble about updates that mess with the classics, but there’s nothing in the new Snow White that dishonors the earlier Disney version. If anything, it reminds us why we loved it. That goes for Condon’s Beauty and the Beast, too: its exuberant live-action retooling of the “Be Our Guest” number—replete with its Maurice Chevalier-esque singing candelabra, as well as a chorus-line-cutie lineup of dancing plates and cutlery—has a zany go-for-broke audaciousness. It’s over the top to the point of madness, but how else do you compete with the artistry of animation, which makes just about any image you can dream up possible? Condon pulls out all the stops; it’s the only rational choice.
There’s something else about these Disney remakes that sets them apart even from a lot of other current big-budget movie projects. So much of today’s moviemaking feels rushed and cheap, as if the studio-money guys have already conceded that most people are just going to watch these movies at home, slumped on their couches, anyway—why splash out? But the Disney remakes, Snow White among them, don’t skimp on the lavish details. Snow White opens with a familiar kind of movie frontispiece: the opening of a story book, this one a leather-bound beauty guarded by a chubby hedgehog. (The new Snow White features a delightful assemblage of computer-generated animals—squirrels, bunnies, swerving, tootling birds—that are much more appealing than the dwarves.) This is how we’re introduced to the story of Snow White’s parents, two kind, generous rulers who long for a child and are thrilled by their daughter’s arrival. The page margins of this storybook introduction are decorated with vivid medieval-style illuminations that appear to come to life before us. They’re just one of those little touches that show evidence of human thought and care.
That’s true of the costumes as well, designed by the great Sandy Powell, who also created a host of sumptuous and cinder-girl looks for Cinderella, as well as a gorgeous array of suitably rustic-looking World War II-era handknits for the children in Mary Poppins Returns. Powell is the master of the telling costume detail: In Snow White, she gives the evil queen a whole wardrobe of glittering, honking jewels that let us know she has grand, extravagant taste. One of the queen’s necklaces, a circlet of ruggedly cut gemstones, conjures the decadent spirit of early-1970s Yves Saint Laurent. I’d wear it in a heartbeat. Does that make me evil, too?
People often laud Disney films for their wholesome messages, even if those are almost always the least interesting things about them. And by now, Disney’s endless parade of modern-day empowered princesses have become their own cliché. The problem with cheerfully and aggressively reminding little girls that they can do anything is that it never occurs to some little girls that they can’t: only when a grownup bends over backwards to encourage them do they begin to question their own confidence and capabilities. Refreshingly, this new Snow White pulls back a bit in the empowered-princess department. For one thing, Zegler’s prince charming isn’t actually a prince. He’s a common bandit, essentially fighting for human rights. (He’s played by Andrew Burnap.)
Snow White may resist her “prince” at first—he wins her over, funnily enough, with a slightly mocking song about her “princess problems”—but she’s not so superhuman that she can deny the pleasures of human companionship. That said, her chief goals here are civic ones, and as the kingdom of her now-dead parents lies in ruins, she dreams aloud of a better future, warning those around her not to become so accustomed to the wicked queen’s status quo that they become hardened themselves: “You’ve forgotten how things used to be,” she tells them, “when people were kind and fair.” Historically, Disney movies are anything but political; they tend to studiously avoid controversy to the point of toothlessness. But this Snow White, emerging in an era of government-sanctioned cruelty, seems to know exactly what it’s saying, even if it chooses to speak only in a discreet whisper. It’s the right Snow White for this moment. Like the animated version that preceded it—released in the midst of a depression that must have seemed never-ending to those living through it—it’s a story in search of a happy ending. Or at least an assurance that no dark, haunted forest can stretch on forever.
