What Does the World Owe Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

            When I say “first animated feature-film” what comes to mind?

            If you’ve been paying attention to any channel of pop culture, and even whether or not you are on board with the Disney mythology, then you know that Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first ever full-length animated film. (Kinda. The Adventures of Prince Achmed made use of paper-puppetry way back in 1926, but that wasn’t quite the trendsetter that “Snow White” was.) You might even know about all the newspapers calling the film “Disney’s folly” or even specific anecdotes like that there somewhere around fifty different proposed names for the seven dwarfs (#justiceforGassy). 

DC League of Super-Pets (2022)

         But in popular discourse, lots of people will discuss Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as little more than a necessary icebreaker. A sort of cinematic ancestor whose pioneering efforts may have been necessary to get the family where it is now--but one whom no one particularly likes to visit during the holidays or even really knows anything about. The popular legacy for the first animated film is seldom considered beyond enabling this deluge of twenty-seven Despicable Me films.

           (Many people also regard Snow White as that initial draconic head on the hydra that would eventually become The Disney Princess franchise and so spend their days trying to slay the beast. However, I’ve already released a three-part rant on the contradictions in trying to use feminism to dump on the Disney Princesses, including and especially Snow White, and so for the most part I am going to leave those talking points out of this ...)

    We’ve moved so far past the specific hurdles that inhibited a film like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from being made that it’s nigh impossible to consider just how bizarre it was that this film ever worked, or that it would ever be so embraced. No one considers what a feat it is that you can create seven dudes with your pencil who basically look alike, but the micro variations in their movement and in their expression can reveal seven distinct personas. Walt and his team went through incredible lengths to find a new way to create storytelling, to add to the pantheon.

            Wednesday nights were apparently movie nights at the studio, and Walt made a point to screen an array of films, from horror to musicals to comedy to drama, all influences that they could draw upon for inspiration. Animator Marc Davis described, “We saw every ballet. We saw every film. If the movie was good, we saw it five times.” Walt didn’t just see this as just a cool lab trick. He saw it as a chance to touch the cultural consciousness in a very real way.

    Today what I’d like to do is detach “Snow White” for a moment from its normal lineup within the Disney canon for a moment and look at it instead as a piece of film history. There are all sorts of works centered specifically on the production of the film–the process of animation, the invention of the multiplane camera, etc. I see this more as an exploration of the artistic implications of this film. What specifically about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was so revolutionary, what risks were Walt and his team making, and why is it that closing in on a century after the fact, we still haven’t really gotten over it? 

 

"Who Wants an Hour-Long Cartoon?"

         Animation had a presence in early film, yes, but only in the specific realm of animated shorts. Little appetizers that played in front of “real cinema.” You obviously had Walt Disney and his own Silly Symphony and Mickey Mouse shorts, but you also had figures like Betty Boop or craftsmen like Winsor McCay. Generally the tone of these outings was very light, very plastic. 

            But Walt saw possibility. He saw a means of using animation to tell stories that could not be replicated by live-action film. He saw animation as being on par with “real film,” and this was a bold vision for cinema. The voice actress behind Snow White, Adrianna Caselotti, described her experience, saying,

''They had told me that it was going to be a little longer than their shorts, which were 10 to 12 minutes,'' she said. ''So I thought it would be 20 minutes long or so. I didn't realize what had happened until I went to the premiere. I saw all these movie stars -- Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, Gary Cooper -- everybody was there. I discovered this thing was an hour and 23 minutes.''

            By July 1933, Walt was publicly speaking about his intention to create a full-length feature film entirely animated. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would premiere at the Carthay Circle Theater four and a half years later. Various accounts will disagree on exactly how bad of an idea everyone was saying it was, but Walt was certainly swimming upstream with this project. Leon Schlesinger, producer of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies for Warner Bros, said in June 1937, 

Minnie the Moocher (1932)

“Brevity is the secret of the success of the short subject. Give the theater patron just a little bit less than he wants and he goes away satisfied and waiting for more. Cartoon makers have been in business for 20 years on that policy, and I have my doubts as to the success of a cartoon which will run at least an hour in length.” 

            Six months later, Schlesinger would concede, “We’re businessmen. Walt Disney’s an artist. With us, the idea with shorts is to hit ‘em and run. With us, Disney is more of a Rembrandt.”

"Snow White" Arthur Rackham (1909)

            I also want to talk briefly about the process of adaptation because another thing that tends to get buried is that Walt's version is actually a fairly committed retelling of the Grimm Brother's fairy-tale, particularly in comparison to Disney’s later fairy-tale adaptations. Films like Beauty and the Beast and Tangled borrowed the premise of the fairy-tale they were adapting, but the shapes of the narratives were fundamentally different. Grimm’s Rapunzel doesn’t leave the tower until her captor kicks her out, and the Beaumont Beauty and the Beast just has the two lovebirds having dinner over and over. Meanwhile, Frozen is less an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” than a tangential thought experiment.

   In the context of larger adaptation, I don’t really champion one approach over the other, but it is interesting in the set-up of Disney and its relationship with existing material. The story material for Disney’s first feature-length film was basically all there.

            Most of the additions to the film come with expanding certain encounters, mostly fleshing out Snow White’s interactions with the dwarfs. Disney’s Snow White also gets to have a brief encounter with her Prince at the start of the film. But there are as many omissions as there are additions. We lose a lot of the exposition, for example, including the explanation for Snow White’s namesake, and how the princess even came to be in this situation with her stepmother in the first place. The Queen in the fairy-tale also makes a few attempts on Snow White’s life once she’s with the dwarfs. The apple stunt was a last resort. 

"Snow White" Robert Sauber (2015)

    She tries to get her first with a comb imbued with poison, and then again with a lace enchanted to suffocate her, but the dwarfs resuscitate her both times by removing the offending objects. When they find her dead from the poison apple, however, they have no sense of what’s wrong with her, which is what convinces them to put this girl on ice.

            This is also where Snow White’s final awakening went a little off script. Grimm’s fairy-tale has The Prince take the coffin back to his castle while she still sleeps. While the coffin is in transit, one of the pallbearers trips and bumps the casket, and the impact causes the poison apple to dislodge from Snow White’s throat, and that is what awakens her. 

    Walt and his team rightfully looked at that resolution and thought, “Hm … is there a way we can make this ending better than specifically her horking up apple?” The film instead took inspiration from the story of Sleeping Beauty, which had The Prince reawaken The Princess with the kiss of true love. (Makes sense, Disney’s own adaptation of Sleeping Beauty would borrow a lot of discarded ideas from this movie.)

            The original Grimm’s story for some reason also has The Queen die a morbid humiliating death at Snow White’s wedding. Mirroring The Queen’s repeated attempts to kill Snow White with corrupted gifts, The Queen is given a pair of iron shoes which are red hot and made to dance in them in front of everyone until she dies from the pain.

            The Queen’s ending in the animated film is considerably less sadistic, and I’d argue at least as poetic, if not more. There is an element of deus ex machina to the queen just getting crushed by some random boulder, but I also think there’s something to not having the good guys take out The Queen Sopranos style, even if she does “deserve it.” That’s not the character of this story--this is not how Snow White would have wanted the problem resolved. It’s also not like in Sleeping Beauty where we’re launching a sword at a literal dragon. The Queen’s a person. The only way we can have her die is if it’s at her own hands or else some act of God--or sort of halfway between, as it is in the film.

            Moreover, the fact that The Queen meets her end in this old and decrepit form has a lot more punch to it. It was her vanity that drove her to such wickedness in the first place. She tried over and over to kill this little girl who was doing her no wrong specifically because she wanted to be the prettiest girl in the room, and here she is lying at the bottom of a cliff that she climbed herself in this shriveled up little shell for all eternity. Or at least until the vultures are done with her.

  There had been dramatized versions of the Snow White story before Walt Disney, including silent films and stage performances. But telling this story with drawing and paper would present new avenues that would open up story possibilities not available in other formats. Children who grew up with Margeurite Clark in the 1916 movie didn't have the opportunity to be traumatized by The Queen's body-horror transformation. Animation can do things that other mediums can't, but only if you know how. 

    And there was very little about animation that had been proven and tested in 1937.

Off to Work We Go

Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse (2018)

   As we discussed in our look at Finding Nemo, animation quickly runs into the question of how realistic things ought to look. Realism can lend a certain authority to your story, but the limitless possibilities of stylization can be too enticing to turn down.

    But with this, Walt was trying to prove that animation could be a genuine competitor with live-action storytelling. That was only going to work if the animators could bring a layer of realism that had not been attempted or even imagined before with cartoons. That realism would prove the legitimacy of not only this film, but also the entire medium. As film historian, JB Kaufman noted, “If a character moved in short, jerky actions, calculated to get the figure from point A to point B with a minimum of effort, it didn’t much matter whether the character was Krazy Kat or Silk Hat Harry.” Intricacy revealed personality, humanity.

    Moreover, it was that extra layer of realism made the audiences buy into the stakes of the story. There were many early iterations that presented The Evil Queen as a somewhat comic character, more along the vein of what we’d get with The Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. But the artists figured out that the audience would have the most investment in the story if the villain were genuinely threatening, and the way to do that was to have her appear as lifelike as possible, and you can see the results. It’s that flare in the Queen’s eyes that has us believe that Snow White’s life is genuinely in danger.

            And yet, it also becomes incumbent on Walt’s team to not leap so far into realism that we lose touch with that necessary thread of fantasy that is so necessary to make this film work. This is also a film where a woodland deer can use its little tail puff to pump water into a sink faucet so that the chipmunks can wash the dishes. The team turned over basically every stone trying to close in on that ideal balance between fantastical and real. 

    There were multiple workshops trying to find that golden mean. The ultimate secret to holding both those things in their hand at the same time was best explicated in a studio-wide memo circulated in December of 1935, two years before the film would premiere. If ever there was a single best explanation of the purpose of animation, it was in this document where Walt explains, 

Belle (2021)

   "The first duty of the cartoon is not to picture or duplicate real action or things as they actually happen--but to give a caricature of life and action--to picture on the screen things that have run thru the imagination of the audience. To bring to life dream fantasies and imaginative fancies that we have all thought of during our lives ... The point must be made clear to the men that our study of the actual is not so that we may be able to accomplish the actual, but so that we may have a basis upon which to go into the fantastic, the unreal, the imaginative--and yet to let it have a foundation of fact, in order that it may more richly possess sincerity and contact with the public."

            In the end, most of the character designs still lean toward caricature, especially the dwarfs who wind up taking most of the screentime. The realism comes in how these cartoon figures move and interact in a physical space. When the dwarfs scratch their head, their hair gets ruffled. When the wind blows through The Queen’s cape, it ripples and undulates. When Snow White sees all the steps that need washing, her shoulders rise and fall as she sighs. 

    Being able to slide between these two things also opens up many avenues for the story to imbue humanism or character into places where you would not find it naturally. That is how we understand that this girl who's just found out her stepmother is trying to kill her would realize her world isn't safe--and start seeing threats in every branch or bush. Yet because the animation of Snow White herself contains "that foundation of fact," we still believe in the stakes of the situation. 

   There was, however, one character who could not find his place between cartoonism and realism. 

            Snow White’s true love was intended to feature in many more scenes than the finished film allows. There was, for example, a sequence conceived in which The Queen tormented the captive prince in the dungeon with her plans to murder Snow White before leaving him to drown in the flooding basement. The Prince was to escape with the assistance of some animal allies of Snow White and ride off to save her, arriving too late. As late as October 1936, about a year before the film would finish, this treatment survived. All these scenes were scrapped after Walt’s animators decided they could not convincingly portray The Prince for more than maybe thirty seconds at a time.

           Caricature just did not suit the demands of the character they had envisioned. As they tried to put their pencil around this grand romantic hero, his aura just dwindled. Animation can make, say, a young princess more darling, seven little men more clownlike, or a wicked queen more theatrical, but add any of these qualities onto The Prince, and suddenly he’s hard to buy as a romantic figure. There was an idea of maybe casting him as a playful, childish character to make him more tenable for the artists, but that just depleted all the gravity of his relationship with Snow White. Basically no one wanted to animate this dude, and so they kept hot-potatoing his scenes around the studio as his screen time kept shrinking until his role was reduced to the bare minimum.

            This problem would persist through Cinderella as well, which is why her Prince barely makes a cameo either. It wouldn’t be until Sleeping Beauty, over twenty years after “Snow White,” that the animators felt comfortable portraying a realistic human male character. Most of what Prince Phillip does in that film is fulfill the tasks that were originally assigned to Snow White’s Prince way back when. The Prince and his lack of characterization is another one of those things that internet critics like to submit to the jury as proof of Disney poisoning the children with its patriarchal propaganda–the truth is way more mundane than all that. 

            We could speculate for a while about whether Walt and company would have been able to display Snow and Princie experiencing a kind of courtship that wouldn’t get Cousin Milicent all in a furor, but that’s giving too much credit to the wrong ideas. Audiences, especially young audiences, actually have an intuitive grasp on when the metaphor of storytelling takes over. It takes the full force of Plotholes.com to sap them of that affinity for imagination. Even in its streamlined form, Walt and his team are still able to impart the essentials of Snow White’s story with The Prince. Because they couldn’t display the intricacies of human interaction here, the sequence falls back on archetype and universal truths about what it’s like the first time you meet someone who is going to change your life. Kaufman describes,

    “Walt is gambling on the loveliness of the imagery to carry out the story, and it’s a wise gamble; we’re instantly drawn into this fantasy world. Snow White, scrubbing the bottom step, looks up at the rest of the staircase and sighs, expressing her weariness more eloquently than a surfeit of spoken dialogue could do ... wordy explanations are unnecessary because the film makes its appeal directly to our hearts. This is the simplicity of legend, of myth … in this opening, Walt and his artists offer us an unabashed romantic story that is not afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve. And, adult or child, we gladly submit to it.”

            But animation was only a part of that fantastical element. That extra ingredient was, of course, the film’s ability to use music and song to carry the story that much further.

 

With a Smile and a Song

    As we discussed in our look at the Disney musical as a subgenre, there was a lot about Disney’s approach to musical storytelling that was groundbreaking for the time.

            It wouldn’t be for another few decades that the Broadway show as we understand it now would be standardized and the “story musical” that we associate with Broadway today started to emerge. The popular movie musicals of the day were more in the vein of The Gold Diggers of 1933. Movies like this almost always followed stage or film actors, and the story was interested in the humorous antics it took to put a show together. The musical numbers emerged out of very specific circumstances. It’s not like the music in something like The Greatest Showman where it’s this sort of internal radio station that a person or people can spontaneously tune in to in whatever circumstances and instantly know all the words and choreography. They emerged from the in-universe performances, following what we generally know about song as a product of staged craftsmanship. 

    And the songs in these films were often … not totally incidental, but more echoes of things we already knew. Ginger Rogers sings at the start that “We’re in the Money,” to remind everyone that there’s a Depression going on just outside the theater, so we’re all kind of thinking about how nice it would be to have money. 

    The musical sequences were basically the centerpieces of the films in which they featured, and yet you could often extract them in their entirety and miss virtually nothing about who these guys were or what they were doing. They weren’t really vehicles for character or plot information the way we think about it. There would be some musical pieces that would experiment with more spontaneous music, but few if any had really committed to the idea in the way that Snow White would, and certainly none of them would reap the same rewards.

            With Snow White, music becomes the space where the main character confesses her secret desires, secret hopes that would only be sullied by the use of dialogue. And these songs actively reveal things about this specific story and the characters acting it out. There is universality to “Someday My Prince Will Come,” yes, everyone knows what it's like to hope for a better future. But the specific lyrics that emerge could only come from this character and this moment. 

    That's an element of the fantasy. You have to see the wonderland she's building with her words, acknowledge the daydream, and choose to see yourself in it anyways, and that transformation becomes just a part of the magic. And without this insight into Snow White’s character, her eventual happy ending would lack the poetic triumph that is so critical to this film’s experiment. Even something like the dwarfs blubbering around a water trough while they perform water torture on Grumpy, well, that serves a purpose. It demonstrates how this girl’s sudden entrance into their life is forcing them out of their comfort zone and they’re having to learn how to do things like wash their hands for the first time. 

    But it also wasn’t just the method of crafting song numbers that was unique. Other musicals of the day almost always took place on stage or in front of a camera, their songs emerging from that very specific venue. Walt and his team were the first to see the inherent poetic-ness and lyricism of music lent itself to the dreamlike landscape of animation, that a person could be doing Saturday morning chores around the castle and the music would just grow out of her. “Snow White” helped unlock in musicals what they should have been all along.

    And it would take a minute for the technology to fully catch up with Walt’s vision. An early concept for “Someday My Prince Will Come” featured a fantasy sequence in which Snow White imagined dancing with her prince on the clouds. The exact reason for discarding this sequence is not known, but it may have had something to do with the animators not being comfortable with giving The Prince extra material to work with. (This would be another thing that Sleeping Beauty would borrow from this movie.) There would be room for Walt and his team to grow after "Snow White."

            But Walt also didn't just write a blank check for songs to fill the radio. There was also a lot of thought given to when music was a natural method of expression, and what it would take for the characters and the audience to arrive at this place organically. Walt would say, “We should set a new way to use music, weave into the story so that somebody doesn’t just burst into song … It would be more than simply movement plus sound.”

    Snow White’s belief that everything gets better “With a Smile and a Song” might be a perfectly suitable vehicle for music, but how does one segue to a mindset where music feels natural? The film’s solution was to have the birds, already a vessel of music, priming the audience by having them vocalizing back and forth with Snow White. That foundation readies the audience to believe that the next thing to come from Snow White has to emerge as a song.

            It isn’t really enough to want to put a song in a certain space to try to fill a market need. Music is a way of accessing something inherently emotional, yes, but storytellers need to earn the audience’s trust first by understanding what it is that moves a person to music in the first place

The Fairest of Them All

East of Eden (1955)

            As with most animated features made prior to the 1980s, “Snow White” as a story tends to feel inaccessible to segments of the internet today. The film doesn’t really follow the normal Joseph Campbell track of storytelling. Snow White’s character is less a psychological case study than a window for the audience into the extraordinary circumstances of the world she occupies.

    The internet likes to absorb this into its “Disney Princesses are bad role models" campaign, but her lack of characterization relative to someone like Scarlet O’Hara has more to do with the expectations of animation at the time than anything gender. As a protagonist, Snow White is about as fleshed out as Pinocchio three years later or Mowgli thirty years later, and that's a perfectly valid form of storytelling. Animation is all about distillation, in understanding something so well that you can describe it in only one or two attributes, basic shape and color, and your audience will see it even clearer than they did before. Animation just lives in a different world than live-action film, and on a level people understand this. 

    No one, for example, calls out the narrative looseness of something like Spirited Away (and I’m not saying they should). There’s very little in the way that film’s narrative events play out that follow your Screenwriting 101 templates. Chihiro’s central goal of finding her parents sort of drops in and out of focus in a larger-than-life adventure that almost feels like it’s making itself up as it goes along. But because animation as a medium almost plays in a dreamlike world, the narrative can fall an almost stream of consciousness track.

    There are certainly motifs one can track here, like the way Spirited Away comments on society’s deadly obsession with work, especially in the context of things like Japan’s own economic situation at the time of the movie’s release. But as with a lot of Miyazaki movies, the film minds things like inciting incident, character autonomy, three-act structure, or setup and payoff as its own discretion. The real goal is evoking a feeling in the audience, which is how animation behaved for the first several decades of its feature-film lifespan. It wasn’t until around the 1980s that Western animation would start to prioritize these things—in large because this is when animation was starting to compete with live-action filmmaking.

    Much of what can be said about a film like Spirited Away can also be said of the very first film to play in this dreamworld of animation. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs proves the cogency of its story not in the articulation of a Joseph Campbellian character arc, but in how completely they envelop the audience in the embrace of this other world they’ve summoned from ink and imagination. That said, “Snow White’s” dream world still answers to the basic arithmetic of narrative. These things look perhaps a little different for this film, but they’re still there.

The Shining (1980)

            What psychological films have in common with more emotional films is that they center on some kind of question, something unresolved in the audience. We are choosing to participate in this narrative because we want to know what the outcome is. Even when there are no wider societal repercussions, as in something like a superhero movie, we invest in stories and the ideas they explore because they say about human values and human nature. What would it take for a man’s demons to naturally arise in him if he were left in a vacant hotel all winter with his family, such that he would actually be compelled to chase his wife and kid through the halls with an axe? And what would that mean about the systems we all participate in? 

            So, what exactly is the driving question of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

            Right off the bat, we’re introduced to this idea that Snow White’s life is literally threatened by her Wicked Stepmother. There’s naturally a hanging question of what will happen to this sheltered little girl who is out experiencing the real world for the first time. But there’s a further question of what would that mean? Why do any of us care what happens to Snow White?

            Simply put, it’s because we find Snow White and her incandescent goodness endearing, and we want to believe that something so pure can somehow survive this world that seems actively out to destroy all pure and helpless things. This is all communicated very well within the film itself and the elements at play.

            People tend to take certain aspects of Snow White, as well as Disney mythology, as just a given. Like, “She’s a Disney Princess, of course she’s going to have a bunch of squirrels following her around doing her dishes and whatnot.” As a result, the narrative use of these motifs tends to go unexamined.

            There isn’t anything specifically in the fairy-tale that lets us know that the princess has like an army of bunnies who will do her laundry for her. That’s mostly an addition by Walt, and there are easily discernible motivations for doing so. Part of that is just that it was familiar to the artists--most of the subjects of Walt’s animated shorts were already animals, so the animators already had some experience with playing around in this sandbox.

   But letting Snow White have her own little animal parade has specific impact on this story. This communicates her proximity to the small and voiceless members of her world. When she sees a little bird on the ground, she is the kind of person to see it as some mother’s child, someone who has been displaced, who is scared and needs comforting. There's something to this film's ethos that feels very Charlie Chaplin (and indeed, Chaplin and Disney were apparently good friends, Chaplin himself even being one of Disney's early proponents in this animation adventure).

    These are things only visible to the eyes of someone as gentle and discerning as Snow White (and further, only possible to convey through the interface of animation). We care about Snow White because she is this living personification of kindness and goodness. The thrust of the text becomes about whether or not such a vessel of purity will survive this world that is so dark and wicked. 

            Grumpy winds up being a pivotal role in this equation, not just because everyone loves a pessimist. He’s there to act as a sort of antithesis to Snow White’s unrelenting optimism. He’s there to challenge her without being actively hostile toward her. Grumpy works like a stand-in for the audience members who maybe haven’t totally bought into this fairy-tale nonsense, and he becomes a barometer for how the skeptical viewer might gradually come to appreciate Snow White as a character brings to the table. And that is exactly what happens. (This is a very effective method of bargaining with your audience, which is no doubt why Disney would return to this dynamic in the 21^st century with characters like Flynn Rider or Nick Wilde, which I explored in my tribute to Tangled.)

    We see that even though he initially repels Snow White, she eventually wins him over with her sheer warmth. Honestly, what really sells the emotional beat of Snow White’s funeral is seeing Grumpy bursting into tears. That is how we know that Walt succeeded in his ambition to create “real cinema” from ink and paper.

    Whether it’s seven little dwarfs, a band of forest animals, or a romantic prince, anyone who comes in contact with her uncompromised gentleness can’t help but be drawn to her. This explains exactly what it is about Snow White as a character that makes her the fairest of them all. This is what The Queen is so threatened by.

            The world is certainly better for her and her indiscriminate kindness, but how can that altruism be expected to defend itself? How can someone who sees good in everything know when someone is wishing her harm? When the old hag comes knocking at her door, Snow White is too good to assume that this person would ever wish her harm. This is exactly why she is so vulnerable, and why the film has narrative motility.

                    To really understand what Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs brings to the table, you have to be willing to engage with it in a way that society has conditioned itself not to. You have to take off those cynic-glasses and let yourself imagine, as audiences did in 1937, that the very embodiment of goodness is resting in that glass coffin, that the love she put out into the world was so rich, so deep, that it couldn’t bear to put her in the ground, and that a fleeting moment of pure joy from long ago that she shared with a kind stranger would be sufficient enough to will her back to life.

    Something that tends to get lost on modern viewers is that this saccharine little fairy-tale cartoon about happily ever afters emerged during the thick of America’s Great Depression—there was plenty for 1930s audiences to be disenchanted with. (Honestly, maybe that’s why there is such emphasis on the dwarfs as being working classmen who go out to earn an honest day’s wage. Like, one of the centerpiece songs is specifically about going to and from work, and that’s the whole song …) Idealism. Hope. Kindness. These are not antiquities. These aren’t things that our grandparents settled upon because they just didn’t know any better. These are things that transcend generation or circumstance. 

    That is what it means to be timeless. 

 

I’m Wishing … 

            So, I’m obviously releasing this piece in conjunction with the release of Disney’s latest remake atrocity and putting this out in an ecosystem that is not necessarily empathetic toward the artistic contributions of this movie, and so we might as well talk all about that.

            There is a segment of the internet that has made it very difficult to critique this remake. (They have a lot in common with the crowd that’s made it difficult to say, “Splash Mountain used to be my favorite ride at Disneyland. I sure am gonna miss it next time I go.”) I’m not here to add to the crowd that has made the bullying of Rachel Zegler their life mission. I don’t see that as a major sidestep because at the end of the day, Zegler was never really the problem with this remake. It could have been almost any Gen-Z actress spouting out the lines about Disney mythology that Disney has believed about itself since basically the start of the millennium. The problem is way deeper than that. 

            As with the majority of these remakes, the impression seems to be that the animated film’s visuals and visual gags have conditioned a nostalgic trigger in the minds of Disney adults, and this is what Disney fans are responding to rather than the narrative fabric of the story. So long as they build their remake around nostalgic imagery like this, they can fill in the story and character slots with whatever they want. “And why wouldn’t we want to do top-dollar refurbishing on such a dated story?”

    Hence, this remake appears devoted to the aesthetic of the animated film (to an extent; they don’t know, for example, how to pull of Snow White’s 1930s hair bob), but no one has dared to imagine what it is people actually saw in the 1937 masterpiece that might be worth emulating. We have to replace the entire songbook and give the story a whole new engine. We’ll see how the final product emerges after three separate reshoot sessions, but I’m not holding out hope. 

    What’s maybe the most insulting thing about this whole remake experiment is just how antithetical it feels toward Walt’s film, not just in the specific themes about whether kindness is enough, but in its whole ambition to twist the Snow White mythology into a predictable algorithm. Because Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs wasn’t just Walt wanting to make a quick buck. It was doing a bunch of things that shouldn’t have worked. It was exploring and creating new vessels for the deepest of human emotions. (Golly, could this be said of other entries in the Disney canon? We can only imagine ...)

    It’s easy for each new generation of Reddit users to fixate on the fingerprints of the 1930s—those signposts that remind us that this artifact comes from a bygone era and give us an excuse to reject it. I’m encouraged by sentiments about certain things being timeless or outliving transient human pettiness. But I’m also not content to just lay back and assume that things will take care of themselves. The precious things of the world deserve protecting. That’s why I make the effort to put out pieces like this. 

    Because maybe Snow White does return after her wicked stepmother kills her, and maybe that does say something about the eternal cycle of goodness, but that doesn’t mean we can’t give her a hand now and then.

    --The Professor