Recently, in the entertainment industry, Disney has been remaking a majority of their old cartoon films. And let’s just say that not everyone is excited about how they’re planning on going about their next release.
Disney is mainly rereleasing the princess stories, they have remade Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Aladdin, Mulan, Jungle Book, The Lion King, and Enchanted along with others. All of these re-releases have just happened in the past couple of years. These have all been decently good movies, and I think this is because they kept the main plots of these movies. Nothing was drastically changed, the characters, main idea, and storyline were the same as they were when first released. Most people enjoy going back and rewatching the movies that they’ve watched their whole childhood because of the “warm fuzzy feeling” that it can give you.
The point of taking a cartoon and making it live-action is to show the same story but in a new light. Most of these movies were originally books that have been brought to life in these cartoon movies and the live-action forms are supposed to be a sort of revival of the story. They are intended to bring the story back in a way that has never been experienced before but still gives that nostalgic feeling of childhood or whenever it might’ve been that people watched these movies for the first time. But when you take these movies and change the whole meaning of them, the characters, the theme, and the story, people are going to get upset.
Many Disney fans are starting to get uneasy about the upcoming release of Snow White. This movie is a classic, it was the first movie Disney has ever released. Making a live-action version of this classic is a big deal. It is the beginning of the legacy of Disney’s iconic Princess movies. People are expecting to get the original love story of Snow White and her seven dwarfs that most everyone knows. Snow White waits around the palace, working as a servant for her stepmother, the queen. She dreams of being free and falling in love with a prince. She gets driven out of the castle and she finds the seven dwarfs she cleans for them and starts doing things around the house and they become good friends. And later the Evil Queen poisons Snow White with an apple and the prince’s magic kiss wakes her up.
While the main plot of this film has not been released yet, we do know a couple of things. Snow White does not fall in love with a prince and she has more than one love interest. She also wants to be able to rule her kingdom and not have her evil stepmother rule. Along with this, the Seven Dwarfs are not “dwarfs” they are different “magical creatures” with different genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, and also heights. Disney’s goal here is to try and fix how the original movie was associated with “dwarfism” and to add more diversity. They also focus on women seeming more independent and not like the only thing they’re ever thinking about is love and how they don’t need a man to come to save them. These are all good things, what makes it seem negative is the way Disney is going about the execution.
The problem here isn’t that they’re changing the way that the dwarfs look but it’s just the idea that in the original story, they are portrayed in a specific way. They’re supposed to be miners looking for gems, they’re supposed to be “dwarfs”. Just like in the original story written by the Grimm Brothers. In that story, the Evil Queen tries to kill Snow White three times with three different poisoned objects while she lives with the Seven Dwarfs and the third time it finally sticks. The Evil Queen is satisfied with her accomplishment, and when the Prince finds Snow White dead he demands to see her. He kisses her, she wakes up and they plan to get married. They invite the Evil Queen, and when she comes they force her feet into red hot iron shoes and she’s forced to dance until she drops dead. (www.gimmstories.com) This story was supposed to show the relationship between good and evil, and that the road to true love is never easy. (www.bartleby.com) And Disney took this story and changed it in 1937 and now they are choosing to change it again, altering the theme and characters and the story itself.
Now if the only thing they were changing was their size it wouldn’t be that big of an issue. The problem is that they’re changing the whole scenery around them and their purpose. Disney is too focused on trying to go back and fix their mistakes and they’re sacrificing what could be a beautiful live-action version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Rachel Zegler is the actress who is going to play Snow White in the upcoming movie. It is wonderful that Disney is putting more diversity in their movies but Snow White was written to be a girl with “ravens hair” and skin “white as snow”. These features are a key point in the story, it’s the movie’s title. The fact that this actress isn’t the same race certainly is not a big deal in this case, but the whole idea that they have to change everything about the movie to conform with the new modern ideals of the world changes the film in a way where you might as well just make a whole new movie.
Disney is becoming obsessed with the idea that they need to go back to every film they have ever made and remake them to live up to today’s standards and make them seem more modern or “woke”, that is just not realistic! If we were to remake every movie that Disney has created because there is something “wrong” with it by today’s standards, we would have to remake them again by the time they finished remaking the first ones. The Grimm Brothers probably would not have been that pleased by the new versions of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They wrote their stories to teach lessons to the people who read them and it’s been changed multiple times to teach a different lesson and have different characters. They probably would have wanted their stories to be told with the same basic themes and lessons that they originally wrote.
In a recent interview with Variety, Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot stated, “[…]it’s no longer 1937[…]She’s not going to be saved by the prince and she’s not gonna be dreaming about true love.” No matter how much someone doesn’t want to admit it, it is a human feeling to want to find love. Standards and civilization change, that’s fine. The world grows and we realize where our ideals were wrong at one point. But the idea of falling in love and wanting to find the love of your life is an ideal that should never go out of style.
If they want to portray a new topic for young people to be inspired by, then they should just make a whole new movie. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a classic. You don’t see people rewriting Shakespeare’s sonnets to have completely new themes and lessons in them. You see them taking the stories and making them in a modern setting, but this is not the same as what is happening with the recent Snow White. I’m sure that the movie itself and the actors portraying it will be amazing but the story not being the original just does not sit right with me nor does it with many of Disney’s viewers.
Along with all of this, the actress playing Snow White has made it abundantly clear that she does not even like the original Snow White. Why would someone want to play a part that they did not like? There are tons of other actors and actresses who would have killed to have a part like Snow White, maybe even someone who looked up to the original movie. In many cases, when you turn something into a movie, the people who end up acting as the characters are people who have admired these books or movies since they were children. For example, Tom Holland and Spider-Man. Tom Holland was a big fan of Spider-Man when he was a kid and eventually, he was able to play the role that he had always dreamed about.
Rachel Zegler was never inspired by Snow White, she recently stated in an interview by Entertainment Weekly with Gal Gabot, “I was actually scared of the original cartoon, I watched it once and then never picked it up again.” Previously in this interview Gal Gabot who plays the Evil Queen in the movie was going on and on about how wonderful the movie is and how excited she was to be involved in the film while Zegler didn’t seem to show as much enthusiasm in the making of the movie. She even said that she finally watched the movie for the second time in 16-17 years while she was making this movie. And it just doesn’t make sense to me to have someone who has never liked this extremely iconic movie play a part that she does not even enjoy in the original.
The way that Disney is making this movie it shouldn’t even be called Snow White it should be a whole new movie altogether. They can make a new movie with the new ideals they want to portray. The “magical creatures” that have more diversity and the storyline that is about a princess who goes off on her own to gain her own power so that she can then take over the kingdom that should be rightfully hers from her evil stepmother. I see no reason why Disney feels the need to take a classic movie, that isn’t hurting anyone. And to change it into something that is just, in my opinion, overly “woke”. Never in the film does anything happen that is just blatantly unacceptable. There is an extent to which you can push the boundaries of ideals in the modern world, and there is an extent to which things that were acceptable back when the film was made are acceptable now. You cannot take things from history and change them to fit the opinions and lifestyles of people in today’s world. Everyone in the world will never have the same opinions but forcing opinions on people has never been the way to go. Despite the fact that we continually try. There has been more and more backlash in certain areas of the community and forcing people to view ideals to such a large extent is just going to slow down the process of acceptance.
I am not saying that the message that Disney is trying to portray in this film is bad. I think that having this sort of message is necessary, people need to see things in order to accept them. But changing a classic movie that people have enjoyed over the past 85 years into something completely different? It feels unnecessary. The original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was not even Disney’s story. The story was originally written by the Grimm Brothers and Disney took it and rewrote it in a less dark way and added a more fun and cutesy version of the story.
A live-action of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would be wonderful and it’s been done before, not by Disney, but variations of this film have been made. Such as Mirror Mirror in 2012 starring Julia Roberts and Lily Collins. And it was a great film, there is so much potential with this movie and its history and it feels like they are throwing it away just to try and seem more approachable by the younger more “woke” generations. But Disney is loved all around the world and there is no reason to change this movie with actresses who don’t seem like they want to be involved, a storyline that is drastically different, and a whole new meaning.
This film is a classic and it should stay that way. I’m sure that it will end up being a great movie, but the overall point still stands that there is no reason to change it so drastically just to conform to today’s beliefs. It was loved for a reason from 1937 till now and it will continue to be loved for a very long time. No matter the changes in society, classics are classic for a reason, modern standards change all the time and while some things will become outdated, others will live forever.
