Robbie Collin in the Telegraph actually gave it three stars:
Disney’s Snow White: Not too woke – and better than Wicked
“And they all lived adequately ever after” is not the fairy-tale ending Disney was presumably originally gunning for. But at this point, the studio will surely take what it can get.
[…]
…I’ll say this for the result: it’s better than Wicked. The opening act sets out just how existentially tearing our heroine’s existence is under Queen Gal. (With apologies to Milan Kundera, call it The Unbearable Snow-Whiteness of Being.) And for the most part, this section is fairly beige and dull. But once Zegler scuttles off to the forest, where she teams up with two chirpy septets – the digitised dwarfs and a zany gaggle of bandits, who may have been dwarf replacements in an early draft – it really picks up.
The new versions of two classic numbers, Heigh-Ho and Whistle While You Work, are stylishly choreographed and rousingly performed, while a handful of the new songs, from The Greatest Showman’s Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, just about keep pace. (I loved Princess Problems, a teasing ode to Gen-Z prissiness which delivers about all the culture-war the film is prepared to wage.)
In contrast, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian gives it one star, and I get the feeling that if he had free rein he’d have given it one asteroid:
Snow White review – Disney’s exhaustingly awful reboot axes the prince and makes the dwarves mo-cap
That title [Snow White] is a description of the page on which new Hollywood ideas get written. Here is a pointless new live-action musical version of the Snow White myth, a kind of un-Wicked approach to the story and a merch-enabling money machine. Where other movies are playfully reimagining the backstories of famous villains, this one plays it straight, but with carefully curated revisionist tweaks. These are all too obviously agonising and backlash-second-guessing, but knowing that at some basic level the brand identity has to be kept pristine. This is particularly evident in the costume design, with which the wicked witch gets a pointy dark crown and skull-hugging black balaclava and Snow White is lumbered with a supermarket-retail tweenie outfit with puffy-sleeved shoulders.
[…]
There are some changes: the hero is no longer a prince, but a more democratic citizen who leads a Robin Hood type insurgency from the forest against the witch’s tyranny with SW joining in on a Maid Marian basis. But he still gets to do the controversial non-consent kiss once our heroine has gone into her picturesque coma. But the dwarves? Will this film make them look sort of like everyone else, like the Munchkins in Wicked? No. This Snow White feebly makes them mo-cap (motion-capture) animated figures, but it also – heartsinkingly – duplicates their presence by giving the prince his own gang of seven live-action bandits, in which people with dwarfism are represented. This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.
Has anybody reading this actually done that thing we used to do with films before the internet?
I have not seen the movie, but I will make one observation.
Rachel Zegler is the first Disney Princess in the history of the company to have short hair.
Read into that what you will.
The terrible cultural coverage is one of the reasons I gave up buying the Telegraph – there is no point in being conservative on your editorial pages if you let the left control the cultural coverage (“politics is downstream from culture” as Andrew Breitbart used to say).
Am I going to watch the film? No – because no one is paying me to watch it.
If someone will pay me (pay me a fairly large sum of money) to watch the film – of course I will watch it.
But to pay (rather than be paid) to watch Disney Corporation agitprop would be absurd.
There are live action versions of “Snow White” already.
“Snow White and the Huntsman” does the Girl Boss thing – and (by the accounts of several people I trust) better than modern Disney does – as Disney is not only far-left it is also not-very-good at what it does.
It is not just that the Disney Corporation (which hates everything Walt Disney stood for) produces agitprop – it also does not produce very good agitprop, its agitprop is crude and stupid. So, for once, the Guardian is correct.
Bob Iger, Kevin Feige and the rest are NOT sincere Marxists (Frankfurt School or any other kind) – they have no idea what they are doing, and the stuff they, and those they hire, produce – is a waste of time.
It is not entertaining, and it is not effective agitprop – it is just a waste of resources.
By the way – “Mirror-Mirror” is a fairly good live action version of Snow White.
I am reminded of the difference between Stalin and Mao – both were mass murdering Marxists, but they were not the same.
Stalin had a good basic knowledge of engineering – if he ordered, for example, a steel plant you could be reasonably sure it would produce steel. Perhaps not very well – but it would do it.
He also had a basic knowledge of the arts (although warped by his Marxism) – he was capable of ordering fairly good buildings, some of his housing blocks are not that bad (by the standards of housing blocks) – certainly better than the rubbish that Soviet rulers had built after Stalin. And some of the music produced under Stalin is not bad either – ditto the other arts, it is not great, but it is, at least sometimes, not awful.
In contrast to Stalin, Mao was an ass – he really was. Yes he, like Stalin, murdered tens of millions of human beings – but Mao was also an ass, a worthless, ignorant, tosspot.
He ordered everyone to try and make steel in their backyards – it was, of course, an utter failure.
He had a massive campaign against birds, and so there were plagues of insects.
The art produced under his, demented, second wife and her associates is a mess – and he smashed up a lot of (indeed most of) Chinese culture with his “Cultural Revolution”.
Nothing produced in the 37 years that Mao ruled China has any merit.
Mao would have fitted in to modern Disney. MODERN Disney – the Disney Corporation that the talent-free puppet Bob Iger, and the other talentless waste-of-space types, now sits at the top of.
I did not see that one coming. 😉
If you don’t count the original animated Snow White, of course.
Still much longer than mine.
The whole “woke” thing misses a very important point. Disney is just not being original. There are so many other tales to tell without having to do tedious remakes of (sometimes) really good films.
Yes, I know they wanna keep copyright until the End of Days but aren’t they suppossed to be… creative?
For my money Rachel Zegler does, in this re-jig, look remarkably like the original animation. I suppose that brings me back to the first point.
Paul,
I think Stalin’s architecture was dreadful. But… some of the graphic design (especially movie posters) and socialist realist painting was technically outstanding. I can’t really comment on Mao.
Having raised a group of kids and thus having seen the original on VHS approximately 93,000 times, I agree. Very close.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029583/mediaviewer/rm947054336/?ref_=tt_ph_3
Re: originality:
It has to be scary to contemplate dropping $400,000,000 into an unknown quantity.
So everything expensive has to be a remake of a successful franchise, or Sequel Part 2 through 43 of a great movie, or based on a successful long-running work like LOTR or Marvel.
Used to be, all you needed for that almost-guarantee of profit was a STAR.
But stars don’t bring in the loyal fans they used to.
Because they allowed themselves to spend all of that star goodwill and love when they decided that we should all know their views on everything.
And most of their views are puerile and uninformed. Which is why the Mark Ruffalos of the movie world will even be able to tank Marvel.
One of Charles Stross’s better comments, back before Brexit drove him over the edge, was that science fiction was a remnant of Technocracy, and that this was as if Russian communism had been overthrown but left behind an artistic tradtion of socialist realism that endured for decades. I have to say the people in that art might have looked like Ayn Rand’s characters. . . .
So first of all, on review I of course missed that the original Snow White had short hair… how wrong could I be?
@bobby b
It has to be scary to contemplate dropping $400,000,000 into an unknown quantity. So everything expensive has to be a remake of a successful franchise, or Sequel Part 2 through 43 of a great movie, or based on a successful long-running work like LOTR or Marvel.
I think that in general that is true, but Disney is different. What they are making is a Disney movie, which is the 250th sequel of the other Disney movies. They aren’t really about originality, they are about nostalgia and the whole Disney spirit encapsulated in beautiful princesses, taking the right and decent path despite it being an impossible cost, but in the end good triumphing over evil. Something you take your kids to, and your daughter wants you to buy her the dress and be beautiful, and both your son and your daughter are inspired to be decent and honorable. And you love to sing the songs, even when your kids are even more out of key than you are.
That is Disney. It isn’t about Snow White, or Ariel, or Elsa, or Mary Poppins it is about the warm hug of the Disney brand.
And so the big risk is not Disney making a big expensive movie, what is a big risk is Disney making a movie that doesn’t encapsulate all the values that people love about Disney.
I think though a large part of the risk is structural. Disney is very dependent on the artists who make it and, for whatever reason, they all tend to be very, very liberal. I have heard them interviewed: they are all about “How can I sneak gay and trans into this movie?”.
Disney blossomed when it incorporated Pixar, quite simply because the artists at Pixar were tech people and so there was an influx of more sensible people. There is no movie more “Disney” than Toy Story.
I’m not sure what they can do except put their foot down against the people who are robbing us of all the greatness, the nostalgia that was Disney. You walk down Main Street Disneyworld and what is it? Small town, midwestern America. A celebration of the idea of America, with Tom Sawyer and Steam Trains and Mickey Mouse a old time saloons. The very first Disneyland had a shooting range with real 22 caliber rifles. That is a very particular vision of what America is, one that I myself really love. But if your people absolutely hate that vision of America, how can they continue that, which is the very lifeblood of what Disney is?
Robbie Collin will praise whatever guff is churned out by Hollywood. The whole business is creatively bankrupt. It’s all very well saying they have to be cautious about new works, but they have now got to the state when they are losing hundreds of millions from the same old CGI tripe. They might as well take more risks.
I haven’t seen Snow White, but it’s hard to take a version where the jealous wicked queen has no reason to be jealous….
My preferred reviewer for mainstream cinema I have no intention of watching is The Critical Drinker. He rather liked Wicked incidentally. (not my cuppa and too long to boot)
He was heading for the edge before then but that does seem to have turned him into a raving nutter
The latest version of Snow White as an example of ungrounded social beliefs driven beyond the limit?
Leading on to comparisons of the Trump presidency as ‘The Magnificent Seven’ or alternatively ‘Titanic’? Time will tell.
Frasor Orr – if people are still taking their children to see Disney movies, they should try watching the modern ones (I have – they arrive on television eventually), the agitprop is obvious, and it is not even done very well.
Why would decent parents take their children to watch modern Disney films – it is a crazy thing to do. Not that the other studios are much better – after all the shares of most of the studios are controlled by BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard (by the way as most shares of most large corporations, in most industries, are “managed” by a few entities – where is this “free enterprise economy” that people talk about?) – all the “mainstream” studios have much the same political agenda.
The reaction to the film “Bonhoeffer” was instructive – one would have thought that as the bad guys were Nazis Hollywood and the media would love the film, but they denounced the film on the grounds that it was “Christian Nationalism” to suggest that an individual should place religious morality above the will of the state. The establishment were that shameless – the mask came off.
Nick M. – I agree that some of the buildings that Stalin had built are dreadful, he made the same mistake that other “Modernists” (such as Mr Hitler) made – assuming that big=good. Nelson Rockefeller had the same idea – he surrounded the attractive State Capitol building of New York State with vast tower blocks – ruining the setting, and ruining the city of Albany.
But then most large American cities were ruined after World War II – “Urban Renewal” was dominated by the same “Modernist” doctrines that dominated both National Socialist (Nazi) and Marxist urban planning. Only a few cities, such as Charleston South Carolina, show what American cities used to be like.
As for Stalin some (some) of his buildings are not that bad – for example, compare the housing blocks built under Stalin to housing blocks built after him in the Soviet Union. The ones built after him are much worse.
Although the need for Russia, the largest country in the world, to have so many housing blocks is dubious.T
This idea that most people should live in big blocks with centrally controlled power and water, no surprise that hot water fails every year in many Russian housing blocks – “we are doing work on the plant” is the normal excuse, is very World Economic Forum – but they did not invent the idea, any more than the United Kingdom invented the idea of a National Health Service (“first in the world” it is NOT) – the Soviet Union did these things before any other country. Just as the Soviet Union was the first country (since pagan times) to legalize abortion, and other “Progressive” things.
There is no good reason why most Russians should not live in houses (with traditional bath-houses attached – for Russian bathing rituals that go back so many centuries) – and have their own land, there is plenty of land – if the state did not claim it for itself (and for its friends).
As for Disney – even the financial entities (BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard) and the Credit Bubble banks (who create “money” from nothing – it is NOT Real Savings) are bored with the endless failures of Disney.
Bob Iger, Kevin Feige, Kathleen Kennedy, and so on, will all be out by the end of this year (2025).
Agitprop is one thing – but badly made agitprop is too much.
I (or someone picked off the street – at random) could do a better job producing “Progressive” propaganda than the people Bob Iger and co have hired.
Caught you out, Paul! Mao ruled for only 27 years, not 37! The communists took Peking/Beijing in 1949, and Mao died in the 70es.
He was heading for the edge before then but that does seem to have turned him into a raving nutter
Perry, his first novel, Singularity Sky, got a lot of write-in votes for the Prometheus Award for libertarian science fiction, but when I reread it just lately I thought the libertarian content was decorative rather than load-bearing. But not that long before Brexit he wrote a lucid analysis of what he called the Beige Dictatorship of political insiders of all the established parties. It’s sad that since Brexit he’s been horrified by the rejection of beige dictators.
Compare Soviet Constructionism art with the Obama campaign art – it has very clearly similar internal artistic fundamentals, regardless of the message. Supremely well engineered to pass on the message it is conveying.
jgh,
Agree entirely. I love that extremely graphic style. And it is is very effective. It is also very scaleable. I usually work on a very big monitor but I know my stuff will wind-up being seen on everything from a phone to a TV.
Not sure I saw this point made here – in this picture, the “fairest one of all” comment is not about beauty but redistribution politics.
I have tried to post twice, and the post just disappears. It includes a link. Is that now prohibited?
OK. The above went through. I add the ignored post text by editing (below).
In case you haven’t seen it, here’s reason‘s take: Forget Woke Snow White. Disney’s Remake Is More Like Socialist Snow White.
I posted something with a link, and it just vanished. I posted about that with the question “Are links now prohibited?” So the answer is…
Apparently so. When I added the text from the ignored post by editing the post about it, the original query post reappeared, along with an odd-looking activity spinner. It’s still spinning.
And when I posted this message and the page refreshed, the edited post disappeared.
The spam-filter algorithm has gone hypersensitive lately.
I will say two positive things about Rachel Zegler.
Rachel Zegler can sing – she is clearly a trained singer. The songs are no good – but the lady does what she can with them.
And Rachel Zegler is clear about her political and cultural beliefs – there is no Bob Iger style cowardice, no “Diversity and Inclusion does not mean we hate you and want to hurt you and your family” when it is clear that this is what it means.
Rachel Zegler said in writing (oddly without using capital letters – perhaps the lady has read the letters of Screwtape by C.S. Lewis and identifies with Screwtape and his colleagues, they do not use capital letters when writing – as to do so would violate the egalitarian Social Justice beliefs of the demons), that “trump supporters” not just “trump himself” but also all “trump supporters” should “never know peace” – that they should be eternally tortured.
It is a bit more than going, uninvited, to the house of the dwarves and making them clear the place (the original Snow White cleared the house herself – to show gratitude to the dwarves for taking her in, at great risk to themselves, the Rachel Zegler Snow White orders the dwarves about) – no Rachel Zegler openly says that most Americans should be tortured for all eternity. The lady says “the quite bit out loud” – someone like Bob Iger would only say things like that in private – not to television cameras.
In much the same way that the Spanish actor Pedro Pascal (who Hollywood seems to put into everything) said that most Americans were Nazis – and should be punished.
I prefer this to the Bob Iger style “Woke does not mean what you think it means” (oh yes it does) stuff – if someone is an enemy it is best that they are open about it.
I won’t be wasting my money.
Johnathan Pearce – a wise decision Sir.