Fairy Tale Media Fix: Snow White (2025)

 All that trouble for this movie?

Okay, let's just get straight to the review.  I'll cover "what trouble" further in.

The poster for Snow White (2025)

Disney's 2025 Snow White is a live action remake or reimagining of their 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The story concerns a young princess named Snow White (adult version played by Rachel Zegler), so named because she was born during a blizzard, who was raised to be a kind and just ruler until her mother died and her father remarries a beautiful but wicked queen with magic powers. Her father then supposedly leaves to confront some potential invaders at the southern border and disappears. The Evil Queen (played by Gal Godot), who is never given a name other than “The Evil Queen”, then takes over and makes some unsavory changes. After receiving some negative news from her Magic Mirror, the Queen conspires to have Snow White killed but she runs away into the forest where she meets seven centuries-old dwarfs with magic powers as well as a band of bandits who've been fighting against the Queen.

Snow White with the seven magical Dwarfs

That's basically it. It's a “Snow White as a revolutionary heroine” take, which we've seen a few times before. And overall . . . it's fine. Not a particularly good movie, but not a terrible one either. I didn't feel bored watching it. It's a musical with a couple of songs taken from the original animated film. Notably “Heigh Ho” and “Whistle While You Work”. The famous “Someday My Prince Will Come” is notably absent because there's no Prince in the movie. His role has been shifted to a character with a different fairy tale archetype. There are a whole bunch of new songs added. “Good Things Grow” is the new set-up song from when they're showing Snow White's past. “Waiting on a Wish” is the new 'I Want' song. “Princess Problems” is the song she sings with the new love interest when she meets him. Not to be confused with “A Hand Meets a Hand”, which is the new love duet. The Evil Queen even gets a villain song in the form of “All is Fair”. And they're fun songs in the moment, but if you think the mark of a Disney song is that you still remember it when you leave the theater, then you might be a bit disappointed (I think that's kind of a high bar, personally). Rachel Zegler does a good job and has a wonderful voice. Gal Godot chews the scenery like a champ among Disney villains but her chops as an actual actress are still questionable. They don't pull anything new from the original fairy tale, but I understand why they didn't. Things like repeating storytelling motifs are hard to pull off in movies. The biggest issue in the actual movie is the two sets of supporting characters. It feels like there might have been two different versions of the script at one point, one with Seven Dwarfs and one with Seven Bandits (note: I've read variants of the Snow White story that have gone either direction. And I've seen one movie where the dwarfs were bandits). But in the end, we ended up with a movie with both. Also, the Dwarfs might be “uncanny valley” territory for some, so be warned.

Snow White with the new male lead.

In anything, the biggest problem with Snow White wasn't anything in the actual Snow White movie. It's that for about a year the internet and even sources outside the internet lost their collective minds over this movie. Especially more Conservative sources. They were upset that a Latina actress was cast as Snow White. They were upset because they thought the Dwarfs might be cut from the movie. They got really upset when Rachel Zegler give a poorly worded interview in which she talked about how much more modernized this take on Snow White would be. It was such that The Daily Wire, a right-wing media outlet, even made a competing, traditionalist Snow White movie. And the trouble hasn't even really ended. In more Left-leaning spaces like Bluesky, it feels like Snow White has become an avatar for Hollywood's more callous attitude toward animation, especially as it's opening opposite the 2-D animated Looney Tunes movie The Day the Earth Blew Up. On the internet, this movie not only can't win, it can't even exist and then be forgotten like most “fair-to-middling” movies should.

Look, I've seen my fair share of Snow White adaptations. I've seen ones that are surprisingly faithful but have other regrettable aspects, like the Cannon Films version from 1987. I've seen and read versions that have changed up big things like the setting. Heck, this isn't even the strangest thing that Disney's done with characters from Snow White (anyone remember The 7D?). Like I said, it's another “Snow White as revolutionary heroine” take. One that actually eschews violence, which is nice. It's more fun and less dreary and aggro than Snow White and the Huntsman. It makes more narrative and character sense than the Snow White storyline in Once Upon a Time (the clip doesn't capture how strange that story got). It's about on par with Mirror, Mirror, but it does have some things that movie doesn't, like songs. But overall it's an “okay” movie that deserves to be treated as an “okay” movie. Go see it if you're interested. But I wouldn't fault you for waiting until it's on streaming or just getting it from the library once it's out on physical media.