'Snow White' Doesn't Know How to Be a Fairy Tale or a Musical

The new "live-action" Disney adaptation made me more sleepy than happy.

It’s bizarre watching Disney muddle through its creative nadir. Thinking back to thirty years ago when I was a kid, I not only had animated Disney movies, but a variety of PG fare that kept me entertained like Heavyweights, The Mighty Ducks, Angels in the Outfield, and more. I’m not going to say that these were giants of cinema (although my brother would disagree on Angels in the Outfield), but they were polished family fare about kids featuring kids, and they didn’t cost a fortune to make.

I feel a little bad for kids today who only get movies that are reheated versions of classics. That’s not to say that Disney didn’t attempt this in the 90s (we got The Jungle Book and 101 Dalmatians), but it wasn’t a cornerstone of their business strategy. Because Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book (2016), and The Lion King were massive hits, Disney is content to keep digging through their library of animated films and making them “live-action” even though there’s very little that isn’t constructed in a computer. There may be a human on screen and some minimal set dressing, but that’s as far as it goes. So we essentially get a newly animated version of a 2D movie (or in the case of the upcoming Moana, a CGI movie) but now with more stuff.

Snow White, their latest effort, highlights the problems with this approach. Some may appreciate that Marc Webb’s new movie is not a carbon copy of the 1937 original, but that was never going to happen. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a landmark of cinema—the first full-length animated feature—and it’s only 83 minutes long. It’s exceedingly light on plot, and that’s okay because it’s a straightforward fairytale. It works on archetypes and folklore, both of which resist excess plotting. So when you balloon that up to a nearly two-hour feature in an attempt to flesh it out, you only further highlight the flaws like a low-resolution photograph turned into a mural.

Rachel Zegler as Snow White in Snow White | Image via Disney