Disney’s ongoing series of digitized sorta-live-action self-remakes so infrequently offer a transporting or even diverting experience that one may trawl restlessly for thoughts to occupy all the empty mental space they create. For example: Does the seemingly haphazard order, pace, and adaptation style of these various remakes actually reveal a new hierarchy of sorts? Certain remakes, like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, quote large chunks of dialogue word-for-word, and reframe iconic images as drab photocopies. These, then, must be the films the studio considers closest to perfection, those that cannot bear reinterpretation. Is it the age of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that qualifies it for some degree of reinvention, then? The studio’s landmark first animated feature was long considered so sacrosanct as to be held back from VHS release as other Disney classics filled clamshells throughout the 1980s. (The tape finally came out, to much fanfare, in 1994.) Now the 2025 version of Snow White is a candidate for the Disney remake that strays furthest from the original text – at least outside of those directed by Tim Burton.
Of course, the “original” text is a Grimm fairy tale, credited here alongside the 1937 cartoon though seemingly not much referred to in the writing of this semi-modernized version. Here, Snow White is named for the snowstorm during which she was born rather than her racial purity, and, as played by Rachel Zegler from the Spielberg West Side Story, does a great deal less simpering than her higher-pitched animated counterpart. The set-up remains the same: Snow White loses her mother, her father remarries an Evil Queen (Gal Gadot) who dispatches him as well. The Queen has her stepdaughter work as a scullery maid until she comes of age and becomes designated “fairest” in the kingdom by the Queen’s magic mirror, at which point she sends Snow White into the forest with a huntsman assigned to kill her. She escapes and wanders into the woodsy home of seven dwarves.
To this, the screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson adds an anodyne quasi-political angle about the Queen destroying the kingdom’s prosperity for her selfish gain; grants Snow White some 2025-appropriate agency as she realizes she must resist the Queen in some form or another; and swaps in Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), the dashing leader of a rebellious bandit party, for that creeper of an unnamed prince. One of Jonathan’s fellow bandits is Quigg, played by charming dwarf actor George Appleby, perhaps to make up for the fact that the Happy, Dopey, Doc, Grumpy, et. al are now computer-generated characters, a choice perhaps intended to make up for the stereotyping of past dwarf actors. At this point, another stray thought emerges: How exhausting it must be for Disney to constantly triangulate these things – all just to make a cross between their own Snow White and two live-action versions that came out in 2012, the buoyant comic fantasy Mirror Mirror and the more serious-minded action-fantasy of Snow White and the Huntsman.
From the former, Snow White ’25 borrows the notion of bright costumes and fanciful sets that might well have been computer-generated but here appear merely augmented; basically, all the colorful scenes set in or around the dwarves’ cabin, which have a neat, tactile fakeness. From the latter film, the new movie borrows some grimmer tones, though not so successfully, maybe not even consciously; to portray the grimness of life under the Evil Queen, cinematographer Mandy Walker (who knows from color, having shot for Baz Luhrmann) provides imagery that looks suspiciously like a variety of other “realistically” color-drained Disney projects. This commitment to the grays is especially noticeable when the Evil Queen makes her famous transformation into an old hag offering Snow White a poisoned apple. Once viscerally frightening in animation – even the Queen herself seems horrified about what she’s doing to herself – the scene now compromises by aging Gadot visibly but not gruesomely, perhaps to make up for years of stereotyping old crones. See what I mean? Exhausting.
And yet: Snow White is really one of the better Disney remakes. Zegler, who casually called the character outdated and caught ridiculous pre-release flak from people who don’t actually care about seeing a Snow White movie either way but sure don’t want a Colombian girl to star in one, is right about Snow (the 1937 cartoon is a wondrous work of art; engaging characterization of its heroine, however, is not one of its defining features) and the right choice to play her, too. The movie bends to Zegler’s talent not through its standard-issue imitation of what dopes will call wokeness, but by embracing its status as a musical. There are eight songs, only a few repurposed from the older films, many performed as full song-and-dance production numbers. This distinguishes the movie from its remade cousins, which never quite seem like musicals so much as movies where characters sing because their cartoon equivalents did. (To do otherwise would count as changing the sacred texts.) Marc Webb – that’s the director, by the way – may not be vastly more talented at production numbers than Rob Marshall or Bill Condon, but he’s not competing with the original versions of “Be Our Guest” or “Under the Sea,” either, and he has in Zegler someone who seems to genuinely love to sing and dance on screen. It makes a big difference.
Are the songs themselves good? Well, sort of. “Princess Problems,” a lightly sarcastic duet between Zegler and Burnap, is probably the best, because it comes the closest to making Burnap pop on screen. A redo of “Whistle While You Work” is almost zippy enough to make you forget the benign horrors of the CG dwarves. If the tunes are closer to Wish than Frozen, including a regrettably bog-standard ohh-ohh-ahh-ohh anthem from the overemployed Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, well, look, at least there’s far less trilling. Indeed, if the Disney remakes weren’t a whole industrial complex, this Snow White would probably be seen as an agreeable novelty: That time Disney paid tribute to itself with an updated fairy tale that can’t revise itself into a fully satisfying resolution but makes a decent effort at doing something different. The animated Snow White may no longer feel quite so revered in the wake of Disney’s relentless franchising, but at least the realm of pointless remakes gives it an arena in which to kick The Lion King’s ass.
Director: Marc Webb
Writer: Erin Cressida Wilson
Stars: Rachel Zegler, Gal Gadot, Andrew Burnap, George Appleby, Jeremy Swift, Andrew Barth Feldman
Release Date: March 21, 2025
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.