Snow White 2025: Cheesy and visually flat live action remake is only for small kids

The 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has this huge mythos built around it. It was Disney’s first feature and the American Film Institute in 2008 declared it the greatest animated film of all time.

But have you actually properly watched it? And recently?

Granted, the animation is wonderful, even now the dynamism of certain sequences makes you sit closer to the screen in awe. But the story? It’s deeply underwhelming. Nay. It sucks.

Snow White as a character is milquetoast, her entire personality amounting to cooing at animals and tradwifery, sprinkled with an unjustified optimism. She then runs off with an unnamed prince that she met only once before when he broke into her home.

Sure, it was 1937, the social mores were different then, people say, but that doesn’t change how awkward it is to watch in 2025. From a narrative perspective, it’s not exactly a barnstormer.

The combination of its place in the Disney pantheon along with how ripe it is for an update is probably why Disney chose to do exactly that. It couldn’t have predicted the maelstrom of controversies that would meet it.

Setting most of that aside, the only hand-wringing that’s actually relevant to the film itself is whether it “honours” the original film’s legacy. It does, but a little too much, and most certainly to its detriment.

Not in the story but in the look. It is so faithful to the 1937 version in terms of its costuming and production design that Snow White never looks as if it’s more than expensive cosplay. This is the same problem that has plagued several of these live-action remakes, most notably Aladdin.

Everything looks stagey and fake, like a Broadway production or a Disneyland attraction, and not a cinematic piece.

These films occupy a strange space in that they’re supposed to feel as vibrant as a cartoon but believable as live-action. It’s not quite the uncanny valley but it is an odd no man’s land that keeps bumping you out. Because every piece of furniture looks like something you’d buy in a toy shop.

You would have to accept that this version of Snow White is made purely for young children who are less discerning about cinematic craft and more forgiving over shonky CGI, to find it charming.

For adults and even older kids, it’s too cheesy, too over-the-top and too visually flat while brimming over with hyperactive theatre kid energy that’s better suited for a Disney Princesses cruise ship show.

Even though lead star Rachel Zegler has been the focus of many of the controversies surrounding the film (she is opinionated, a cardinal sin for an off-screen Disney princess), her performance is the shining light in this film.

Zegler strikes the right balance between plucky earnestness and relatability, and she has seriously impressive pipes for the slick new earworms written by Benji Pasek and Justin Paul, the duo behind the ditties in The Greatest Showman, Dear Evan Hansen and La La Land.

Waiting on a Wish and Good Things Grow will delight, but it’s the snappy and wry Princess Problems that could easily become a classic.

The filmmakers – director Marc Webb, producer Marc Platt and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson – have expanded the story so it’s not just Snow White runs into the woods, meets the seven dwarfs, eats a poisoned apple and is revived by a prince.

The real conflict here is the Evil Queen (a miscast Gal Gadot who is neither menacing nor campy enough) has sucked all the joy and hope out of the kingdom by selfishly hoarding all the wealth and driving the people to poverty and torpor.

Snow White is awakened to the plight beyond the castle gates by the Robin Hood-coded Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), a bandit who is caught stealing potatoes from the Queen’s stores. He challenges her to do something and stand up against a monarch who rules through instilling fear in her subjects, promising to protect them from concocted outside threats.

The former seven dwarfs are now “magical creatures” whose CGI visages are just weird. It doesn’t work. Dopey could be mistaken for Alfred E. Neuman, the Mad Magazine mascot.

Disney must have been sensitive to criticisms over the portrayals of little people (Peter Dinklage sounded off about it in 2022) so this was the “solution” to mitigate that.

There is also a little person actor George Appleby who plays one of Jonathan’s bandit crew, who shares scenes with the now 274-year-old “magical creatures”, almost as a comparison point.

The story’s parallels to present-day geopolitics are obvious, even though the film is only ever advocating for benevolent monarchical rule from a princess who wants to bake pies for her people.

Disney doesn’t stand for real revolution, either in society or in its films.

Rating: 2.5/5

Snow White is in cinemas