How Disney's Snow White Became A Poisoned Apple

Girlbossing the beloved little princess was always a doomed project.

As someone who works part-time with small children, I listen to a lot - and I mean a lot - of Disney music. Much of it fades into background noise, which helps the preservation of my sanity (I get a surge of dread every time a tot chirrups “Put on the Elsa song!”). Now and then though, something from the oldies - the classics - will give me a poignant shiver, the tender, evocative tunes of When You Wish Upon A Star, The Second Star To The Right or A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes. I was born in 1993 during the sanctified period of 90’s history known as the Disney Renaissance. Like any self respecting millennial girl, I had a cupboard full of Uncle Walt’s videos which I watched on repeat. Despite now being 31, at Christmas my mum still insists on buying me some kind of Beauty And The Beast-themed ornament or trinket in honour of my childhood obsession with it. (As sweet as this is, the amount of merchandise now on display makes me look like one of these godforsaken Disney Adults.)

This stirring of emotion that Disney music sometimes gives me goes beyond nostalgia to joy. Joy is not like happiness and contentment, it’s far more spontaneous and embodied. You’re generally too busy feeling it to register you are feeling anything. For many adults born 20th century, Disney films were synonymous with joy. People in their sixties and older will reminisce with misty eyes about the first time they saw Mary Poppins or how the death of Bambi’s mother made them weep.

Over the last decade, Disney has remade any number of their cherished films of the 20th century into live-action or CGI versions. With the exception of the widely-lauded 2016 reimagining of The Jungle Book, which balanced the spirit of the original with far greater spectacle and a richer story, the reception to almost all these remakes has been anywhere from “Meh” to “Thanks, I hate it.” However, as much as critics and audiences panned Tim Burton’s Dumbo and Robert Zemeckis’s Pinocchio, the upcoming remake of Snow White And The Seven Dwarves - simply titled Snow White - has attracted more scorn and venom that all of them put together. Indeed, things have gotten so bad, its premiere has been scaled down.

The film opens on March 21st and is predicted to be a box office catastrophe, all the more sad/funny as it took three long years to finally arrive. Since the official trailer was released, there’s been something of a competition as to who can say the nastiest thing about it. I’ll abstain from joining in the feeding frenzy and give a brief outline of the production lowlights. Firstly was the controversy around casting real-life actors with dwarfism to play Happy, Dopey, Doc et al. This led to dwarves being scrapped altogether in favour of an apparently more PC seven magical hobos (hand me the poisoned apple already). After this decision was derided, the dwarves were reinstated to the plot as grisly CGI animations, visually more suited to a survival horror fantasy game than family flick.

Unfortunately, it’s Snow White herself who is generating the most vitriol, specifically Rachel Zegler, the actress playing her. Zegler, who won a Golden Globe in 2021 for playing Maria in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story readaptation, has one of the most naturally charming singing voices I’ve heard in recent years. Unfortunately, that’s where the charm ends. Every interview she has done in the run-up up to Snow White has left a worse taste in people’s mouth (I’ll refrain from further poisoned apple jokes). She got off on the wrong foot by disdaining the original classic 1937 film on the basis of its problematic sexual politics, going as a far as to call the prince “creepy” and accuse him of “literally stalking” the film’s heroine. (He doesn’t. If anyone cares, Snow White makes a wish in a well that he finds her).

Things went from bad to worse for Zegler. She’s polarised people by posting frequently and aggressively about Palestine, to the point of coming across as purposefully hostile to her Israeli co-star Gal Gadot. After Trump’s 2024 election, she expressed her hope in sweary tirade that he and his voters “may never know peace”. After attempting some damage control by issuing an apology, she undercut whatever hope of recovery was left with an Instagram video in which she compared to herself to The Winged Victory of Samothrace statue in the Louvre - broken, but still something people will forever line up to see. Evidently it’s not just the evil queen who needs a reality check from the magic mirror.

Her infuriating combination of being young, female, obnoxious, and an anti-Trump progressive has made her a favourite whipping girl of right-wing antifeminist commentator Matt Walsh. He has recently released his fourth video on The Daily Wire trashing the Snow White remake. Here I feel almost defensive of Zegler. Behaving like a narcissistic, politically insulated brat makes her indistinguishable from 99% of Hollywood (conservatively estimated). The amount of perpetually online men whose heads’ she appears to be living in rent-free, is nothing short of pathetic. Walsh has long had a bee in his bonnet about modern Disney’s ‘wokeism’. The casting of a young black actress, Halle Bailey, in the 2023 remake of The Little Mermaid, had him take an unprecedented interest in the niche field of merfolk studies, explaining that “Scientifically, it made no sense for Ariel to have dark skin” due to translucentism being necessary for skin pigmentation to survive the harsh conditions of the ocean. Indeed, he has so many videos dedicated to Woke Disney, he could probably start a course for folk to earn literal Mickey Mouse degrees.

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Zegler has been undoubtedly subjected to excessive trolling and constant misogynistic comments on her looks. One wonders though if the anger at her is also connected to a sense of betrayal of the Snow White character herself. The remake has, predictably, girlbossified the little princess, with the plot centring far less on the love story and more on her leading a rebellion to take back her kingdom from the evil queen. This is not an original interpretation, the 2012 film Snow White And The Huntsman already did this. Moreover, it pulled it off because they brought a completely new aesthetic. This new Disney version, which aesthetically mimics the 1937 version, comes across as fixing/breaking something that was already perfect. Zegler’s nose-wrinkling the 1937 film for being “creepy” and “weird” reeks of artistic ingratitude as well as immaturity. This arguably hasn’t just offended anti-feminists, but those who cherished the joy the original brought them.

Of all the Disney princesses to give a girlboss makeover too, Snow White was never going to work. It is the innocence and pureness of the character’s femininity that defined her, an orphaned child, treated as a slave by a wicked step-mother, who nonetheless radiates kindness and hope. She effortlessly becomes a much-needed mother figure to the seven dwarves while still retaining her child-like charm, and fulfils her dream of becoming wife to a handsome prince. It’s the simplest, sweetest coming of age story that, whether you approve or not, taps into the psyche of many girls. At the risk of being sentimental, I rewatched Snow White And The Seven Dwarves in advance of writing this article and was genuinely moved by just how beautiful it was. I have read more feminist and film analysis theory than is healthy and even I could switch off the killjoy voice in my head and root for happily ever after.

Whistling while you work is an act of joy, whistling while you systematically dismantle the patriarchy, less so. The problem with modern Disney isn’t that it’s ‘woke’, as such, it’s that everything is manufactured, including the emotions it’s trying to inspire. “Let us never lose sight of one thing,” Walt Disney once said, “It all started with a mouse.” Alas, that mouse is now a hyper-capitalist monster that cares more about trying to please focus groups and profit off vibes than it does about creating joy through art. It doesn’t make films for children anymore but rather adults- namely millennials - who want to feel like children again. But so much of its modern audience struggles to consume entertainment or art without ‘problematising’ it through political and identitarian lenses. The innocence required to experience art through the prism of sheer joy has largely been lost.

There is nothing manufactured about joy. The old Disney movies understood this, at least. I, for one, am nothing but grateful for all they gave me in childhood.

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