Hello folks, I have now seen the actual 2025 Snow White! AMA!
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Yes, the Seven Dwarfs are apparently mostly CGI and motion capture or however it’s done. I have no idea what size actors were playing them.
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However, there is also a dwarf/little person as a named character playing a minor role with a bunch of other minor-role actors, and nobody is talking about his size, he’s just one of the gang.
(IMHO, that is ultimately the best way to provide jobs for dwarf actors, or female actors, or nonwhite actors, or older actors, or disabled actors, or whoever actors: Just cast those actors in a wide range of roles, like any other kind of actors! There’s pretty much jack-shit about most film roles that can’t be played by an actor who happens to be short or disabled or female or nonwhite or whatever!)
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I liked those seven dwarfs, I thought they were quite cute and funny. (I liked the character played by the (other?) dwarf actor too.) However, I am admittedly a pretty bad judge of cinematic quality in things like visual effects (and composition and pacing and cinematography and lighting and soundtracks and “chemistry” etc., let’s face it, I mostly just don’t understand movies).
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Even with the above caveat, I am fairly confident in saying that this was not a particularly good movie. And I say that reluctantly, because I would have liked the anti-woke zealots to be just totally wrong in their predictions of failure and make complete horse’s asses of themselves. While I still think that anti-woke zealots are complete horse’s asses for getting so upset about a Snow White remake with a slightly brownish heroine, I wouldn’t bet against their failure predictions at this point. A lot of the film just felt clunky, stale, formulaic.
The broad outlines of the plot reworking (where Snow White is at least trying to do something to cope with the governance crisis in her kingdom that’s bigger than just keeping house for a kabaddi team’s worth of industrious jewel miners) were okay, I guess. But it didn’t really feel that fresh or interesting.
A really good film remake gets you excited about the story and seeing things in it that weren’t there before. Except for a few isolated moments, I didn’t get that out of this. It felt like more of a paint-by-numbers update and remodeling than a new creative vision. Where they didn’t have a specific update to make, they just fell back on unimaginatively rehashing the original. (For instance, why is Snow White wearing that cartoon-ass court gown to go apple-picking in the woods? Couldn’t she have a more practical “disneybounding”-type outfit in the same color scheme, to give more expression to this version of her character? And how tf is that dress still so pristine after she’s been running around in the woods for several days, nearly drowned, etc.? That’s just lazy filmmaking.)
If you’ve got kids that like live-action Disney princess movies in general and/or have been looking forward to this one, sure, take them, they’ll most likely enjoy it. But don’t expect very much.
That said…
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I think the new extended version of the “Heigh Ho” song is excellent. Fun to listen to, fun to watch, fun to think about the wordplay post-hearing: that’s what a remake should do. Musically, visually, character-wise, it built on the familiar old favorite and made it more interesting and captivating. I have little hesitation in saying that without any particular fanfare or promotion efforts, the 2025 version of “Heigh Ho” is going to become the canonical version that everybody associates with the song. My ticket purchase felt a lot less regrettable after that scene.
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The rest of the songs were much more meh, although the version of “Whistle While You Work” also had some fun aspects. (The whole whistling motif in the remake, including its eventual incorporation into a “Heigh Ho” reprise, struck me as one of the movie’s rare bright spots.) The male lead’s song “Princess Problems” was perhaps the least weak of the all-new numbers.
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The performances were very good, especially Zegler in the lead, and Gadot as the evil queen of unimaginable elegance. If Gadot’s costumes, and cloaks in particular, aren’t featuring prominently in Disney cosplays this year, I’ll be quite surprised.
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Anybody who is trying to argue that Rachel Zegler isn’t beautiful enough to play Snow White is nuts. If you personally think skin tone is a dealbreaker for the role, that’s one thing, but come on, otherwise she basically looks just like Snow White. (That’s one thing Disney does well in its live-action remakes, protagonist typecasting. Halle Bailey likewise basically looks just like Ariel in Little Mermaid, also modulo skin tone. Mena Massoud looks just like Aladdin. Etc.)
Anything else you were wondering about? Oh, the CGI animals are cute too, but definitely Disney-cute, not any real-animal-behavior cute. Same for landscapes. What might a Disney live-action remake be if it had a Peter-Jackson-like vision of a fantasy-world setting that nonetheless seemed to be rooted in genuine dirt and body tissue? It would be interesting to know, but we won’t find out from Snow White.)