Peter Dinklage Rips Disney For ‘Snow White’ Remake: ‘What The F**k Are You Doing?!’

Cafe Society
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I have to rewatch Time Bandits but this morning I refreshed my memory of Snow White during morning exercise.

It really is the story of the seven and they are the only characters of the movie who have any character growth at all. I think they have more screen time than Snow too. Snow really serves as the event that changes and challenges them.

All of them go from characters able to be spooked by a bird tapping and quaking at the mention of the evil queen, to heroically trying to save Snow from said powerful fearsome evil and chasing her up a rocky precipice in a horrible thunderstorm.

The most fleshed out of them is Grumpy who goes from a misogynistic ass, to caring about this woman, crying at her apparent death. Doc is next most characterized, the leader of the group, able to get flustered but to willing to make and enforce his decisions. Dopey is the Harpo of the group. He avoids the bickering that his friends engage in and is the sweetest of them. True that Sneezy and Sleepy are not well fleshed out short of their defining traits and the characteristics and growth they all shared.

Comparatively Snow is no character at all. Sweet and pretty entitled Princess White who the forest animals serve happily. What growth did she show? None. The Queen. Talk about a cartoonish figure. No depth no growth. And the Prince is THE generic White prince.

Heck I saw more growth and depth of the dwarf characters than I did in Boba Fett through his entire show!

Refresh my memory of Time Bandits please. How are they each different from each other? What individual growth arcs did the Bandits individually have? All I can remember is them bickering and their motivation to thieve and avoid capture. And like the Seven of Disney developing some attachment to the human they got stuck with. I recall the story being from the kid’s POV with them as the vehicle for his adventure, the means that he was dragged into it. Not as their story. But again, due for another watch. It’s been many years.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a classic animated movie that is very dated in many ways. It should be seen just to appreciate its place in the history of animation. It is not getting expunged from Disney, is a cultural reference point even to those who never saw it, and could use being brought up to modern standards. A remake COULD be an opportunity to not only do something about the cringiness of Snow’s Whiteness and being the fairest of the land as her defining features, along with that she cooks cleans and sews, but to also provide some characterization of “the dwarfs “ with less comedy and more mature depth.

Having more of those characterizations of those with extreme short stature would be more helpful than having Disney switch out to some other magical creatures.

Time Bandits is a great surreal fantasy comedy. It is not part of Western cultural literacy like Snow is.

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FWIW something interesting I noted rewatching Snow today is that in universe “dwarf” is not used. Snow coming onto the house at first assumed it was a children’s house and when she first saw its owners ( who discovered her sleeping in their beds) noted them as not children but little men. “Dwarf” is used written only, which is out of universe.

The other note to make is that yes this movie had huge cultural impact. But one does have to place it in the context of its time. The media representation of “dwarf” in that time was freak show and circuses. In that context these dwarfs were not made fun of for their short stature, were kind and sympathetic characters who were, in the end brave. A huge improvement to replace what was with that.

But still they were comedic (in ways that stereotyped cowboy prospectors would have been in a cartoon) and became the knee jerk association to the word. Supplanting that comedic even if otherwise positive image with more like you and me or otherwise fully fleshed ones would be a good thing.

They can still sing.

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Great posts, DSeid.

I think part of the problem Disney has with its animated “Snow White” is that it is so culturally significant that people are reacting to its influence rather than the movie itself. Everyone should go back and rewatch it. It’s definitely a product of its time, but there’s a lot that’s worth reinterpreting for our time, including better representation. Which is an excellent reason to remake it, so that Disney can reset our perceptions.

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That’s probably true. And the cultural significance is that “dwarfs are funny little men who exist to care for the pretty human”.

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A bold try, but it’s still only five out of seven. And Grumpy’s amazing character growth is exactly what I said - he becomes enchanted by Snow White.

Come on. They are all one note caricatures, who are completely infantilised (Snow White literally gives them a bath and sends them to bed with a story, for crying out loud), and that’s all they are.

ETA - and in some ways that’s fine. It’s a story for young children, and they are young children substitutes. Makka Pakka and Iggle Piggle aren’t very fleshed out characters either. They are what they are, but given that, it’s no surprise some people aren’t very keen on them getting another round of cultural impact.

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Exactly. It doesn’t matter that that is only part of their characterization in the actual movie, because it’s what people have remembered. The movie also shows them as diligent, persistent, and musical, but our bigoted society doesn’t remember those parts.

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You are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. Just watched. No she did not give them a bath. The bit was that she asked them to wash up and it was very much a caricaturized cowboy prospector trope. The utility for their characterizations was Grumpy’s refusal and Doc’s enforcement with the others following Doc’s directives.

Again, if you think another character in that movie was given more depth or demonstrated more growth please let me know which one. Hell the mirror had more depth and change than any of one note Snow, the Queen, or the Prince.

And still needing my memory jogged for the individual character depths and arcs of the Time Bandits that you state clearly was there.

Exactly correct. Neither the bigots or the victims of the bigotry are actually responding to what was in the movie. The bigots remember only that which conforms to their bigotry, even if they have to imagine or create it, and victims of that bigotry respond to that.

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Fair, I misremembered. So she makes them wash up and then sends them to bed. They are the kids and she is the mum. They are one dimensional caricatures like, as you so rightly point out, everyone else in the film.

You sure I said they had individual character arcs?

In any case, I’ll have to rewatch to give you a full close textual reading, which may or may not happen over the weekend.

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Well …

I guess you could be considering all six of the Bandits as one character having growth. But barring that yes I am pretty sure.

I’ll also use this as a cause for giving Time Bandits a rewatch!

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Refresh my memory. Where did he say why they are offensive to him?

“Literally no offense to anything, but I was sort of taken aback,” said Dinklage, who won four Emmys for his role in the HBO fantasy epic. “They were very proud to cast a Latino actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there. It makes no sense to me.”

“You’re progressive in one way,” he continued, “but you’re still making that [expletive] backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together.”

“Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox?” he asked. “I guess I’m not loud enough.”

And if something is offensive to one member of a minority, but the others are fine with it, should we cater to that one person, or go with the will of the majority?

I had a friend who hated being called “black”- “I am a lovely shade of mocha, not black”, and sure, then if you knew that, it would be polite to not call her black. But does that mean the term is verboten for all the others?

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Do we know how any other dwarfs feel? We have

  1. Dinklage, an actor, but one good enough to get “real” parts
  2. some lesser actors who would like the chance to make money from the show

What about all the dwarfs who AREN’T actors, and who won’t get paid by Disney, but may be affected by how the show portrays them. Do we have any cites about how any of them feel?

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Good points. We know some of what Dinklage feels. We also have heard from a good number of other actors. But by no means enough to form a consensus. It isn’t a huge stretch to say other Dwarf actors are Okay with it, but yeah, we have not heard from the rest of the community.

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There.

You planning on having a vote about offensiveness?

We also have had some other dwarf actors voicing agreement with Dinklage on his main point that SW&7D is regressive, even if they otherwise disagree with him.

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I’d be shocked if most dwarfs didn’t feel much like Dinklage and the women @MrDibble just cited. Yes, i can understand that a Disney role is with a lot to a handful of actors. But the cartoon dwarfs in the original are so… demeaning.

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@MrDibble, saying that’s basically saying he found it offensive because he found it offensive. What about it did he perceive as a “backward story”?

Well to quote his the next clause he spoke:

“… that fucking backward story of seven dwarfs living in the cave.”

Which is the point. We have no evidence that he is reacting to anything that was actually in the movie. Or that he’s ever seen it.

Which in no way disputes that bigots have used the movie, the parts they remember through the filter of their bigotry, and what they imagine they remember, to come up with demeaning things.

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It’s not just “bigots”. We have the example linked of a pretty decent person (QuadGopTheMercotan) responding “which one are you” when a patient said, “I’m not happy”. That’s a pretty pervasive and negative influence.

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No, “backwards” is only one of the myriad reasons that could be for finding something offensive. It’s not a tautology.

He’s reacting to the movie itself, not its plot points.

Question : all the other people who agree it’s regressive (including in this thread), you think none of them saw it, either?

Still with this bullshit? I thought we covered it quite handily already. It’s just a rhetorical soundbite. Its accuracy has no bearing on Dinklage’s point.

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FWIW I do not divide the world into bigots and decent people. “Decent people” can be bigoted, often are, and often do not appreciate their own bigotry. In that case QtM was definitely bigoted. My sense of him, as much as one can has a sense of a person through this medium, is that he is a decent person, and that was the result of bigotry. I have no reason to believe that it was the result of imagery or plot or characterization in the movie. It was pointing out otherness because it was other for no other reason than its otherness, and at best being ignorant of the hurtfulness.

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That’s a “rhetorical soundbite” like referring to Fiddler on the Roof as “that backwards movie with hook nosed Jews running banks” would be.

From the posts I think many of the posters here likely have not seen the movie for multiple decades and are remembering things that were not in the movie.

Fiddler is actually a good example here.

Imagine that there were orders of magnitude fewer Jews in this country than there are and most people in the country have never met a Jew. And that the major exposure they had to “Jewish” was Fiddler.

Pretty sure that some when they met a Jew would think it clever to ask “Do you wish you were a rich man?”

As a Jew I would find that insulting and othering. Hearing it many times, each person pleased with the joke they came up with, annoyed if anything that I didn’t find it funny, would be more than tiresome.

Those with extreme short stature are visibly very other. Snow White or not they will have kids and adults even staring and pointing, and otherwise decent people thinking it original and clever to make a joke that plays on the otherness. A Time Bandit joke if that had enough cultural currency.

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Not at all - an underground setting similar to a cave does actually feature in the dwarfs’ lives, in a way
running banks have absolutely nothing to do with Fiddler. Saying "live in rather than “work in” and “cave” rather than “mine” are just the kind of thing you do when speaking off the cuff. People making a big deal of those differences are being needlessly nitpicky. And the specifics of that detail have zilch to do with the point that the representation of dwarfs in the movie is backwards.

Try “less than 5 years ago”