I wouldn’t necessarily go that far, as I doubt the implication is that two teens had sex. But she is singing “Someday, my prince will come,” and then this prince joins her, and she accepts this. In that context, the dancing implies romantic feelings. And that, if the Queen didn’t intervene, they likely would have started dating.
The story also goes out of its way to say that only true love’s kiss could resolve the spell, so he wasn’t just infatuated with her. We are supposed to believe that he loved her. And, well, that sort of love at first sight is pretty common in these types of tales.
I personally like that they had the prince meet her and then later go out looking for her, rather than to merely chance upon her. Maybe it’s not as much as we’d want in a story today, but it does seem progressive for the time. There was at least some indication of romance before the kiss, rather than him just kissing her for being beautiful.
I think Disney added that. In the original, i think he’s just infatuated with the beautiful corpse, until it’s dropped, the apple falls out, and she comes back to life.
Fair. I’m treating the book the Grimm Brothers published as “original”, but of course it’s not. Still, I think the whole “true love” trope was added by Disney.
The Grimms’ version nearer to the source versions anyway, and love at first sight is definitely more the Disney princess trope than those types of tales.
Again the old tales are dark heady stuff articulating psychodynamic fears and issues of both children and parents. Definitely for kids but not Disney.
And would not go over well in today’s movie environment as child entertainment.
Posting this here because it seemed relevant to the discussion – an actor with dwarfism has criticized the casting of Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa in Wonka. This quote really stood out:
“A lot of people, myself included, argue that dwarfs should be offered everyday roles in dramas and soaps, but we aren’t getting offered those roles. One door is being closed but they have forgotten to open the next one.”
Frankly, I though casting Grant as an Oompa-Loompa was weird. I kept wondering why they didn’t use a dwarf actor - I mean, the CGI to shrink Grant would work just as well for an actual dwarf, and it’s a strong tradition with cinema Wonka.
Casting Grant actually took me out of the fantasy. The opposite of what you’d want to have happen.
This is the first I’ve heard of this prequel and Hugh Grant’s bit in the trailer is what will probably get me into the theater instead of waiting for it to stream. And I’m not really much of a Hugh Grant fan.
And more to the topic of the thread, Grant as depicted is in a role that even an actor with dwarfism couldn’t pull off without special effects.
I mean…in most cases, I would agree that “fair” means “attractive”, not literally “white”, but in this case, it is right there in the name.
ETA: just checked the original German title: “Schneewittchen”. That word means “A girl or woman with black or dark brown hair and pale skin.” So, yeah, it this case it really does explicitly mean “whitest”.
Nope, “fairest” just means “most beautiful” in this context, at least in the Grimms’ version of the tale. You are right that Snow White is originally given that name because of her coloring, but the magic mirror is judging the competition for beauty, not specifically for paleness.
Disregarding for the moment the ubiquitous racist entanglement of beauty with racially Caucasian phenotypes in such tales, and the issue of the extent to which a nonwhite woman could ever have been considered conventionally “beautiful” in that historical context…
…the point is that Snow White ends up winning the title not because she’s paler than her stepmother but because she keeps getting prettier. (I had not previously realized that the fairy tale extends this nonconsensual kingdom-wide judging of female beauty to “contestants” as young as seven years old. Ew.)
If they wanted a “name” actor there are short-statured actors that are well known names. There’s no reason they couldn’t have one of them play the Oompa-Loompa(s).
I already knew that there existed two separate fairy tales featuring characters named Snow White: the “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” that we’ve been talking about here, and “Snow White and Rose Red.” What I just learned is that they slightly different names in German to distinguish them:
He’s proportioned like a dwarf, though. Sure, he’s smaller than a real dwarf, as you say. But that’s something you could do with greenscreen. The actual CGI involved seems to be about making him look like a dwarf.
