Waking Up Snow White
Luke Y Thompson reviews the new 4K disc for 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'
[Luke’s review this week is as much an argument against another segment of the critic community as it is a review of the new 4K. That’s what I think makes it interesting and I’m interested in how readers will respond. — Ed.]
![Amazon.com: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [4K UHD] : Adriana Caselotti, Harry Stockwell, Lucille LaVerne, Moroni Olsen, Billy Gilbert, Pinto Colvig, Otis Harlan, Scotty Mattraw, Roy Atwell, David Hand, Ted Sears,](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15c01621-ce91-45d6-bf27-2c4c7e671ac6_800x1000.jpeg "Amazon.com: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [4K UHD] : Adriana Caselotti, Harry Stockwell, Lucille LaVerne, Moroni Olsen, Billy Gilbert, Pinto Colvig, Otis Harlan, Scotty Mattraw, Roy Atwell, David Hand, Ted Sears,")
When I put the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 4K disc into our player, my wife and I simultaneously said the same thing...
“I haven't seen this since I was a kid.”
I suspect that's a popular sentiment. Most fans of Snow White are likely kids or parents, which is why I have trouble believing that so many seemingly single adults online actually give a solitary shit how accurate a live-action remake may or may not be. Nobody was asking for that remake, and few were likely expecting much, but the dopamine rage-click machine decided to get a bunch of people frothing mad that a potential new Snow White remake would reflect values of today rather than those of (checks notes)...1937.
Frankly, if the movie didn't have to update anything in 86 years, that would be the real shocker. Audiences of today simply will not and cannot experience Snow White the way audiences of the '30s did. It may be thought of primarily as a kids' movie now, but at the time, it had to prove to adults that an animated feature film was a viable thing anybody could stand. Because animation was familiar to moviegoers as gag-filled shorts, the perception was that a full-length feature would be overwhelming: 90 minutes of non-stop gags and intense colors, that would presumably affect the viewers the way strobe lights in a Pokemon cartoon would induce seizures in epileptics decades later.
As such, Snow White is structured like a variety show, or Vaudeville. With an overarching and incredibly simple story, the actual beats play out as vignettes. You get a song, a theatrically evil monologue, comedy shtick, a choreographed musical number, jokey song, slapstick, and so on. It's actually surprisingly fidget-inducing if you're looking at it in strict story terms. On the one hand, it's made for short attention spans. On the other, the short attention spans of 1937 were quite different. Musical numbers that don't advance the plot, for example, were shiny, essential distractions then; now, they're often perceived as “hurry up and get back to the plot” digressions.
As far as that plot goes, the characters are extremely basic. The nameless evil queen, furious that she's no longer a hot teenager, decides to kill the one in her nearest vicinity, namely her stepdaughter Snow White. Snow White wants to get with a hunky Prince she's briefly met by a well, and if they marry, though the movie doesn't focus on this, the dowry would probably be all of the queen's estate. Jealousy over hotness, though, is a simpler motive in a musical.
Snow White runs away and hangs out with some dwarfs. The queen disguises herself as a “harmless peddlar,” who, hilariously, is about 50 times more terrifying looking, and the movie knows it, too. Fortunately for her, Snow White doesn't, and naively takes a poison apple from her which sends her into a coma. All the animals in the forest summon the dwarfs, and in a scene James Cameron clearly cribbed for the climax of Avatar, they all rush the evil queen/witch, who's felled by a divine lightning bolt. The existence of God is assumed implicitly by the movie, as the good characters all say prayers, and the evil queen has a mirror demon at her command.
Disney's 4K restoration is very nice indeed. There's a little bit of ghosting, mostly during scenes in the queen's dungeon, but these may be rooted in bad dissolves on the original print. As with Cinderella, twinkling effects are exquisite, and the multiple layers of cels create some effects that still look extraordinary, as when the dwarfs march behind running water that we can partly see through. Pooling water, as in the wishing well, is done by effects I simply don't understand – they look like modern CG, yet cannot be. The witch, ahem, “harmless peddlar,” is a terror, and Snow White's run through the forest is intense enough that Disney theme parks made a horror ride for it, one which was eventually closed in Florida and way toned down in Anaheim.
As for the “skin as white as snow” of the protagonist – if, indeed, we can call such a relatively passive character a protagonist – on the cleaned-up print, it actually looks a lot closer to Rachel Zegler's skin tone. So for anyone in a huff about that, it was never 100% literal. Maybe the name will now signify purity of heart, or even a family name – regardless, there are at least 20 other Snow White films out there already, for multiple tastes. If you don't like the one at hand, there are other options aplenty. I quite enjoyed Mirror Mirror, for one. Let's say the new one IS “woke,” whatever that means. In all the grand pantheon of movies based on this story, don't the “woke” deserve one, out of twenty or so?
Aside from the restoration, the Blu-ray has all the extras from the Diamond edition, which is a pretty thorough collection of mini-docs, missing scenes, and even evidence that an animated short was planned as a sort of sequel that would reuse the deleted scenes. As compensation for their being cut initially, Disney let the animator work on Jiminy Cricket, and fascinatingly enough, “Jiminy Crickets!” is exclaimed by one of the dwarfs in the movie. Ergo, the expression predated the character, and digging a little deeper, the conscience character by that name in Pinocchio is therefore actually named after a PG-version of the blasphemous “Jesus Christ!” exclamation. Think about that next time you watch it – Jiminy's name is basically a non-swear swear. One might even call it “woke,” to the extent that the term means “everything a conservative Christian hates.”
And that, folks, is why the context of time matters.
 | A guest post by
|
Wow Luke, you're really trying to rile up the commentariat here and I'm eager to read what some have to say. I find your disagreements with the rage machine to be provocative in a way that I hope will bring discussion here. What made Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris great was that they sought to provoke as much as they sought to review and I feel a bit like a Peckinpah fan reading Kael after reading your piece today.
My own take on the critical community is a bit different from your own. Of course, I think there are those who are seeking to benefit from rage clicks. All the scholarship on polarization and social media shows that anger results in more engagement and if you want to make money it's the way to go. However, I do think there are some who genuinely believe what they are arguing.
Where I disagree with you is whether an "updated" version of anything is necessary or appropriate in general, or whether it is best done through the creation of a new thing. At what point do changes made shift a creation away from a version of the story to something different?
I grew up on subversive and deconstructive fiction. It was my introduction to genre media. Elric was one of the first fantasy characters I ever read and my youth was spent reading Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and that means that when I encounter something that isn't a deconstruction it feels fresh to me. It is the "Hollywood Ending" that feels creative to me, while the "realistic and subversive" ending seems stale. I'm the opposite of most people this way.
In fact, I find deconstructive writing to be lazy writing. I've come to think of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns as semi-boring and predictable tales and find Moore's more sincere run on Supreme to be a better example of him as a good comic book writer.
All of that aside, I don't think of the new Disney live Action Snow White as a deconstruction of Snow White, or even much of an update to modern sensibilities. From what I've seen, and that's far from everything, it is the equivalent of the "HR making everything bland" version of Snow White. It's the "let's not offend" anyone version of the film. It seems that this is intentional, hence the recent return of the Dwarves in response to pressure. Far from being brave, it is just driven by risk aversion. Of course, it's corporate so that's completely understandable when a business had decided to move away from creativity to bland inoffensiveness. It's the Dane Cook of Disney animated films. Dane Cook made his money on "appearing" to be offensive while actually being very bland. In this case Disney is attempting to appear to update something when instead it's as if they let Disney's censors write the film in response to random public surveys.
I understand why Disney might want to do the milk toast approach though. After releasing The Last Jedi, they are wary of experimentation. The Last Jedi is not only the worst Star Wars film it is also the worst Rian Johnson film by a long shot. Yes, even worse than Ninja Ko. This is in part because of what I discussed earlier. It was a deconstruction of Star Wars, but it happened in the middle of the mythic cycle. As such, it betrayed the source material. Had it been its own film, outside the Skywalker Saga and thus with some different characters, I think I'd be quite fond. Instead, I find it lazy.
When Michael Moorcock wanted to deconstruct Conan, he didn't write Conan stories where he was corrupt and infirm. Instead, Moorcock created Elric, a character in his own right, and made new things. The question I often ask when I see a reimagining, any reimagining, is "would this be better if it was its own thing 'reacting' to the prior work?" If the answer is yes, then I'm usually going to be very critical.
Snow White>Snow White