Heigh Ho! Heigh Ho! It’s home from this remake you go.
Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was the animated feature that started it all. It set off a line of memorably, delightful characters, who would eventually wander around Disneyland or “House of Mouse.” Even pop culture references in “Enchanted.”
Now that we live in a new age of live-action remakes, it’s obvious that “Snow White” has to join the list. But it’s definitely not without its criticisms.
The early pre-release criticisms regard Rachel Zegler thinking the Prince was a stalker, while Snow White was wishing at her well. Another is how the seven dwarfs were poised to be played by actors who didn’t have dwarfism. And others consist of story changes which has the princess leading a rebellion against the Evil Queen, and its colorblind casting. Even the David Hand, the son of the original animator David Dodd Hand, criticized this film.
Now, this “Snow White” remake isn’t as much of a poison apple as I thought it would, but that’s not really saying much. There have been many attempts to try to top the 1937 feature like “Mirror Mirror” and “Snow White and the Huntsman,” but there’s not much luck in doing so.
Among the actors in the film, Zegler is now Snow White, Gal Gadot is her evil stepmother-the Evil Queen, and Andrew Burnap plays Jonathan, the charming leader of a group of bandits, who are all against the Queen’s greedy ways. You know the story of how Snow White works as a servant girl following her parents’ deaths, and how the Queen will do anything to be the Fairest in the Land.
Zegler still has the kind of singing voice that permeated hers in “West Side Story,” and she has better spirits here than in “Shazam: Fury of the Gods.” Gadot looks marvelous and wickedly charming as the Queen, but she doesn’t have the kind of vibrance that she should. And Burnap marginally does better work here than in “The Front Room,” but he seems to mimic Jonathan Groff’s voice of Kristoff in “Frozen.”
Here’s how the seven dwarfs are portrayed here. They’re given motion-capture performers with voices from Andrew Barth Feldman as Dopey, Titus Burgess as Bashful, Martin Kleeba as Grumpy, Jason Kravitz as Sneezy, George Salazar as Happy, Jeremy Swift as Doc, and Andy Groteluschen as Sleepy. I have the same complaint against these dwarfs as I did with the giants in “The BFG.” I respect people of all sizes, but CGI people are weird and creepy.
Jonathan’s bandit team consists of Farno (Colin Michael Carmichael), Quigg (George Appleby), Scythe (Samuel Baxter), Finch (Jimmy Johnson), Maple (Dujonna Gift), Bingley (Idriss Kargbo), and Norwich (Jai Betote). The only thing I was able to take away from them is that one of them has a slingshot as a substitution for a crossbow. It’s like the film was more interested in the seven dwarfs than them, and from my standpoint, if the film was more interested in the bandits, they would have been much better supporting characters. At least, they don’t look all CGI.
This “Snow White” was directed by Marc Webb, whose last two films were “The Only Boy Living in New York” and “Gifted.” I didn’t see the first movie based on the reviews and my time, but “Gifted” is a marvelous and underrated film. This new version of the Disney classic isn’t as lousy as “Pinocchio” or “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil,” but it still doesn’t rank with the likes of “Cinderella” or “The Jungle Book.”
The new and old songs were written by Pasek and Paul in their first film collaboration since “Spirited.” Some of them are catchy, especially when we already knew the old songs, but others aren’t that memorable. They’re more upbeat than “Heigh Ho.”
You can call me Grumpy all you want, but I can’t be Happy with every Disney film.