A week or ago, after a Snow White screening, I had to force myself not to gleefully skip up Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side. Much is overlooked on Manhattan streets, but skipping, grey-bearded, knapsacked gents in Harry-Potterish eyeware are sort of a no-no, especially since that whole Luigi Mangione incident.
So instead, fueled with exhilaration, I, for the next 23 blocks, texted nephews, nieces, great nephews and nieces, friends who were parents, former students, and two pals who had vasectomies and were thus childless, insisting they all had to run see Disney’s latest.
On arriving home, I without delay opened my much-thumbed copy of Ralph Manheim's Grimms' Tales for Young and Old. Why? I was wondering how modern times had transformed the original take the Brothers Grimm had on "Schneewittchen"?
Well, in the primary text from the early 1800s, Snow White’s real mom died on giving birth to her, and the seven dwarfs were very neat and they mined silver. In 2025, the queen hangs on awhile longer than that—for a complete song, in fact—and the dwarfs are now slobs and mine multicolored rocks.
Additionally, in the original folk tale, the evil stepmother, jealous of her mirror's fondness for her stepdaughter's beauty, tells the huntsman in her service: "Get that child out of my sight. Take her into the forest and kill her and bring me her lungs and her liver to prove you’ve done it." The huntsman dispatches a boar instead and lugs that animal's innards back to the palace where the Queen gobbles them down believing they are indeed Snow White's guts. This displays a cannibalistic nature, one that might be a bit off-putting in 2025. Thankfully, Disney came up with a more fruity alternative.
Also, back then, after our heroine bites into the poisoned apple, comes one of my favorite to-the-point lines: "Snow White lay in her coffin for years and years. She didn't rot . . . ." In 2025, she doesn't rot either thanks to a quick rescue kiss.
Finally, while the current offering has a superb comeuppance for the royal villainess, one that just might give your young 'uns nightmares for a few eons, it's hard to compete with what the Grimms recorded on paper. The odious Queen enters the hall where Snow White and the prince are being wedded: "[T]wo iron slippers had already been put into glowing coals. Someone took them out with a pair of tongs and set them down in front of her. She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance till she fell to the floor dead." A perfect scenario for the next the Saw franchise entry.
Which brings us to the Snow White that's directed by Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer), that's scribed by Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary), and that has no prince.
Having not viewed the beloved 1937 animated version in complete form since my prepubescent days, I was still enthralled to rehear the classic songs of my childhood resung here ("Whistle While You Work" and "Heigh-Ho") along with instantly hummable additions by Benji Pasek and Justin Paul (The Greatest Showman).
May I just note that while the fair princess and her shorter buddies are touchstones of millions of happy childhoods, not all look upon this account favorably. As NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro noted a few years back: "Snow White is a fairy tale that traffics in some tropes that we might now roll our eyes at: feminine jealousy, unrealistic expectations of beauty, a woman cleaning up after seven ungrateful men."
Wilson's screenplay addresses many of these issues with much more subtle grace than the recent Substance and Nightbitch do. Here the all-male septet learns the delight of household cleaning; kindness to humanity is extolled as a better trait to treasure than vanity; and the princess fights alongside her Robin-Hood-like beau and his merry crew, to restore gaiety to the local populace while dismantling the ruthless reign of a very self-involved despot. No doubt if the film were longer, Snow White would have even rehired a few thousand federal workers.
Truthfully, watching this rendition of Snow White, all I felt was untainted childhood joy, the same joy I imagine I felt when I saw my very first film in the cinema with my dad after my mother died, The Lady and the Tramp.
So please set aside temporarily (or for good) all of the scurrilous commentary circulating about this feature. Here's a film you won't mind your kids streaming over and over again ad nauseam. With charming leads, huggable sidekicks, a scary forest scene, and loveable hedgehogs, who could ask for more?