Snow White: Disney's 'earnest effort to meet an impossible brief'

You have to feel slightly sorry for the makers of this (mostly) live-action musical reimagining of the Snow White story, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. Adapting Disney's beloved but "deeply pre-feminist" 1937 original into a story fit for the 21st century was always going to be tough, and the film arrives "pre-mired in controversy". Hackles have been raised over everything from the casting of Rachel Zegler, an actress of Latino heritage, in the title role, to the decision to CGI-generate the dwarves, rather than employ actors with dwarfism. The result is "an earnest effort to meet an impossible brief".

Rather 'beige'

It's not the disaster it could have been, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph, nor has there been any radical alteration to the basic plot. The opening section in which Snow White (so named because she was born in a blizzard) is subjugated by her jealous stepmother (Gal Gadot) is rather "beige", but the film picks up after she "scuttles off to the forest" and teams up with the "digitised dwarfs" and some "zany" bandits to reclaim the kingdom that is rightfully hers.

'Pious and sanctimonious'

The CGI dwarfs are "benign enough": their renditions of "Heigh-Ho" and "Whistle While You Work" are a "highlight" of an otherwise unmemorable score, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. As for Snow White's skin not being as white as snow... who cares? This is a fairy story, not a history book. But where are the jokes? Where is the personality?

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Snow White here is, predictably enough, a "girl boss", not a subservient princess in search of her prince; yet she is so "pious and sanctimonious", you'd run away from her at a party. The film's problem isn't its "wokeness": it's the fact it has "a workaday narrative, blandly generic characters and a leaden script that wrings all the magic from the story".