Here’s what I tell myself, gearing up, or at least managing expectations — yours and mine — for another one of Disney’s live-action adaptations of an animated Disney favorite: You never know. Hope springs occasional. Also, the musicals among these recycling efforts can pay off in ways the non-musicals cannot.
In a way it’s like managing your expectations about the weather. Disney’s going to keep doing this, and there’s zero fiscal imperative for Disney not to continue the high-priced repurposing of existing intellectual properties. These films may be self-cannibalizing, and do little for Disney’s creative legacy. But pre-COVID especially, the studio made collective billions on the live-action remounts of “The Jungle Book” and “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King” and “Aladdin” and many others. Stylistically they’re not my thing; they’re visual karaoke. But karaoke remains popular, in case you haven’t noticed.
“Snow White” is the latest in Disney’s subset of animated musicals turned into live-action remakes. It is far from a disaster. It’s one of the better ones, in fact. There’s little bloat; we’re talking about a 100-minute movie, minus the end credits. Director Marc Webb moves it along, with a rock-solid lead, very well sung, courtesy of Rachel Zegler.
There are also considerable misjudgments afoot, chiefly the visual realization of the story’s magnificent seven of short stature. In Disney’s 1937 animated classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (and it really is a classic), these crucial supporting characters heigh-ho’ed their way to the mines each morning, and into film history. They were and are comedy gold, beautifully individualized and graced by lovely slapstick setups and payoffs.
How to drag these fellas and their bumptious physical humor into a contemporary live-action realm that, let’s be accurate, lives somewhere near live-action, in an uncanny valley between digital animation and live-action?
The remake’s solution combines motion capture performance technology larded with digital animation from a presumable army of effects houses, with Bashful voiced by Tituss Burgess, Dopey handled by Andrew Barth Feldman and so on. The actors’ efforts are valiant; the visual results are purely, weirdly animatronic. Pardon the ’70s movie reference but Grumpy, Sneezy, et al. resemble understudies for the homicidal ventriloquist’s dummy in “Magic.” Wrong kind of magic!
Many things about this “Snow White” hew closely to the ’37 narrative, and rightly the splendid earworms “Heigh-Ho” and “Whistle While You Work” fold into the action alongside new songs from the “Dear Evan Hansen” team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Their best contribution: “Princess Problems,” a witty assessment of Snow White’s travails sung by a woodland bandit/freedom fighter played with easygoing assurance and sly comic timing by Andrew Burnap.
Here’s the biggest change from the animated version: Snow White has been activated as a character driving the action. This will not be for everyone. But there’s little value in hanging onto the antiquated conception of princess as operetta drip, opposite a cardboard prince. As for the online pre-release whining about casting a Latina as Snow White: It’s a depressing variation on the pushback from some regressive quarters regarding Halle Bailey as Ariel in the “Little Mermaid” adaptation two years ago. Or John Boyega or Kelly Marie Tran ruining some rageful, tradition-bound acolytes’ memories of their precious “Star Wars” franchise. Two words: Spare me.
Working from a hint or two found in unused story ideas for Disney’s ’37 film, screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson and several earlier-draft writers given “special thanks” in the end credits make “Snow White” their own, to mixed but often compelling results. This version’s a story about a can-do princess, someone born “to lead, not be led.”
After the death of her mother and the disappearance of her father, the evil stepmother (Gal Gadot, glacially impressive but frankly dull) grabs ahold of the crown for personal profit and ego. The gems those dwarfs spend their apparently uncompensated days mining appear to be going directly to the queen’s personal collection. The narrative here is quite simple: Snow White joins forces with her new friend and his scrappy band of traveling actors-turned-freedom fighters to take their country back.
This works better than you might think. The movie takes the hesitant but genuine romance of the young rebel lovers just seriously enough. Snow White’s empathetic friendship with the apparently mute Dopey works like a charm, which compensates for the general comic unfunniness of the dwarfs chaos. The whole film is a 50/50 proposition. For every unforced moment of pathos in this new “Snow White,” there’s a bum lyric sticking out like a sore thumb in one the new songs written by Pasek, Paul and co-lyricist Jack Feldman. (Sample, sung by Grumpy in “Whistle While You Work”: “If you don’t hush / I’ll take his brush / And stick it where the sun don’t shine.”)
Warning: My tastes regarding the Disney method of adaptive reuse do not align with the general public’s. I found “The Little Mermaid” redo, and the best of this new “Snow White,” more interesting than nearly all of the billion-dollar Disney do-overs. On the heels of “Wicked,” this marks the second screen musical in four months to warn children and their elders against blind acquiescence to a totalitarian ruler. Heigh-ho!
“Snow White” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG (for violence, some peril, thematic elements and brief rude humor)
Running time: 1:49
How to watch: Premieres in theaters March 20
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
