MAGA Hates Disney Because They Think They're "Woke." I Hate Disney Because They Made the Mind-Bogglingly Awful Live-Action Snow White Remake
I hated, hated, hated, hated this movie
I caught part of the “Friend Like Me” production number from the 2019 live-action Aladdin remake a few years back.
I had a powerful, visceral reaction. WHY? Why, for the love of all that is holy, did they make a live-action version of Aladdin with Will, “The Most Violent Man in Entertainment” Smith replacing the irreplaceable Robin Williams?
I knew the answer, of course. EVERYONE knows the answer. Disney green-lit a live-action version of Aladdin because it is a corporation whose legal and moral obligation to shareholders is to make as much money as possible, even if it means making movies like the live-action Aladdin and Snow White.
These abominations gross BILLIONS of dollars. That’s a lot! That’s too much money to resist.
This helps explain why Snow White exists in violent defiance of God’s will. We willed this nightmare into existence by mindlessly consuming all of the other Disney live-action remakes, no matter how dire.
Snow White hobbled onto screens in a fog of controversy and bad press. Star Rachel Zegler enraged the MAGA mob by being half Columbian and saying that Trump’s re-election betrayed a “deep, deep sickness in this country” and hoped that “Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace.”
It’s Snow WHITE, not Snow Half-Columbian, these awful people will argue. This lends a distinct irony to the moment when the Evil Queen tells Snow White, “You know, I really don't remember you being this opinionated.”
Disney would appreciate it if Zegler was less opinionated, but she had to open her mouth and express several sentiments that not everyone agrees with. She deserves to lose her career as a result.
Trump supporters were enraged. Megyn Kelly called upon Zegler to be fired from a three hundred million dollar that had finished shooting and was ready for release.
Incidentally, the far-right lunatics at The Daily Caller wanted to make a “non-woke” version of this story to make Disney look bad. Their plans fell apart. Disney doesn’t need right-wing creeps to ruin their movie; they did that all by themselves.
Zegler generated further controversy when she made the very tame observation, “The original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so. There's a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird! Weird. So we didn't do that this time.”
The controversy magnet isn’t wrong, but she also didn’t read the room when she delivered these valid criticisms at D23, an event put on by the official Disney fan club. They are, unfortunately, the folks most likely to be enraged by even the softest criticism of an iconically sexist tale.
Gal Gadot, meanwhile, generated outrage on the left due to her support of the Israeli military. With their trademark obliviousness, Disney somehow managed to piss off the left and the right. It also unnecessarily antagonized people who value creativity, originality, and quality.
In trying to please everyone, Disney ended up pleasing no one.
Despite Republicans’ fears that Disney would transform a beloved tale of near-death and a life-saving yet non-consensual kiss into a Marxist manifesto about the evils of men and capitalism, Snow White is sappy and old-fashioned.
My son said the backgrounds look like bad AI. He’s not wrong. I was struck by how closely the cottage where much of the film takes place resembles the hackwork of Thomas Kinkaid, the notorious “painter of light” who made a small fortune franchising his artwork.
Kinkaid derived inspiration for his sentimental horseshit from Disney, which has an ongoing relationship with his estate. Snow White’s problems extend beyond its unfortunate Thomas Kinkaid vibe.
They instead stretch to eternity and beyond.
Snow White feels like it was filmed at Disney Land. Actually, it feels like it was shot on the cheap at EuroDisney after it went out of business.
We start by being re-introduced to a story everyone already knows. Snow White is born a princess in a fairy tale kingdom. Her parents, the King and Queen, were kind and wise and ruled benevolently over their magic kingdom.
I am falling asleep recounting this forgettable piece of shit.
Then the Queen dies, and the King remarries the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot).
As the villainess, Gadot is continually upstaged by her wardrobe. Her outfits are extravagant and dramatic and help distract from the extravagant awfulness of her performance. There are high school students who play the evil stepmother at children’s birthday parties who bring more color and charisma to the role.
Snow White is the most embarrassing musical endeavor Gadot has ever been involved with, including her infamous COVID pandemic-era celebrity “Imagine” sing-along.
Then the King, who is a REALLY bad judge of character, goes out for a pack of smokes and never comes back. The Evil Queen is consequently free to treat her stepdaughter like a servant rather than an heir or stepchild.
Prince Charming has been given the old heave-ho in a failed bid to make the story more contemporary and relevant. He’s replaced by thief Jonathan (Andrew Burnap). Jonathan is a real Antifa type, the kind who wouldn’t think twice about hurling a Molotov cocktail at a Tesla dealership.
This is who the radical left Marxists over at Disney think Snow White (or Snow Multi-Cultural, as I’m sure they’d love to rename her) should end up with, not a classy Prince type like Donald Trump Jr or Elon Musk.
In what can only be deemed an immoral and illegal DEI affront, the Huntsman is now black. For the sake of historical accuracy, all of the characters in this fairy tale should be white and straight and express strong support for limited government and lower taxes.
The songs in Snow White are like the film: bland, generic, and utterly forgettable. They sound like outtakes from Wicked. It’s consequently a delightful change of pace when they recycle standards from the original, but they ruin those as well.
About an hour in, my son expressed a strong desire to leave the theater. We’ve only left two movies early—Despicable Me 4 and Mufasa—but I not only understood; I shared his urgent need to not experience a second more of one of the worst films I’d seen in years.
I would have left with my son if it had not been for this newsletter. However, I felt a professional obligation to suffer through the rest of the film, which kept me in my seat despite an intense yearning to flee.
“We've got to at least see the Dwarfs,” I told my son. “We’ve got to see what they look like.”
“Oh God no!” was my response to seeing the dwarfs for the first time.
Disney was in an impossible place when it came to dwarfs. It seems disrespectful to cast little people in an ancient story that posits them not as human beings with agency and agendas but rather as magical helpers whose one-note personalities double as their names.
On the other hand, little people don’t have a lot of prominent roles in American studio films. It’s the same dilemma that has plagued minorities since the beginning of film; the cost of representation and employment often entails taking roles light on dignity but long on stereotypes.
Disney’s “solution” involves making the dwarfs non-human. They’re magical creatures whose life revolves around helping a normal-sized woman. The dwarfs are realized through some of the most appalling CGI in film history.
The faces of the little people are pure nightmare fuel. Great horror movies do not contain imagery as terrifying and disturbing as the CGI dwarfs in Snow White, particularly Dopey, who looks like an off-brand Alfred E. Neumann.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ran a tight 83 minutes. The live-action remake sadistically adds twenty-six minutes to the runtime while assiduously removing everything that made the groundbreaking 1937 cartoon special. The pacing is hopelessly off. We come to dread rather than anticipate new songs.
Disney’s “Woke” Snow White isn’t even particularly progressive. They did controversially replace “Someday My Prince Will Come” with “I Don’t Need No Man (Patriarchy is Evil)” featuring Megan the Stallion and Cardi B, but otherwise, it feels an awful lot like the infamously regressive fairy tale.
Snow White is less passive than in the original version, but she’s still a far cry from the Elizabeth Holmes-style girlboss of the right-wing imagination.
Snow White might cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, market, and distribute. So why does it feel like a cheapie Asylum version of a splashy Disney blockbuster rather than the real thing?
The MAGA mob hates Disney because they think they’re “Woke.” I hate Disney because they made this worthless piece of shit.
Zero stars out of Five
Can’t remember how, but I got into it with some maga goon on YouTube last week. Apparently at least a few are still parroting the “Disney movies are all failing now, and it’s because they’re woke” line from like 2022. So many of them broke the $1B mark recently, but in this fact-free era, they can just pretend that they actually lost money after marketing costs or something, especially in a place like YT comments that doesn’t allow links.
I really don’t get it at all. The original was revolutionary when it was made. The Disney animation was meticulous. I had a 45 of all the songs and I learned every single one of them by heart. When I was six years old! Why this compulsion to mess with perfection?
The Grimm brothers collected more fairy tales than “Little Snow White,” the story Disney used. Hundreds of fairy tales are available for reinterpretation, should anyone care to. For instance, I don’t think they have ever devoted a movie to the great Baba Yaga, who lives in a house on chicken legs. Just for instance. Why the completely unoriginal thinking? But then, that’s always been a problem with Disney. The aesthetic has always been to dumb down and infantilize fairy tales, which has always been my ax to grind with him and his studio.