The Failure of Disney’s New Snow White

A polarizing, money-grab reboot devoid of creativity

By Danielle Ridolfi

July 30, 2025

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In his provocative essay, “The Surplus Value of Images,” iconologist J.W.T. Mitchell wagers that images have so successfully saturated our culture because they behave like viruses, mutating ad infinitum to meet the needs of their human hosts. And there are no images more virus-like than those produced by Disney. Its motion pictures shapeshift into myriad variants of illustrated merchandise and multimedia offshoots: action figures, storybooks, video games, clothing, stuffed animals, and theme parks, each expertly executed with dazzling, child-centric marketing schemes. When Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released to delighted audiences in 1937, it was launched alongside a monumental merchandise campaign. And fifty years later, in 1987, when Disney celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Snow White’s release, they rekindled this model, releasing commemorative collector’s editions of the book with fancy bindings and household products like candleholders and automobile accessories. Many of these products targeted adults—the adults who were children in 1937. Maria Tatar describes Disney’s Snow White as “a powerful success story about how a tale once told around the fireside, in workrooms, taverns, and all the many other places where there was talk, migrated first into print culture for children and then became cinematic entertainment ‘for young and old.’” Disney has adroitly spread its influence and imagery to nearly all corners of the world, producing variants that snare the attention of nearly everyone—a successful virus indeed.

Most recently, Disney has reproduced its iconic imagery and stories via live-action reboots of its classic films. By directing new generations of children and their nostalgic caregivers back to old intellectual property at regular intervals, Disney ostensibly brings joy and delight to new generations. But entertaining children has never been the only motivation for publishers and filmmakers, or even the primary one. John Newbery, the so-called father of children’s literature, valued his eighteenth-century customers, no doubt, but he also valued his bottom line. He directed customers to his line of patent medications—a business he ran alongside his publishing work—by including them as plot points in his stories. The lack of a certain fever powder that he sold in his shops would sometimes spell the demise of the characters in his books. In the mid-twentieth century, Little Golden Books became early pioneers of commercial partnerships when their 1950 children’s book Doctor Dan the Bandage Man came packaged with Band-Aid brand bandages. Children’s media creators are not just benevolent spinners of yarns—they are business owners, media executives, and freelance creatives. The need to turn a profit has long lived in harmony with the need to create high-quality content. But Disney, unfortunately, has begun to view quality as superfluous. Their live-action remakes are thinly-veiled cash grabs that lazily recycle old content and direct viewers to endless scores of merchandise with little creative energy required.

Such is the case for Disney’s newest live-action remake, Snow White, released in March 2025. In the months after the film’s release, negative reviews mounted. This did not seem particularly surprising; the reviews of most of Disney’s live action remakes across the board have been mixed at best. But the magnitude of the animosity was curious. Plenty of blousy superhero and fairy tale reboots of far more questionable quality had passed through the cultural gauntlet less scathed than this. What, I wondered, had everyone been expecting? As the critiques became political, it became clear that what everyone was expecting was not necessarily something of higher quality, but something more “traditional.” Accusations that Disney has become too “woke” came from the highest levels, including in a 2023 interview in The Telegraph from retired designer David Hand whose late father co-directed the 1937 iteration. In the 2025 remake, Snow White is cast not as a wife/mother figure tending to the domestic needs of the dwarfs in exchange for protection, but a slightly more assertive princess who motivates the dwarfs to clean up their own messes and ruminates, as future queen, about how to remedy economic imbalances. And, to the consternation of many on the political right, she is played by Rachel Zegler, an actress of Colombian and Polish descent. In other words, according to Snow White purists, she is not “white as snow.” Hand called Disney a “disgrace” for “trying to do something new with something that was such a great success earlier.” Hand’s diatribe goes on: “Their thoughts are just so radical now. They change the stories, they change the thought process of the characters…they’re making up new woke things and…I find it quite frankly a bit insulting…There’s no respect for what Disney did and what my dad did…I think Walt and he would be turning in their graves.”

Such critics get many things wrong. While Walt Disney’s 1937 Snow White was a masterpiece of narrative animation, it is by no means “original.” Fairy tales are shared, constantly shifting, cultural material. As is the case with most fairy tales, the story of Snow White has existed for hundreds of years as an oral folktale, iterated on countless times by individual communities and storytellers around the world. Even the Grimm brothers took liberties with their version, curating details to cater specifically to a European audience. Hand’s argument that to alter Walt’s version of the story amounts to a cultural disrespect ignores this history; in fact, Walt himself rewrote the tale to meet the needs of his primarily White, middle-class audience. When asked why he did so, Walt replied, “It’s just that people now don’t want fairy stories the way they were written. They were too rough. In the end, they’ll probably remember the story the way we film it anyway.” This prediction was prescient; his version has become singularly canonical, contributing to the prickly overprotectiveness of his work today and the unfortunate deployment by critics of certain details, such as Walt’s injection of race into the tale with the line “skin white as snow” (the Grimms’ version said nothing about skin color) as yardsticks by which to measure the supposed purity of reboots and their leading actresses.

The real failure of Snow White is not in its deviations from some perceived “original” since none exists, nor in its status as a remake. Remakes themselves are not inherently lazy creative endeavors. Indeed, many children’s stories, both in print and on film, have been updated to reflect more modern tastes and excise racial insensitivities or outdated morals, and do so with creative mastery. Standout projects are Guillermo del Toro’s 2022 Academy Award-winning remake of Pinocchio, which rejects the original tale’s insistence that Pinocchio needs to be a “real boy” to be fully loved, and Jerry Pinckney’s 2020 picture book The Little Mermaid, which reimagines Ariel as a Black mermaid who searches not for romantic love but for a friend. Pinkney argued that the classic story was “out of step with the times” for modern children. Most centuries-old folktales are. And most notably, Pinkney and author Julius Lester created Sam and the Tigers, a masterful remake of the caricature-heavy 1899 tale Little Black Sambo. The perfection of Sam and the Tigers stems from the precise creative surgery the duo carried out. They excised the offensive minstrel-inspired caricatures of Sambo and his parents, recasting the story in a vibrant community in the American South, but retained the core strength of the tale: Sambo’s (now Sam’s) heroic bravery. A Black child who outsmarts his tormenters and gets to celebrate over a meal with his loving family—that is a narrative that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had never been seen before. That was narrative gold.

What the 2025 Snow White gets wrong is that it failed to retain its critical strengths—the precious ore at the heart of its mountain. What was most unique about Snow White was not its story—it was well-worn and centuries old even in 1937—but its visual potential. The Grimm brothers’ publication waxes poetic about snowflakes “falling like feathers from heaven,” the radiance of a drop of blood set against a shock of white snow, and the enchanting beauty of a queen. It calls out for a visual accompaniment. Illustrated editions of Snow White emerged by the mid-nineteenth century. And in 1937, Disney brought Snow White to its highest visual realization yet. Disney’s invention of the multiplane camera allowed for the illusion of three dimensionality as the camera moved through layers of animation instead of just across them, giving the film an immersive feel that 2D animation traditionally lacked. Some of the most notable contemporary graphic designers and illustrators have recalled that seeing Snow White as children deeply influenced their artistic careers, including designer and illustrator Seymour Chwast, whose archive now resides in the Dowd Illustration Research Archive at Washington University in St. Louis. To the remake’s credit, it does retain certain visually-compelling aspects of the 1937 version, like the haunting sequence of a breathless Snow White running through a forest of malevolent anthropomorphized trees. But this ultimately reads as lazy mirroring; ultimately, the remake leaves little to be desired in the way of visuals. Disney’s abandonment of animation in favor of live-action, punctuated by a tiresome amount of computer-generated imagery, is its critical flaw.

Part of the ostensible joy of seeing an animation remade into a live-action film is the wonder of seeing beloved characters in the flesh. But nothing about Snow White feels fleshy or tangible. The seven dwarfs are an uncanny monstrosity, looking like hybrids between waxy humans and AI renderings. Walt Disney’s 1937 animated dwarfs, in comparison, feel infinitely more alive. Slick computer-generated images are quickly losing their persuasiveness. In his forthcoming book, Reading Pictures: A History of Illustration, visual culture scholar D.B. Dowd argues that we are becoming increasingly wary and mistrustful of highly processed photographic visuals in this age of ersatz images. He wonders whether rough-hewn or handmade images might become more persuasive as we move deeper into the twenty-first century. Indeed, such trends already seem afoot. Consider the awkward charm of the handcrafted puppeteering in Del Toro’s remake of Pinocchio (2022) or the innovative blend of computer-generated animation and dynamic hand-drawn lines in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023). The visible pencil lines, painterly textures, and intentionally imperfect transitions lend these works a raw, energetic tactility. Animation has the superior ability to exaggerate, heighten emotion, and express movement via line and color, and artfully dodge the physical constraints of the real world. Disney would be wise not to abandon its animation roots.

While the visual shortcomings of Snow White are the most troubling, the saccharine sterilization of its darker edges is a close second. A hallmark of fairy tales is the use of macabre endings and the tangible sense of terror. In the Grimms’ version of Snow White, the wicked stepmother meets her end by dancing on iron shoes rendered red hot in burning coals. In the 1937 version, the queen’s death is revised but the viewer still relishes in the gruesome details. After a bolt of lightning splits the rock outcropping where she has fled, the queen plummets into a ravine. We do not actually see her body dashed on the rocks, but the two smug vultures who fly down in pursuit ensure that our minds conjure up images of a picked-over corpse. Sometimes the suggestion of death is most frightening of all. In the 2025 remake, following a decidedly anti-climactic confrontation with Snow White and a group of villagers who deliver a gentle lecture on the good old days, the queen vanishes ambiguously into the magic mirror’s vortex after breaking it in a petulant rage. Disney sacrificed a dramatic battle and gruesome definitive end in favor of another cash grab—they preserved the possibility of a sequel.

The removal of danger, death, and the macabre from contemporary Disney remakes mirrors larger trends in children’s media in which embattled parents and school boards debate the question as to whether children’s media should convey harsh realities or wrap children in a protective cocoon. Books that deal with difficult subject matter like racism, sexuality, abuse, and death are challenged and banned. Creators of children’s media experience pushback from publishers and other gatekeepers when advocating for such necessary topics in their work. Newbery award-winning author Matt de la Peña, in his touching essay “Why We Shouldn’t Shield Children from Darkness,” describes learning that his picture book, Love, would not be supported by an important publishing stakeholder unless he “softened” an illustration depicting a child hiding under a piano while his parents argue. The picture also contained a detail suggesting at least one of the parents had been drinking. While the world of children’s media has made great strides in terms of racial inclusion, de la Peña argues, “many other facets of diversity remain in the shadows.”

Death and the danger or conflict that can exist within one’s own home remain some of these overlooked topics in children’s media. Maria Tatar argues that the true core conflict in Snow White is the jealousy between a mother and a daughter. In fact, prior to the Grimms’ version in which the queen was cast as the stepmother, some of the oral iterations that circulated featured a rivalry between a biological mother and daughter. How utterly terrifying that such murderous jealousy could come from such an intimate source. The Grimm brothers and Walt Disney likely found this a touch too unsettling, or a violation of “the sanctity of motherhood.” But jealousy, cruelty, abandonment, anger, and all number of complex emotional experiences are an inevitable part of domestic relationships. Children’s films like the dark fantasy Coraline (2009) have exploited such maternal complexities to superb effect. No doubt, Disney could create something just as edgy, dangerous, and raw should they choose to. But they are too worried about profits to take such cinematic risks. Instead, no doubt, they will continue to crank out sub-par variations of the same tired content in as many different media as they can muster.

The virus-like quality of children’s media—the way it morphs and jumps forms to be consumed in countless new ways is nothing new, and may, to children, seem rather natural. According to Sam Leith, author of The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, children themselves are the original content remixers. They facilitate, Leith argues, the spillage of stories from one medium to another via their oral culture and inventive play. Watch any child after they consume a children’s book or movie—they will inevitably invent playground games or scenarios for their toys and action figures that extend the story. Children’s stories have, according to Leith, “a blurriness, an availability to be reinvented.” Disney has capitalized on this knowledge, fully aware that its incessant reissuing of toys, storybooks, and films will seem to children seamless, in line with their own practices of cultural re-invention. Disney’s goal in rebooting Snow White was not to create a second canonical iteration of the beloved fairy tale, but to surreptitiously direct the desires of children and their nostalgic parents back to the Disney universe and its stockpile of cheaply-produced merchandise.

The world of children’s literature, according to scholar Perry Nodelman, is a world colonized by adults. One could say much the same about the children’s film industry. Adults make children’s films, advertise them, profit from them, persuade children to see them, decide whether the children in their lives will, in fact, see them, and ultimately, render judgement of them. If Disney’s iconic imagery replicates itself like a visual virus, seeking to attach itself to new young hosts and live on indefinitely, then there are countless adults behind the scenes tinkering with that virus’s underlying code in hopes of shaping those iterations for their own financial gain. I wonder, without the interference of adults, what children would reinvent about their favorite fairy tales, which films they would see, and how they would review Disney’s remakes. I have yet to see any sustained efforts to elevate the reviews and voices of children. Adults are arbiters of childhood. But maybe we should not be. So, if you seek a true review of Snow White, try asking a child.