Snow White: the 2025 version is an amazing success (critic)
Carried by good songs and a good duo of actresses, the last live action of Disney is not the disaster announced.
What do we start with? By the dwarves replaced by digital “magic creatures” by the IRL clash between Gal Gadot and Rachel Zeglerby the cast of the latter in Snow whiteby the first visuals which let fear the worst … no, rarely a Disney had been so evident and (badly) expected before it even left. But, as Marie-Madeleine sings him in Jesus-Christ superstar (a 1970 musical who took very dear to his exit from conservative Christians): “COULD We Start Again, please?” Let’s try a little bit of Start Again and to explain that the Snow white from 2025 is a success.
We know what to stick to the live action remakes of the studio: big indoor hits, who try to fall back into lightning in the same place as the originals, remaining self -crushed to their music and their visual codes (there is sometimes a success, like The Jungle Book from 2016). In fact, Snow White takes up certain visuals of the classic of 1937 (the dress), assumes the fantasy of the original (the horde of digital animals, the haunted forest) and gently updates the film in his time without too much pain: Prince Charming is thus replaced by a brigand living in the forest at the head of a strip of outlaws, “Ex-actors threatened by Queen’s policy” (sic), perhaps echo, let’s be crazy, with 2023 strikes in Hollywood.
The main good idea of the new Snow white is to have hired the duo Justin Paul/Benj Pastek to compose the new songs of the film: they are the ones who knitted the tubes of La la Land And The Greatest Showmanand Snow White is a good example of their know-how. The choreographer of La la Land Mandy Moore is also in the credits. No genius at work here, but a good job as a musical as we like: the sung prologue, which immediately continues with the I Want Song Snow white, Waiting for a wishis an immediate box. Choked then by Gal Gadot with the delicious All is Fair which is its dark side – the I Want Song of the nasty queen, in short, where she attacks us that “All is fair when you wear the crown”.
Between these two Want SongsThe naivety of the wish and the affirmation of the Imperium Disney, the film finds its dynamics. Between the Snow White embodied with passion by Rachel Zegler and the queen camped as only Gal Gadot seems to know how to do it-delicate balancing play between the non-game and the immediate transformation into even Internet by the grace of the timing of the breaks between each of its replicas. In any case, Gadot is a real nasty, undermined as such and as Disney had no longer dared to make it for years, a foreigner in the kingdom “Coming from a distant country” (sic) whose only ambition is the power of the Moula.
Yes, of course, the dwarves – sorry: the “magic creatures” – can be a big drock for the public, trying to reproduce the look of the characters of 1937 in realistic digital: it risks badly aging, a bit like a Shrek Live action. Example with the magic mirror, servile copy of the original, far from the beautiful liquid metal version of the pretty Snow White and the Hunter from 2012.
His statement as a naive fairy tale resonates really with the context: Happy spends his time asking the cantonade if “We can’t all become friends”while Snow White claims that one can govern with kindness, and that the richness of a kingdom is above all that of the people who cultivate it. It is the reverse of its remake dynamic in live action, which wants to update without too much offending, changing without modifying anything, which stems less from an author’s vision (the staging of Marc Webb is kindly transparent) than from the submission to his time.
While Disney sets in front of Trump by gradually adapting his creative policy at the time (or at least as the studio perceives it), we tell ourselves that we are not likely to review a live action remake – or even a Disney short – in this way before a long time. If we could start again from the start …
