Snow White (2025) Movie Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. It's been a busy week here in the Geek Cave, so I haven't had a chance to come on here and do any blog posts this week. However, since The VHS Club Podcast aired this week's episode a night early, I went on Disney+ to watch the live-action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs last night. So that gave me something to write about this week. There will be some minor spoilers, but nothing super major since it's a relatively new movie. Let's get into it!

My history with Disney's live-action remakes of their classic animated features has been mixed. While I enjoyed Beauty and the Beast (2017), Christopher Robin (2018), and Aladdin (2019), I'm too much of a fanboy of the 1967 animated original to have enjoyed The Jungle Book (2016), and I saw no point in watching the other ones, though I did try to watch both Mulan (2020) and Cruella (2021), but didn't finish either one. However, even though I didn't want to go to see it in theaters, I did have an interest in seeing Snow White just because the original animated version is so old and dated (I still enjoy it though), that I was intrigued to see what a live-action remake could be, being that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the first animated feature film produced by Walt Disney in the 1930s.

Despite my interest though, I was still skeptical. Afterall this was the same studio that did a CG animated remake of The Lion King, and then dared to call it "live-action", even though it's a photorealistically animated movie. I was pleasantly surprised though to find that I found myself enjoying the movie to the point where I was smiling and singing along to the classic songs that appear in the movie, such as "Heigh-Ho", "Whistle While You Work" and "The Silly Song (Dwarfs's Yodel Song)". I couldn't help myself, because two of those songs have been part of my childhood since before I ever saw the 1937/1938 animated movie on VHS after 1994 (it didn't come out on home video until 1994), as I had the Disney Sing-Along Songs: Heigh-Ho VHS tape when I was a kid, and both "Heigh-Ho" and "The Silly Song" are both on there.

The cast was interesting. Gal Gadot was the only member of the cast I've seen in other movies...namely three (out of the four) of the DCEU films she appeared in as Wonder Woman. I enjoyed Rachel Zegler's performance as the titular character, and Andrew Burnap as Jonathan, the stand-in for the Prince Charming character from the original movie. I also enjoyed the performances of the actors who voiced the Dwarfs. Including Dopey. Which was weird to me, because Dopey was always this mute character, but it made sense that they'd change that since the Dwarfs aren't as comedic in this movie as they are in the original animated one. 

One thing that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me is how the Queen knew where Snow White was before she disguised herself as an elderly woman to give Snow White the poison apple. In the original animated movie, the Magic Mirror told her where Snow White was staying, but in this version, it didn't. And being that none of the Queen's soldiers knew where she ended up being after their fight with Jonathan and his Loyalists (they fight the Queen's men in the name of the King, Snow White's father), I don't know how she could've known where Snow White was. Maybe it's in one of the deleted scenes that are on the movie's Blu-ray release? Who knows.

I do appreciate that they expanded the story so that we meet Snow White as a little girl and see what her parents were like before her mother died, and her father married the Evil Queen, so that we see what happened after Jonathan (Prince Charming in the original) kissed her to break the sleeping death spell the Queen had placed on her through the poison apple. It also meant that the Queen's death can happen after that, instead of by chance after the Dwarfs had been chasing her, like in the animated movie. Even the original story by the Brothers Grimm had more in it than the original animated movie did.

In a way, the movie felt like what the animated movie would've been had Disney made it in the '90s, during the Disney Renaissance era (1989-1999), instead of the '30s. It had some of the same story beats as Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994) did. Maybe that's why I enjoyed it so much. It felt familiar and interesting in a way that the other Disney live-action remakes haven't been before. This doesn't mean I'm going to go back and watch all of the other Disney live-action remakes, even the ones I've seen before, but I enjoyed the movie.

Overall, I really enjoyed the movie. It was fun, hopeful, interesting and the songs were great. Between this and Superman (2025), I'm beginning to feel hopeful that Hollywood is starting to inject hope and fun back into the movies, while sending very good messages through the power of cinema, because it really hasn't felt that way to me for a very long time. While the movie didn't do very well at the box office, it has found its audience on Disney+, so I recommend giving it a watch, even if you're not a fan of the Disney live-action remakes.

That's gonna be it for me for today. I might be back tomorrow to do a review of The Hobbit, as I'm almost finished re-reading it (for the hundredth time), and I did review The Lord of the Rings early last year or late the year before. In the meantime have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.