I’ve amused myself today by reading reviews of the new Walt Disney movie, Snow White. It seems to me that the House of Mouse may finally have made a movie so bad that it’s killed the incredible studio that Walt Disney started so long ago. From every corner, left, right, and center, the critics’ reviews are in, and even the “good” reviews are bad—and honestly, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving studio.
What’s most interesting about the reviews isn’t the weird AI dwarves, the fact that the queen really is stunningly more beautiful than Snow White, or that the new songs are banal poperas (pop+opera=popera). Instead, it’s that the movie seems to have erased the most important part of Snow White’s character, which is her radiant goodness.
(Disclosure: I haven’t seen the movie and don’t intend to. I’m basing this on myriad reviews about the movie, as well as suffering through the promos.)
The original Snow White is an exquisite movie. It has some of the most beautiful animations you’ll ever see, with each moment in the film a work of art. Right from the beginning, when Snow White is wishing at the well, the stone’s texture, the pink blossoms, and the rippling water are visual magic.
The songs are lovely, too, and eminently singable. That last is important. No song is some popera sludge that requires professional pipes to warble. While every kid can easily sing “Hey, Ho! It’s off to work we go,” it takes someone with serious chops to belt out Frozen’s anthem, “Let It Go.” Listening to tuneless little girls taking their turn at the song is...um, painful.
And then, of course, there’s the movie’s message, which is very old-fashioned but should be immensely important—namely, that selfless, cheerful goodness is its own reward. Snow White is good not because she has an agenda but because she is intrinsically deeply kind and anxious to see the best in everyone and everything. What so many miss is that this level of goodness is not weakness; instead, it has a profound power.
This is a message that modern Hollywood is incapable of grasping or even pretending it understands. Thirty-one years ago, Hollywood came out with a version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which was a beautiful-looking movie that hewed to the plot outlines of the original book. However, what the writers, producers, and actors couldn’t grasp was that the entire book is about Jo learning to master her selfish impulses in favor of selflessness. Only when she achieves self-mastery does she gain true happiness.
The Disney studio once understood this principle, but that’s no longer true. For modern Disney (a studio staffed at the upper-management level and in the star’s trailers with fabulously well-compensated people), pure virtue is inconceivable. Virtue can derive only from hewing to a leftist agenda that involves embracing the class struggle.
Or, as Peter Suderman wonderfully writes, the concept of “fair” has morphed from both “white” and “beautiful” to something remarkably like the Marxist’s beloved “equitable”:
The movie goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the queen isn't fair because she's not a socialist. I am not kidding.
The film doesn't quite use that word. But early in the film, Snow White encounters a handsome thief named Jonathan in the castle. Jonathan is the leader of a group of bandits who live in the woods and survive by stealing food. He feels justified in stealing because he and other ordinary people have very little while the queen has a lot and she won't share.
This isn't just a generic lesson in being kind. Later, after Snow White takes up with seven computer-animated dwarfs in the forest, one of the dwarfs explains that the bandits in the woods are "only there because of the queen's greedy economic policies, which forced them there into a liminal space where ethics are harder to define." This might not be a precise word-for-word quote—the line gets spat out so fast I am not certain I transcribed it exactly right—but it's pretty close. This is a movie about how stealing is justified because of the evil queen's economic policies. She's not fair, you see, because her privilege and selfishness have impoverished ordinary people. It's Snow White by way of Occupy Wall Street.
(Read his whole brilliant review here.)
Suderman wasn’t the only one struck by the fact that Snow White can only manifest goodness through political activism. An X user named Steph Anie had a very profound comment about how the studio handled Grumpy and Dopey in the new movie:
I love Grumpy. He's my favorite dwarf because of his character growth in the OG movie. I'll never forgive Disney for stripping him of his storyline and giving it to Dopey because they thought Grumpy was too misogynistic and sexist. Grumpy was Snow White's favorite dwarf, and she… pic.twitter.com/DbrJMKszZU
— Steph Anie (@mynerdyhome) March 21, 2025
I love Grumpy. He's my favorite dwarf because of his character growth in the OG movie. I'll never forgive Disney for stripping him of his storyline and giving it to Dopey because they thought Grumpy was too misogynistic and sexist. Grumpy was Snow White's favorite dwarf, and she taught him kindness. Dopey was the least problematic because he was always very childlike and never spoke. Instead of keeping that childish nature- they made him a moral rebel????
She’s right. By denying Snow White the chance to tame Grumpy, Disney ate away at the movie’s moral heart, which is quite literally right out of Proverbs 15:1-2: “A soft answer turneth away wrath: But grievous words stir up anger.” At the Disney studios, the Bible’s values (which were Walt’s guiding lights) have given way to Das Kapital.
Disney’s huge budget sort of live-action Snow White has garnered more rotten tomatoes than fresh ones from critics whose livelihood depends on some degree of honesty. That’s how it got a 44% score, which is equivalent to an F.
And while it’s true that non-critics gave the movie a 72% score (a C-), the greatest likelihood is that only Democrats who want to support Disney, the shrewish Rachel Zegler, and the movie’s woke message have bothered to see it. If even those citizen activists can’t get excited, you know it’s bad. And here’s the thing: they may not understand that the movie’s beating heart—true, non-activist virtue—is missing, but even they get that something is very wrong.
Image by Grok.