Here are two things that recently happened in very quick succession: my oldest son opened his laptop and said: “Daddy! There’s a new Snow White trailer!” And then, less than two minutes after that, he shrieked: “Daddy! These dwarves are TERRIFYING!”
Reader, it brings me no happiness to inform you that Disney has done it again. Several decades after shaping the animation industry as we know it with exquisite, characterful, cutting-edge feature-length fairytales that are still rightly regarded as classics, it has decided to squeeze out a hot fat turd. As the years of counselling my son now requires will tell you, there is a trailer for Disney’s new live-action Snow White movie. And it is beyond horrible.
What’s so horrible about it, you may ask? Well, there’s the fact that, after the 1937 Snow White movie and the 1961 Snow White movie and the 1969 sex comedy The New Adventures of Snow White and the 1987 Snow White and 1997’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror and 2005’s The Brothers Grimm and 2012’s Mirror Mirror and 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman and 2016’s The Huntsman: Winter’s War – plus all the assorted books, plays, operas, TV shows and video games based on Snow White – there isn’t really all that much meat left on the bone.
More pressingly, though, there is the fact that this new Snow White is arguably the ugliest thing ever committed to screen. It treats the animals that Snow White finds in the woods with the same photorealistic CGI that was used in the most recent Lion King remake, which has the effect of transforming helpful woodland creatures into literal vermin. And then there are the dwarves. My God, the dwarves.
I try not to use the term “nightmare fuel” any more than I possibly can, but yeesh, the design of the new dwarves feels like something that would be deliberately shown to prisoners of war to break their spirit. It’s hard to even describe them. I think, and I might be wrong, that the film has used modern computer-animation tactics to render the dwarves from the 1937 film as lifelike as possible. But just because they could doesn’t mean that they should have.
The new Snow White dwarves look like someone has snuck into Disneyland, grabbed the statues from Snow White’s Enchanted Wish and wrapped them in human flesh, as a serial killer would with a gift for their mother. They look like something a seaside caricaturist would draw of someone they openly hated. They look like animatronic figures that were struck by lightning and came to life before the fire was put out. They look like someone has shaved the Sonic the Hedgehog from that first Sonic the Hedgehog trailer that everyone hated. Most impressively of all, they achieve the feat of somehow looking extremely racist while not actually being racist at all. Nightmare fuel.
We should be used to this by now. In its ongoing attempt to sully everything that anyone ever loved about it, Disney has ruined several classic animations with hideous CGI at this point. Tim Burton took Dumbo and turned it into an Athena poster as drawn by John Wayne Gacy. The Lion King made the animals so lifelike that they lost all facial expression. The Little Mermaid took Sebastian the crab and transformed him into a literal, real-life crab, which are not traditionally known for their reassuringly jaunty appearance.
But Snow White represents a new low. Until now, the theory was that Disney was embarking on its campaign of live-action remakes as a way to extend copyright on its characters and stop them lapsing into the public domain. But having seen the new Snow White dwarves, I think something slightly more fiendish is going on. I now think that Disney is making these ugly films so that any time in the future, if anyone thinks of making a Snow White movie of their own, they’ll automatically be haunted by visions of this film’s bulbous, gruesome hell-spawn dwarves and be so busy crying and vomiting that they’ll immediately go off the idea. At this point, that is the only logical conclusion.
If all were right in the world, then on the basis of this trailer Snow White would be locked away forever like The Day the Clown Cried. As it is, it will leak out to cinemas next March and scar a generation of young kids the same way Return to Oz did for us. On the plus side, though, I now have a new thing to threaten my son with: clean your room, kid, or I’ll make you watch the trailer again. Honestly, it’s that bad.
