Snow White: Disney Remake vs. Jesus People Appreciation

The showbiz news is all about the new Disney live-action remake of the classic and beloved 1937 Disney animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I have not seen the new film and odds are you don’t have the kind of money it would take to pay me to see it.  Anyway, the critics have not been kind.  Apparently the new Snow White is to live action remakes what Chernobyl is to having a bad day at work.  Like everything else that the new Disney touches it is mostly a second-rate vehicle for woke ideology: thus their axing Prince Charming and true love and turning Snow White into a Marxist woman pursuing female empowerment. If they hated the spirit of the original so much, why bother with a remake? 

       I suppose the prescient might have seen the changes coming.  Those angsting about “white privilege” could predictably have had trouble with a character whose skin is, as her name says, “snow white”.  And the notion of a girl in trouble saved by a Prince Charming who wakes her from her enchanted sleep by “love’s first (non-consensual) kiss” was also guaranteed to have sent the woke Disney revisionists into frenzied overdrive.  And what about those dwarfs?  Can you even call someone a dwarf in Hollywood now?  How about “Snow White and her Seven Vertically-challenged Friends”?  The inevitable revisions were as stupid as they were predictable and, like I said, the critics have not been kind. 

       They have, however, been entertaining—in fact, more entertaining apparently than the movie.  One creative soul made a song out of the many critical comments left by viewers of the movie trailer. Some of the comments: “The poison apple was the real hero of the movie.”  “I wanted the queen to win in this version.”  “If I saw this movie on a plane, I would still walk out.”  “They finally did it: they made a movie nobody is going to pirate.”  Ouch.   

Another creative soul made his own one-minute animated summary of the movie targeting the woke rhetoric of Rachel Zegler with her famous dismissal of the original Snow White love story as “weird, weird” and referring to Prince Charming as a stalker.

       There were also more thoughtful (if scathing) critiques of the film.  But the point is that the new Snow White was not so much a movie as it was another shot fired by the woke left in the ongoing American culture wars—and the scathing comments on the movie were not just evidence that the movie was horrifically bad, but were shots fired back.

       But what of the original 1937 film that inspired such a vociferous revision on the part of modern Disney?  Admittedly, like all early films, some parts of it wear better than others, especially as the canons of political correctness ebb and flow.  And what was the lesson of the original?  It was that beauty fades and so it is futile for someone (like the evil queen whose beauty was fading with age) to be jealous of younger people (like Snow White) whose beauty will replace them. Such jealousy never ends well. Better to forget about competing beauty, get on with one’s life, fall in love, and settle down with the beloved.  Even apart from Snow White’s skin hue, this message was also guaranteed to provoke a furious primal scream from Walt’s benighted stepchildren. 

       It is interesting to learn, however, what the original film meant to those who first saw it in the years after its release.  For example, Annie Herring, a member of the Jesus People group “The Second Chapter of Acts” saw the film when she was eight years old. 

In her words at a 1975 concert, “When I was a little girl, I saw Snow White and I just fell in love with the movie and… I became Snow White.  I used to make sure that none of my older brothers and sisters were watching me and I used to go out into the woods and I’d sing the theme song to Snow White: “Some day my prince will come; some day I’ll find my love”—and expected that the squirrels would come down and look at me and butterflies to fly all around me.  I sang that song a lot.  I sang it every day.”

       And then Annie got to her point and introduced their song: “But when I was twenty-three years old, my prince did come—the Prince of Peace came. And He took away all my sins.  And He is coming for me.  And He is coming on a white horse with ‘King of kings and Lord of lords’ written on His thigh. And He’s coming for us, His bride. And this is really our song, to our Prince of Peace.”  The lyrics are as follows: 

“I’ve got a brand new story, though you’ve heard it a time or two, about a prince who kissed a girl right out of the blue. 

This story ain’t no tale to me now,

for the Prince of Peace has given me life somehow. 

You know what I mean.

My sleep is over, I’ve been touched by His fire

that burns from His eyes and lifts me higher and higher.

I’ll live forever with Him right by my side.

He’s coming again, on a white horse He’ll ride.

He’ll clothe me and crown me and He’ll make me His bride.

You know what I mean.”

       This, for Christians, is the true meaning of love’s first kiss (and of the original Snow White movie): true love is to be found in Christ.  Obviously, this Christological interpretation was as far from the minds of the 1937 Disney people as it was from the Brothers Grimm in their 1812 German fairy tale on which the film was based. But Christians, taught by St. Paul about how married love images the greater love of Christ for His Bride the Church, can find in love stories depths otherwise unimagined.  That is why we have always read the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs as containing revelation about our heavenly Bridegroom.   

The drive and desire to find romantic love points us to something else, something transcendent—the source of all human love, the divine love that Christ has for every soul.  The innate and universal desire to find Prince Charming or Snow White should not be disdained or denied.  It should be embraced and investigated, for within its hidden depths lies the innate and universal desire to find God’s love.

       This desire to find Prince Charming or Snow White in marriage is not wrong or misleading. But true love and the married life are not, alas, as effortless a journey as the 1937 Snow White movie—or any movie—suggests.  Husbands are called to be Prince Charming, but our fallen nature ensures that this will end up being a lot of work. But that remains the task; that is the project of marriage.  Husbands and wives often fail to reach the ideal, but the ideal abides, calling them to try again to reach the ideal and embody the fairy tale a little more fully.

For the woke who presuppose a battle of the sexes and can see in Prince Charming’s ardor nothing but stalking, of course this ideal will have little resonance.  For women like Zegler whose song is “I am woman, hear me roar”, the forest song of “Some day my prince will come” can only seem to be “weird, weird”.  But, I suggest, this forest song remains the secret cry of every young woman’s heart, even as the secret voice in every man calls him to be Prince Charming.  And as husband and wife struggle each day to bring their marriage closer to a fairy tale and the original vision of true love that first bound them together, they can take strength by together looking to their Prince of Peace.  He is the fulfillment of their married love, as He is the fulfillment of everything.