In a movie climate where remakes tend to draw sneers of derision and claims that people have just gotten too lazy to invent anything new, Disney’s remakes of its own products are always a chief target. It should surprise no one that a media behemoth would try to make big bucks recycling past hits. Barry Jenkins’ Mufasa: The Lion King, conceived as both a prequel and sequel to the 2019 live-action version of The Lion King, itself a reimagining of the 1994 animated film, may be the best example of the hall-of-mirrors nature of this type of filmmaking. And because Disney remakes of one sort or another just keep coming, from Mulan to Pinocchio to The Little Mermaid, the temptation to be cynical about them is enormous.
Yet a surprising number of the Disney-remaking-itself projects have been wonderful, or at the very least, have found inventive ways to build on the appeal of their source material without slavishly duplicating it. Kenneth Branagh’s vivacious and clever Cinderella (2015), Bill Condon’s joyous, gonzo Beauty and the Beast (2017), Rob Marshall’s practically perfect Mary Poppins Returns (2018): all of these films stand proudly on the shoulders of their predecessors rather than noisily trying to improve upon them. Some of the Disney reinventions, like the 2018 Christopher Robin, Marc Forster’s almost-melancholy meditation on how easy it is to be crushed by the pressures of adulthood, are deeper than you might expect them to be—though even then, there’s always a Pooh Bear or a Piglet padding through the landscape to remind us what really matters.
Now Marc Webb’s Snow White, a live-action reimagining of Walt Disney’s enchanting 1937 animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, joins the ranks of the surprisingly pleasurable Disney remakes, thanks largely to the no-nonsense charms of its star, Rachel Zegler, whose Snow White dreams less of finding the right princely guy than of building a better world for everyone.
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