Disney is going down a list of their animated films and reissuing each one as a mediocre live-action movie. Such iconic animated features such as “Aladdin,” “Dumbo,” “Pinocchio,” “101 Dalmatians,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King,” “Mulan,” “Peter Pan,” “The Jungle Book,” and “The Little Mermaid” have been adapted to a live action format. A live-action “Lilo & Stitch” is slated to release this year as well. The problem with “Snow White” was that, instead of offering a new perspective on the 1937 film, Disney changed the most obviously dated aspects. “Snow White,” in the spirit of the times, papers over the political errors of the past but fails to genuinely grapple with either the past or the present.
Live-action “Snow White” replaces Prince Charming with a two-dimensional non-problematic rebel, the seven dwarves with non-defined magical creatures, and a shallow stereotype of an Evil Queen with a shallow stereotype: a senselessly evil woman who only cares for her looks. This sanitized version of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" seems to want to simply forget the parts of the original that lack a modern sensibility. This is not how the entertainment industry – or contemporary politics – should treat our problematic past.
Perhaps the entertainment industry does not have to update its stories by writing over them. There are two reimaginings of American classics that do a particularly good job of commenting on the original instead of trying to erase it: “Maleficent,” the 2014 twist on “Sleeping Beauty” from the perspective of the villain, and “James,” Percival Everett’s novel that tells the events of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of Jim, the African American slave who accompanies Huck in his journeys. “Maleficent” shows how no one is simply evil and that even those who are can still redeem themselves through love. It finds fault with a simple black-and-white narrative. “James” gives Jim a rich inner narrative that better highlights his agency and struggles. Both retellings do not forget the flaws of the original piece, rather, they showcase those flaws from a different perspective to ensure that the viewer contemplates and recognizes them, and makes changes to the storyline with very careful thought of the original plot.
This same issue that the entertainment industry has is startlingly relevant to today’s political scene, which similarly seeks to forget the uglier parts of America’s history. From a 2023 Pew Research Center study that found that three-fourths of adult White Americans do not think African Americans deserve reparations to the ending of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that aimed to close equity gaps formed by past discrimination, it seems that people have a preference to move to the future without giving thought to the past, and the way that it shapes the lives of the people around us. It is easier to recast the past in gentler terms than to confront what the past demands of us today.