Disney’s New Snow White Movie Is Good Enough for TV

Not since Brandy and Whitney Houston sang a spirited “Impossible – It’s Possible” has a made-for-TV fairytale musical been as winsome as the live-action version of Disney’s Snow White, which will presumably air on ABC this Saturday night. Starring Rachel Zegler as the titular mistreated princess and Gal Gadot as her wicked stepmother, a.k.a. the Evil Queen, Snow White is likely to charm viewers of all ages when it comes on their televisions after local programming.

The film, directed by Marc Webb, is not some eye-popping spectacle suited to the big screen. But not everything needs to be a tentpole visual feast with thrilling set pieces. Sometimes the quaint and faintly chintzy trappings of something like Snow White—which was likely shot on the ABC studio lot last month—are just what the doctor ordered for a night at home with the kids. Those little ones won’t mind the less-than-special special effects and the rather tinny sound of the movie, which we can expect to watch 8PM ET.

Those diminutive viewers might even enjoy the new songs that have been written for the movie, generic “I want” solos and big group numbers composed by Pasek and Paul—who probably only had a few weeks to repurpose their Greatest Showman anthems to suit the needs of the Snow White story. Zegler is, as ever, in lovely voice, and proves a sprightly fairytale heroine. Gadot even gets a villain song, “All Is Fair,” in which she purrs and growls, surely on her way to a plum role in an upcoming remake of the Dinotopia miniseries.

Sure, Pasek and Paul’s songs might wither in comparison to the compositions from the original 1937 Snow White, some of which are included here. But kids these days don’t want clever and catchy melodies. They want rousing barnstormers about dreams and hopes and wishes. And hey: a duet between Snow White and her dashing suitor, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap, appropriately charming), called “Princess Problems” does actually conjure up some of that old merry whimsy. Would any of this fly on Broadway, or at the multiplex? Oh mercy, no. But for the proportions of this Snow White, which might start at 7PM Central Time, they work just fine.

The new tunes are not the only revision that Disney has made to its classic property. Jonathan is no longer some featureless savior prince: he’s a roguish Robin Hood figure, a proletariat rebel fighting against the vicious oppression of monarchy. The film has class and equity on its mind, as Snow White learns a valuable lesson about the best uses of privilege and the joys and benefits of collective living. No one is quoting Marx, exactly, but Disney is at least trying to be keen to the realities of the present day. The message of Snow White is perhaps a bit hurried and muddled, and awkwardly grafted onto a very basic fairytale princess template, but it’s admirable that the House of Mouse is willing to have at least this partial discussion on a major broadcast network in primetime.

But who cares, really, about the movie’s politics—which surely isn’t a rush-job attempt to keep important IP relevant! What people are no doubt most curious about are the seven dwarfs, Snow White’s new friends and helpers who have become problematic figures in our more enlightened times. Rather than majorly rethinking the characters, or hiring little people to play them, this Snow White uses the latest in computer technology to render the dwarfs from whole cloth. From the look of it, the production used the most recent Macintosh Performa models with 16MB of memory to create these quirky little miners. It’s high-grade stuff as far as television is concerned.

Those who feel that this Snow White is unnecessary or even worse should know that it is not the total disaster they were fearing. There’s some value to the film, even if that value will mostly be found by younger audiences. That is the intended audience, after all. And really, how much should we expect from something with such modest ambition, to simply be a diverting two hours of tube time before bed. Hm? What’s that? This Snow White is not a made-for-TV movie shot in Burbank but is instead a theatrically released feature film that cost upwards of $250 million to make? Oh. Oh dear.