‘Snow White’ review: Rachel Zegler becomes Disney princess she was meant to be, despite dissenters

That year, Zegler, who grew up in Clifton, told NJ Advance Media that she was delighted to learn that Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics for “West Side Story,” had likened her voice to a nightingale.

That songbird quality is on display throughout Disney’s new “Snow White,” and not just when she’s singing and whistling with actual birds.

So is the wide-eyed, earnest approach Zegler takes to the role, one reminiscent of her approach to Spielberg’s Maria.

It works because in this new telling of “Snow White,” the princess is a character who strives for kindness in all she does, but in her benevolence, she’s also trying to rise to the occasion of becoming a leader in the mold of her parents, the former king and queen. She’s not sure if she can, because their goodness has been extinguished from the kingdom when the Evil Queen, played by Gal Gadot, takes over and consolidates her power.

Here, Snow White is diminished, but her vulnerability, and her empathy, is seen as her strength. It’s a story about her desire to embrace those values as her power in the face of corrosive, dehumanizing fear.

Zegler, 23, won a Golden Globe for her performance in “West Side Story.” In 2023, she led the film “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” as a musical character, tribute Lucy Gray Baird, before making her Broadway debut last year as Juliet in a reimagining of “Romeo + Juliet,” which had Zegler performing select songs in the Gen-Z-staged tale of star-crossed lovers. She was just announced as the star of a reimagined “Evita” on London’s West End.

So even if she’s not leading an actual kingdom — New Jersey is no monarchy, at least not at the present time — she can certainly sing her way there in a Disney movie.

What about the controversy, you say?

The word reared its head when so-called “traditionalists” objected to the casting of Zegler, who is of Colombian American heritage, in the role of a character who was said to have “skin white as snow” in the German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. The fairy tale had formed the basis for the original animated Disney movie directed by New Jersey’s own David Hand (the animator was a Plainfield native).

Disney traditionalists again criticized the casting of Zegler after she made comments at a Disney event about the original “Snow White.”

They took issue with Zegler saying that “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was a movie that scared her as a child. She also said this new reimagining of Snow White would veer away from the fairy tale character counting on a prince to save the day.

“She’s not gonna be saved by the prince and she’s not gonna be dreaming about true love,” Zegler said at the D23 event in 2022. “She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true.”

Fearless, fair, brave and true are indeed at the core of Disney’s new “Snow White” story, despite their apparent decision to scale back press during the movie’s rollout and premiere.

In the new story, written by Erin Cressida Wilson and directed by Marc Webb, we are introduced to Snow White as a girl (Emilia Faucher). She’s a princess in a royal family that we’re told is magnanimous, more concerned with being fair to the people of the kingdom than “fair” in the sense of beauty, the obsession of the Evil Queen.

The older Snow White (Zegler) wears her reminder to be fearless, fair, brave and true in a pendant around her neck, a remnant of the formerly happy life she enjoyed with her parents.

After the death of her mother and the death of her father, who remarried the Evil Queen apparently without knowing she was evil (her dazzling beauty has magical powers, of course), Snow White is de-platformed as the new ruler, her vain, power-hungry stepmother, obscures all hope and goodness.

She fades away from public view and spends her days cleaning the castle — it’s almost as if she’s forgotten she is, in fact, Snow White. The influence of corrupt power has infiltrated all, creating a climate of fear where not only does a princess take a backseat, but everyone is also afraid of questioning or criticizing the queen.

However, there is still a little spark as Snow White stands up for a man who has stolen a bunch of the queen’s potatoes. The people are hungry and struggling, she tells the queen, who would rather hoard food than dispense “luxuries” to the common people.

Gadot’s Evil Queen expertly wears looks that channel the animated character in the original movie, but she isn’t nearly as scary as the first Evil Queen, despite their shared sense of disdain for just about everyone else and quest to ascertain that they are, in fact, the fairest of them all.

This is where live-action often falls short — there are just some things that come across better in animation, including certain strains of villainy, the kind that can evoke both dread and awe.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, how does the rest of “Snow White” fare?

You might’ve heard a lot of fuss about the movie’s use of CGI, which is first evident in the film’s forest creatures — a roly poly hedgehog, rabbits large and small, a Bambi-esque deer — who are set to maximum “adorable” mode.

Disney made the decision to go with CGI animation for the seven dwarfs, another element that was criticized when a first look at the film was released in 2023, when the film’s release was delayed by a year, from March 2024 to March 2025, during the Screen Actors Guild strike.

New Jersey’s Peter Dinklage, who, like Zegler, starred in “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” had panned Disney’s decision to revisit “Snow White” in the first place.

In a 2022 interview on Marc Maron’s podcast, Dinklage, who has achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism, explained why he objected to the film being remade.

“Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there,” the Emmy-winning actor, who grew up in Mendham, said at the time. “It makes no sense to me. Because you’re progressive in one way but you’re still making that f—ing backward story of the seven dwarfs living in a cave, what the f— are you doing, man? Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox? I guess I’m not loud enough.”

The dwarfs in this telling of the story are indeed based on the original crew of characters who lives together in a cottage in the forest, which is where Zegler’s Snow White finds them. (Is this thing on Airbnb, because it puts all the cottagecore places to shame.)

Sneezy sneezes, Sleepy has narcolepsy, Dopey is nonverbal, Happy is a jolly fellow, Grumpy is a grump (a reasonable response to the world, he posits) and … you get the idea.

Doc is the brains of the operation, able to treat a seriously injured person and spit out an AI-like summary on command.

There is a lot of emphasis on Snow White’s relationship with Dopey, who in this telling, indicates that fear is keeping him from speaking. The bond between them is supposed to melt your heart and endear you to the characters and story — to illustrate the kindness and humanity of the princess.

She immediately connects with Dopey, who is the first one to see her up close. When he’s bullied by his fellow dwarfs in their usually congenial but often rough-and-tumble household (that will happen when you live together for 274 years … “We’re not friends,” Grumpy says), she helps him find his voice through whistling.

The classic whistle-heavy “Snow White” songs “Whistle While You Work,” performed by original Snow White actor Adriana Caselotti in the 1937 film, and “Heigh-Ho,” the returning-from-work anthem of the gem-mining seven dwarfs, are in full effect.

Joining them are new songs from Oscar and Tony-winning duo Pasek and Paul — Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (“La La Land”) — that drive at the heart of the film’s new approach to the old fairy tale (one reportedly guided in earlier stages by “Barbie” writer-director Greta Gerwig, who is not credited in the final screenplay).

In “Waiting on a Wish,” Snow White sings about mustering the courage to become the leader her mother and father raised her to be. The wish she’s waiting on is herself:

“Waiting on a wish, holding out for someday / Hoping somehow, some way, I’ll become my father’s daughter,” she sings. “I close my eyes and see the girl I’m meant to be / Is she a part of me I’ve yet to find?”

Another song, “Princess Problems,” is a kind of wink to the story’s new approach, as performed by Snow White and Jonathan, her love interest, played by Andrew Burnap.

Jonathan is instrumental to the story, but not central to it. To be sure, his connection to Snow White is a love connection, but it’s not the fulfillment of a perceived lack or longing. There is a kind of “saving” involved when Snow White is being hunted by the queen’s men, but she doesn’t spend a huge chunk of the movie pining after Jonathan.

“You must’ve mistaken me for a knight in shining armor,” Jonathan says at one point.

No one’s “making that mistake,” Snow White replies.

These little cutesy winks gesture to their more casual brand of chemistry, like how she finally learns his name after many exchanges.

“My name’s Jonathan, princess,” he says, quickly jumping in to clarify his statement.

“Not Jonathan Princess.”

In the class-conscious “Princess Problems,” Jonathan, who is something out an outlaw bandit (he was the guy who stole the potatoes), calls out the princess and clue her in on the day-to-day travails of what it’s like to be a common person fighting for food:

“The odds can’t be beaten, and a man’s gotta choose / Will he eat or get eaten? Does that dampen your day? Do the facts make you frown? / Wakin’ up to the real world is bringin’ you down? / Well, that sounds an awful lot like princess problеms, finally learnin’ that life’s not fair.”

He could try being kind “or whatever you said,” he tells her in the song. “It’s just that I’m partial to not bein’ dead.”

Snow White answers Jonathan’s argument for staying scrappy and focused on survival, maintaining that his “none for all and all for none” approach is devoid of hope, something he says is in short supply.

“But still, we have to try,” she sings.

Earlier in the movie, Snow White wistfully reminisces about the days when her parents would deliver apple pies to the public as a gesture of goodwill.

“You can’t fix the world bakin’ apple pies,” Jonathan sings.

Touche.