Disney’s Snow White was made to be a live-action musical reimagining of the classic 1937 animated film. The film followed Rachel Zegler in the title role and Gal Gadot as her stepmother, the Evil Queen. The magical music adventure featured the beloved Seven Dwarfs: Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, and Sneezy. Director Marc Webb hoped to bring the magic brought to audiences almost a century ago in a live-action format.
The story of this iteration captured the sole essence of the original masterpiece, with a hint of modernization spice. The modernized elements significantly enhanced Snow White’s (2025) journey, enriching the overall narrative. It was great to see how the narrative focused less on the romance and the tropes of a saviour and more on the power of kindness—among other themes.
The modernization of this live-action remake also rang true in its musical numbers. These original songs were arranged by the songwriting duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who were most notable for writing the music and lyrics for the award-winning musical and film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen. In film, they recently worked on Aladdin (2019), Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile and Spirited. This movie offered a new perspective on the story, highlighted by the song Princess Problems, which tackled issues that fans of the original Snow White film faced over the years.
In addition to the newer songs, there are the classic songs that previous generations will still enjoy. This included iconic songs such as Heigh Ho and Whistle While You Work. These classic songs, among others, that many people grew up with were given justice in this film. Rachel Zegler’s Snow White and Andrew Burnap’s Jonathan delivered strong emotional performances in both acting and singing.
“This movie offered a new perspective on the story, highlighted by the song Princess Problems, which tackled issues that fans of the original Snow White film faced over the years.”
Zegler and Burnap’s voices harmonized beautifully, particularly in their duet of A Hand Meets a Hand. In most male-female duets, females lower their pitch while males typically sing in the baritone to bass range. However, Zegler and Burnap were able to harmonize on a higher scale than typically expected in most on-screen duets. It was as rare a vocal occurrence as having two powerful female leads in Wicked go toe-to-toe.
The ensemble cast playing the Seven Dwarfs also acted and sang really well with each other. Initially, the CGI versions of the dwarves were distracting and resembled human doubles from Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express. It was surprising to see CGI characters alongside real actors, and the key test of their integration was Zegler’s interaction with the Seven Dwarfs.
Zegler successfully brought the Seven Dwarfs to life in ways that others may have found challenging. In the Star Wars prequel trilogy and the Jurassic World trilogy, actors had difficulty delivering strong performances alongside CGI characters. However, Snow White (2025) was among the better performances using CGI characters with live-action characters—like recent great work in the Sonic the Hedgehog and Paddington films.
Snow White (2025) had many highs, but a couple of significant flaws detracted from the overall experience. One of the issues was with Gal Gadot’s two musical numbers as the Evil Queen. Perhaps, if the rest of the cast were not Broadway/musically-trained, Gadot’s voice would have been appropriate. Unfortunately, her voice stood out like a sore thumb to everyone else.
The other misstep with this remake was with some of the backgrounds that were evidently filmed on an LED volume. It effectively illuminated the CGI and VFX backgrounds in various outdoor settings. The artificial lighting was effective for some emotional scenes but felt overwhelming when there were too many CGI elements on screen.
Through the highs and lows of Snow White (2025), this was a good live-action adaptation. The question always comes up about why they should remake the classics in this medium. For this project, I thought it worked well to showcase the voices behind the characters. Consequently, I would have liked to see the Seven Dwarfs be real actors on-screen, too, but Disney and Webb did not hold back how animated their characters were. Ultimately, Snow White (2025) made clever changes while preserving many of the best elements of the original.
