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I just think the original story's random and uninteresting.
Queen becomes jealous of princess. Tries to murder her. Fails. Queen tricks princess into eating poison apple. Princess falls into coma. Queen is chased up cliff and then falls to death due to lightning strike (lol). Prince stumbles upon comatose princess and kisses her, awakening her from her coma. The end.
Throw a magic mirror and seven dwarfs in there because why not.
I simply don't care. The general audience probably doesn't either. Not sure why the remake was greenlit.
It is a fairy tale, especially the more sanitised version of the Brothers Grimm version. There are several what I guess we'd call tropes which resonate with people familiar with how such stories go: the Wicked Stepparent, for example (though some stories are also about neglectful or abusive parents - think about Hansel and Gretel and their own parents just abandon them in the woods). Even today, this is a live topic so the idea that the second wife of the king would not have been loving to the stepchild is exactly what everyone would assume.
Then there is the question of beauty, which ties in with both questions of power and maturity. After all, the queen is technically only ruling as regent until Snow White, the legitimate heiress to the throne, comes of age. Snow White becoming old enough to be esteemed beautiful as a sexual rival indicated the end of, or at least a threat to, the queen's power. Having her disappear in the forest on a hunting accident is deniable enough and also allows the story to permit Snow White to survive and grow up. Look at the Princes in the Tower for what happens to inconvenient obstacles in the way of an ambitious claimant to the throne.
Snow White, in the Grimm fairy tale version, grows up with the dwarves until the evil queen manages to catch up with her, and has three attempts at killing her. The dwarves foil the first two, but the third - the poisoned apple - works. The prince finds the crystal coffin in the woods with this beautiful maiden inside and demands to bring it back with him (this is creepier/stalker behaviour unlike the cartoon where they meet when she's alive and develop a first attempt at a relationship, so Zegler got that wrong). It's not true love's kiss that wakes her up, it's when the coffin is jolted and this knocks the poisoned piece of apple out of her throat.
The wedding is planned to go ahead, the evil queen finds out and when she arrives there discovers the bride is Snow White. She tries to kill her again, and the prince punishes her by forcing her to dance in red-hot iron slippers until she is dead. Then the happily ever after happens.
Everyone knows how the story should go: the wicked are punished, the good may suffer but they get their reward in the end. It also brings in the notion of the Golden Age (before the evil queen ruled) and a return to that, with the rightful heiress (Snow White) who knows the lot of the ordinary folk (because she lived in the forest with the dwarves as a humble person) restored to her rightful place (the bride of the prince) and now the rightful rule will be established again and Snow White will be a better queen. EDIT: Though dwarves in folklore are not the cute version of the Disney cartoon, nor are they humans of short stature. They are sort of nature spirits (which is why they live in the forest and work in the mountains in the story), and Snow White becoming aligned with them is one form of magic against the magic of the evil queen. So there is another thread there of the rightful queen (Snow White) taming the spirits of the woods and mountains and bringing them into alliance with the humans in the kingdom so they are less malign and malicious.
So yeah, there's room to update the 1937 cartoon, but changing the prince to a bandit leader misses the point: this is about monarchy, not some kind of "head of state democratically elected by the people". But in the end, it's a fairy tale about a princess and the rewards she gets for being good and suffering at the hands of the wicked, so it doesn't have to be too deep. It's for little girls, who may or may not still want to dress up as princesses and play at that today.
Isn't there also a version where it takes the prince literally raping her to wake her up? Or am I confusing it with Sleeping Beauty?
That one I think is Sleeping Beauty; she gets pregnant with twins and the child (or children) suckling at her finger so the splinter that caused her to fall asleep is sucked out is what rouses her out of the slumber. Rapunzel also gets pregnant by her prince, but that was more consensual. After the witch causes him to fall off the tower into a patch of briars which poke his eyes out, he eventually meets Rapunzel wandering in the wilderness with her twin children and her tears restore his sight.
Folktales were never shy about the grim parts of life. That's why Zegler saying the prince is a creepy stalker might apply to the original stories, but since she's talking about the cartoon where the Disney story made sure to have them meet while Snow White was still alive, that's not applicable.
I know Neil Gaiman is now Problematic, but he wrote a version of the story where the queen stepmother is the heroine and Snow White the villainess, and it works too; the idea of a girl with skin white as snow and lips red as blood can be creepy and horrific as well as unearthly beauty: Snow, Glass, Apples.
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Modern retellings make it a wicked step mother who abandons Hansel and Gretel in the woods.
Actually that was a revision by the Grimm brothers. It enhances the story, because children back then (and now) were often put under the care of people who weren't their parents and it is good to learn early that just because someone calls themself your parent doesn't mean they love you like your parents are supposed to.
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That is because it doesn't resonate with you. The story does resonate for young, attractive women. Young attractive women face a lot of bitterness and resentment from older, less attractive women. The story is effectively a warning to young women and a lesson for them. If you are being backstabbed by other women, withdraw from social games and wait until you snag a high quality man.
It also teaches be humble, be kind to those around you etc even if you are an attractive women. Don't let that attractiveness turn you into a monster.
To add to this, have some similar stories from other countries:
From Scotland, Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree, in which an oddly-named queen decides to kill her equally oddly-named daughter after a magic fish tells her that her daughter now surpasses her in beauty. Unusually for these sorts of stories, the king/father is not totally useless, and he fakes the daughter's death while also secretly shipping her off to marry a foreign prince. This lie holds for a while, but eventually the queen goes back to the magic fish to verify that she's now the most beautiful woman alive, the fish blabs the truth, and she goes off to the foreign prince's castle with murderous intent, and after a number of shenanigans gets tricked into drinking her own poison.
From Italy, Bella Venezia, in which a female innkeeper constantly asks customers to agree that she's the most beautiful woman in the world, until one day they start saying her daughter is more beautiful, so she locks her daughter away, but she escapes and ends up keeping house for a gang of thieves. All's good until one of the thieves visits the inn and blabs, and then the mom hires a witch to kill the daughter, and things proceed as in Snow White.
From Armenia, Nourie Hadig, in which a rich man's wife regularly asks the moon who's most beautiful, until one day it names her daughter, and she asks her husband to kill her. Less competent than the Scottish king above, the Armenian rich man fakes his daughter's death but abandons her in the forest to fend for herself. Then she wanders into a gender-swapped Sleeping Beauty situation, except she has to cook and clean for the sleeping prince for seven years before he'll wake up, and then when he does some other chick tries to steal credit, but he sees the truth at the last minute and marries the heroine. Meanwhile, the mother had soon learned from the moon that her daughter was alive, and had spent the seven years unsuccessfully hunting for her, but after the marriage the moon starts referring to her as "the princess of (location)", thus giving her away. So then the mother makes an enchanted ring that puts the wearer in a coma, and persuades the daughter to wear it, and this works for a while but eventually someone tries to steal it, she wakes up, and the mother dies of rage-induced apoplexy.
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I think you're wrong and that we are precisely in a time where a good mythic story about the unique role, power and duty of women to others and themselves could resonate with a lot of people. I don't think Barbie was just meme fodder.
In my view the remake is empty and boring precisely because it attempts to be subversive instead of trying to properly engage with the themes of the tale.
Making it about power politics instead of the good and evil sides of femininity through some dime store play on the word "fair" is so tiresomely post-modern that I'm falling asleep just thinking about it.
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The original movie is also like 50 minutes. Its simple by necessity. The film is iconic and carries the nostalgia factor for a remake because of its excellent animation for the time, and the excellent writing, voicing, and particularly singing/songwriting.
This film's biggest problem is it couldn't pull in any of that. A jealous aging woman is a tale as old as time. You don't need much plot development to get to that point if that is the motivation driving our villain. AND this is a villain-driven movie. She has the agency for most of the movie, and since her motivation is clear, the movie can proceed at pace. And that speedy pace ends with the downfall of a villain. So its simple tight plot wrapped up in singing and animation.
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You can do this type of reductionist deconstruction with every story.
As a counter argument: Using the 'correct' view, good stories are about the journey. Not the Shyamalanaman plot twist, clever subversion of tropes or badass value shifts.
It's easy to get overwhelmed by these short term moments, designed to give you an emotional high, and lose focus on what's actually good when you're born into what's effectively a vortex dragging your brain towards this sort of short term stimuli on an ever-accelerating repeat. But we should be able to spot it.
This vortex afflicts both the consumer and creator. As can be seen, for example with projects like Star Trek. One of the big problems with new Star Trek, to kick that dead horse, is the narrow scope of the overarching narrative. It's not about a transcendent view of humanity, that existed in the older versions. It's about... Brexit? Immigration? Racism? It loses sight of what makes the 'journey' of watching Star Trek and being immersed in that universe feel good. None of the bells and whistles of the new era matter since the journey you have to take to enjoy them involves wrapping yourself in some sort of post-progressive pessimism where humanity is still constantly tripping over itself.
By the same token, categorizing fairy tales by their plot elements is just... For a lack of a better term: Not getting it.
You don't really need a plot twist at the end of a story with a simple moral message. And whilst the OG versions of these fairy tales often had a quite a... 'convoluted' message, they lived on to serve a different purpose. In short: These movies should be wrapping the viewer in the warm embrace of a loved one that's just sat down next to them on a sofa with a grandfather clock rhythmically ticking in the background. Ready to soothingly tell them a story from memory. Instead the movie is contextualized in political feces before it's even released.
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The dwarves are there to demonstrate that, as a fair maiden, she has the power & duty to civilize the uncultured. She makes them wash their hands.
Based.
Those dirty fuckers.
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