Fairest Of Them All? – how Disney's latest Snow White left me bruised

Easter half-term brought the latest Disney live action reboot of Snow White to the big screen. I surrendered to the constant waves of advertising and took a trip with my daughter.

From the first advertisements and trailers, our cinema experience caused discomfort. If you rarely attend cinemas, you can forget the overwhelming, machine-gunning blitz of commercial messages, their amplification in visual size and audio and vibrancy. It's all So Much BIGGER. And when sitting alongside your young daughter, you view it through their super absorbent eyes and quietly shudder every few seconds.

Perhaps sensitised through professional life, I was freshly reminded how mental health language has infiltrated pop culture: stress, boundaries, anxiety, mental health. This also evoked shudder responses. It's presented as cool and amusing to lace language like this in an oh-so-knowing, but to me rather irksome way.

There's also the normalisation of smartphone culture, the casual acceptance that it is here now in life and there is no other way but to embrace all social media, screens and everything they bring. How, like, totally hilarious are all our maladaptive addictions and 'disorders', right? Let's just lean into them! Of course this is a compelling and, nay, essential commercial narrative.

Ahead of watching the film, there was some awareness of a so-called 'woke' controversy involving the lead actor having brown skin, as indeed the lead actor of The Little Mermaid had a couple of years earlier. But as it started I was immediately more offended by her doll-like body figure: not a girl, not quite a woman. And yet to a child's eyes, absolutely a woman. Rachel Zegler appears to be physically mirroring her reproduction as a doll. That alone made me deeply uncomfortable.

Unqualified threat and menace are broadly unceasing across the first 30 to 40 minutes of the movie. This was also upsetting. It lacked the otherworldly underwater fantasy filter of The Little Mermaid, the humour in the baddies.

In time-honoured Disney tradition, the parents of the protagonist are promptly absented. This time through random sudden death (mum) and seemingly abandonment to fight in a war (dad). The 'evil' wicked witch person arrives with no backstory whatsoever to ultimately supplant the parents as Queen, and we're later told she killed the dad. She's just intrinsically evil and bad. That's all you need to know.

Possibly most upsetting is the threat to life that Snow White prances around throughout. The Queen's loyal huntsman is the first character to be delegated the task of her barbaric murder. He has a knife tip to the throat of Snow White, a moment when my daughter looked away, apparently learning a trauma-dissociating skill of focusing on distant seats and counting their numbers, I later learned.

At the film's climax, the Queen again delegates the task of murder. And again, it can't be ignored that she once more delegates it to another muscular, powerful black man with a blade. (Spoiler alert: he doesn't do it either). What message does this send? Men can save your life several times over, even with a kiss when you're unconscious, but be careful out there you mini princesses, because men might kill you too. Particularly black men who look like this. Rationally speaking, it might be considered a reasonable warning. Sadly, many men do abuse and kill many women. Blades are dangerous. Still, I felt deeply queasy, disturbing associations of the Southport attacks, and the aforeblogged Adolescence, flitting through my head. This was a PG certificate, not a U, but such messages or thoughts were not what I was expecting to be prompted by a Disney movie for kids. 

Until the introduction of the CGI'd seven dwarfs there's very little levity to proceedings, and I clung hard to the delightfully HeighHo-ing small people for that reason. Maybe hardest of all to the adorably rendered Dopey, who remains mute for most of the film, shy and inhibited until he is seen and recognised by Snow White. When he finally speaks, with a bold new confidence and fearlessness, a readiness for necessary confrontation, it felt like a moment. I was moved. As hammy and simplistic as the message might be, Dopey's journey I imagine could speak to many.

In hindsight, did I overall regret taking my daughter? Yes, a little. Did she still love it, despite its scariness? Yes. Are my ears now being mercilessly subjected to whistling dwarfs around the clock? Certainly.