As a Girl Mom, I’m Glad the New ‘Snow White’ Exists (Despite All Its Flaws)

I’m a huge Sondheim fan, so I waited basically my entire life to introduce my daughter to my favorite childhood play, Into the Woods. But as we sat down to watch (in this case the Disney version, though my heart will always lie with Bernadette Peters), I had a stunning realization: she had no familiarity with the source material. Cinderella? Never heard of her. Rapunzel? Lived in a what with no stairs now? Little Red Riding Hood? Was she the one who slept in Papa Bear’s bed? 

The reason my 8-year-old had such a gaping blind spot was entirely my own doing: I had never read her these books or shown her these movies because the plots are overwhelmingly sexist, predatory and otherwise problematic. Sleeping Beauty getting nonconsensually kissed while she’s drugged? No, thank you. I was caught between a rock and a hard place: I didn’t want to teach my daughter that you need a prince to come and save you, but I also didn’t want her going into the world thinking Rumpelstiltskin was a wrinkle releaser. 

Enter Snow White, Disney’s most recent attempt to correct and newly monetize the original IP.  

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know the new live action film, starring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, is steeped in controversy, from accusations of being “too woke,” to criticisms of its handling of the dwarfs, who are now creepy CGI gnomes with beads of sweat glistening on their bulbous noses. The drama has been embarrassing (with the top stars reportedly snubbing each other) and the reviews have been middling. But I recently took my daughter to see it…and I’m not mad I did. 

Is Snow White a great film? Absolutely not. The new songs are forgettable, the added characters are confusing and Gal Gadot is borderline terrible in the role of the evil queen. But it’s serviceable. And more to the point, it eliminates the most egregiously offensive plot points while still retaining the heart of the original Snow White.