This winter Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney’s very first full-length animated film, turns 85. In this new obsession to remake new versions of their classics, Disney has been working for a couple of years in yet a new live-action version of the iconic Grimm brother’s story. As it happened when the company announced they were making a remake of The Little Mermaid, Snow White also got huge backlash with the actress chosen to play Disney’s first princess.
Again, the reasons why people got mad were just nonsensical and racist, Snow White will be interpreted by no other than West Side Story’s sensation Rachel Zegler, a latinx young actress that has captivated the industry. Still, as it happened with The Little Mermaid, no one care to question why do we need to see once again a story that has so many issues or even if the new film would deal with that. Well, now someone has and it was no other than our Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage.
In an interview with Marc Maron for his podcast WTF, Dinklage dissed the upcoming Snow White live-action saying that the idea of bringing this story back was “f… backwards” and hypocritical.
“Literally no offense to anyone, but I was a little taken aback when they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White. But you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there. It makes no sense to me.”
He’s not wrong. These stories, not only Snow White, tend to portray dwarfs as fantastical creatures that are often seen either in a negative way (say villains, or greedy creatures) or as comic relief agents, but they’ve never given the respect nor have their personal stories or struggles been explored.
Dinklage carried on saying that the idea of having a person of color as the leading character of the story might be progressive, but keeping the dwarfs as the story has is simply using diversity as decoration.
After Peter Dinklage’s opinions on the upcoming film, a Disney representative stated to The Hollywood reporter, that the film will have a different approach to Snow White’s story to “avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film.” To do so, they have a consulting team that has approached members of the dwarfism community. Apparently, they’ve been working on the dwarfs’ characters since the very beginning precisely to avoid falling into offensive and respectful characterizations of the community.
Snow White doesn’t have a release date already and production will start this year. So far, the production has only confirmed the participation of Rachel Zegler as Snow White and Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen. The movie will be directed by Marc Webb, who brought us iconic movies like 500 Days of Summer and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man saga.
Photos from: Shutterstock and Disney Animations
