'Snow White' and the Magical CGI Non-Dwarves
Why wouldn't you just use real little people? And other questions about the new 'Snow White' live-action adaptation. (Plus, a toddler dad movie revue, and This Week in Movie Posters).
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Credit to my friend Brian Abrams, who first sent me the new trailer for Disney’s upcoming live-action Snow White adaptation. As he asked when he sent it to me, “why didn’t they just use real dwarves?”
And yes, that does feel like the big question here.
Certainly there are others, especially if you weren’t aware of Disney’s entire line of lazy, live-action retreads of their back catalog (Decoding Everything had a great, detailed explainer about that, but the short answer is that they write themselves, usually make money, and look great in boardroom presentations about “maximizing the value of existing IP”). Even so, the CGI little people stand out as the number one headscratcher here.
Isn’t half of the point of a “live-action remake” (such that it even exists) seeing which actors they choose to play your favorite drawings? Isn’t seeing actors act most of the fun? In a movie that’s already filled with CG animals, why would you just replace seven roles with even more boring CGI?
Think of how much more dull and dreary all our lives would all be without Peter Dinklage or Warwick Davis? Even Tim Burton’s Chocolate Factory movie at least had one little person (Deep Roy) (that time they mostly used the CGI to clone him a bunch of times). Meanwhile, the most recent Wonka movie (starring Timothee Chalamet) had a CGI Hugh Grant playing the Oompa Loompas. It’s hard not to interpret that arc as gradually writing the little people out of it (I mean you don’t have to interpret it, that’s literally what happened).
And now there’s this: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with no little person actors. True, playing a dwarf in Snow White remake probably isn’t the role little person actors dream about, but it’s still a job. Moreover, that’s seven slots for potential future Dinklages! (PFDs!)
Shit, “dwarves” is right there in the title. Or at least it used to be. This one is either called just “Snow White” (IMDB) or “Disney’s Snow White” (the video description). That they removed “Dwarves” from the title and added “Disney” says a lot.
Why did they do this? My joke answer was that the little people must have too good a union. My too-serious answer is that this is part of a long history of trying so hard not to offend disabled people that you essentially make them invisible in media and culture.
In fact, it sounds like that second one is partly what actually happened. Peter Dinklage said something about the story perpetuating annoying stereotypes two years ago on WTF, and in response, Disney made them CGI not-dwarves instead.
“Literally no offense to anything, but I was sort of taken aback,” Dinklage said. “They were very proud to cast a Latino 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. You’re progressive in one way, but you’re still making that fucking backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together.”
“To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community. We look forward to sharing more as the film heads into production after a lengthy development period,” Disney said in a statement shared with TheWrap.
Instead of dwarfs, Disney will fill the void with a group of what they describe as “magical creatures,” according to casting sheets that TheWrap has seen. (They are currently looking for voice actors to give these creatures personality.) It’s unclear if they will inhabit the same roles as the dwarfs – will they be mining for jewels? Will they have names like Sleepy, Grumpy, and Bashful? – but these magical creatures will be the substitutes for the original seven dwarfs.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can now answer those questions: Yes, they will be doing all of those traditional Dwarf things, and carrying all those traditional Dwarf names. Only without any real Little Persons getting paychecks for it. Great solution!
And it all dovetails quite nicely with the broader corporate world’s reflexive push to automate away any jobs they can. Why deal with any more actors than you absolutely have to? You might point out that it probably takes way more than seven workers to animate seven dwarf characters than it does to just hire seven little person actors, and you’d probably be right. But since when have corporate fads ever been logically consistent?
Anyway, Snow White, directed by Marc Webb (Amazing Spider-Man, 500 Days of Summer) opens March 21st, 2025, starring the world’s greatest actress, Gal Gadot.
Ashley Ray Solved the JonBenét Case
I mean not really, but kind of. There’s a new documentary out on Netflix, Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey, from director Joe Berlinger (who directed Paradise Lost and a million other things). I watched it. This one is very pro-Ramsey family, and quite watchable. I binged it all and came away thinking “Gosh, the media and police got it so wrong and really mistreated that poor family so badly over the years.”
Luckily, multiple-time Pod Yourself champion Ashley Ray happens to be a massive JonBenét head, and has written an incredibly well-researched, detailed breakdown of the case (and why she thinks the documentary got it very wrong). Her piece pulls from books, police reports, and family appearances on television over the years — pretty incredible work.
And now I’m kicking myself. Because I should’ve known better than to believe a “wasn’t the media so unfair to ___??” story. This has become a rich source of documentary and docuseries fodder these days, usually delving the 20-year nostalgia cycle to explore tabloid stories from the 90s and early 2000s. Weren’t we so unfair to Britney Spears?? Weren’t we so unfair to Tonya Harding?? (I’m waiting with bated breath for “Weren’t we so unfair to Larry Bud Melman?”)
And yes, lots of people treated Britney Spears very badly, but the media wasn’t really the main offender. Talk show hosts and news anchors were pretty weird with her over the years and did ask some creepy, intrusive things (and paparazzi are obviously scummy bottom-feeders), all caught on camera, but behind the scenes, there’s an entire apparatus in place for putting people like Britney in front of dopey talking heads. You don’t really get famous by accident. There’s an entire stage mom-fame promoting industrial complex in place working to make it happen, and it feeds on these Disney kids. Britney isn’t the only one it has driven insane. The media are mostly just the useful idiots.
So when a documentary is so heavily focused on Barbara Walters being weird or Perez Hilton drawing coke lines on celebrities’ noses, especially without addressing who’s responsible for those teenagers doing media tours in the first place, you know it’s kind of missing the point. With the JonBenét case as with so many others, don’t just read the headline, ask whose PR team pitched the story. Anyway, I should’ve known.
Also, this is neither here nor there, but in the course of reading about this case, I discovered that JonBenét Ramsey’s father’s name is “John Bennett Ramsey.” Suddenly the name made so much more sense. Depraved.
Mini-Toddler Dad Movie Revue: The Wild Robot
I took my son to his first movie in theaters recently. I took him (along with my stepson and nephew) to see The Wild Robot, which I’d heard was good. And it was! Very cute and earnest, and even the older boys loved it. The animation was a perfect mix of mimicking some parts of old school 2D animation mixed with the modern day more three-dimensional-looking stuff.
Of course I bribed all the kids to go with me by letting them get whatever they wanted from the snack bar. My son ended up drinking an entire Icee and ate a whole box of Sour Patch Kids (I had forgotten how big those movie theater boxes are). On the way home he said “my tummy hurts,'“ and just as we walked in the door, he took two steps into the house and puked on the kitchen floor. It was blue.
I probably lost a few dad points for that one. Good movie though.
This Week In Movie Posters
Welcome to the This Week In Movie Posters, the feature in which we go through all the week’s new movie posters and read way too much into them. Blessed are the paid subscribers, as without them, none of this would be possible. All posters via IMPA.
We begin this week with this new, easily parsable poster for Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, which is actually the fourth Bridget Jones movie, for those keeping tally at home (“tally” is British for “count.”).
As for the poster… *nudges date* *points at Leo Woodall* …that’s the boy.
That’s right, Woodall, whom you may remember from the most recent season of White Lotus, seems clearly to be playing the love interest here. Chiwetel Ejiofor has a referee’s whistle, and he’s all like “Foul on the play! Red card for excessive age gap!” But then he’s all like, “Eh, play on. They’re too cute together.”
Why is there a cell phone peeking onto the top of the poster there? In what’s otherwise an analog photo motif? Who knows, it’s anyone’s guess. What I can tell you is that this whole thing looks like a sanitized rom-com twist on cuckoldry porn. Usually the black guy is the young stud and— wait, why am I telling you this already when you surely already know?
Leo Woodall is great, because he somehow has character actor face and leading man face simultaneously. Only British dudes can pull that off. Speaking of British, I just looked him up on Wikipedia to see how aristocratic he is. And he’s not very, surprisingly for a British actor. Though I did learn that he was born in “Shepherd’s Bush.” Which seems like a very unfair way to describe his mother.
Oh yeah, baby, it’s the new live-action — but not really live-action because it’s just a different kind of animation — prequel to the last “live-action” (and genital free!) Lion King movie, Mufasa: The Lion King.
Fuck, man, someone is going to have to make a flow chart to keep track of these things. Barry God-damned Jenkins is supposedly directing this thing. We need a congressional order preventing good directors from being hired to direct Discount IP Slurry™.
“FEEL IT IN 4DX!”
Feel what? Lions staring at a sunset? Kiss my ass.
And for those of you who can’t read the characters on this one, this is actually a poster for The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. On the one hand, hooray for 2D animation! On the other, “The film was announced in June 2021 and development was fast-tracked to prevent New Line from losing the film adaptation rights for Tolkien’s novels.”
Ah, yes, complex licensing deals are the source of most great art, I always say. I wish they’d announce they were “Tolkien’” a break from makin’ these, am I right?
Greeteength. Eet eeth me, Pedro Almodóvar. Won’t you thee my new movie? Eet ethtars Hooliannge Moore y Eteelda Ethweentón. Ay only ecatht thee figh netht actorth por mi efeelmth. Theeth juan eeth about pooteeng on thee leepthteeck. Altho, he eeth not on thee pothter, but eet also ethtar Juan Toor Toorro, un mucho bueno actor. Me guthta mucho el Toor Toorro. Grathias.
This one is already screening for critics, and shockingly, the early reviews have been good (I had to take my kid to a sports thing and missed mine, so I’ll have to wait another few weeks).
As for the poster, I have just one question (and since I’m not a Bob Dylan scholar so I’ll have to put this one to the peanut gallery): Did Bob Dylan really button the top button on his shirts like that? I’m confused, because I thought Bob Dylan’s whole thing was being a cool guy. And buttoning your top button is strictly for DORKS.