It seems some photos from the set of Disney’s new, live-action Snow White movie have been leaked and have gone viral, largely via the New York Post. Chief among them is this one:
which shows a person (perhaps of the human kind formerly known as ‘woman,’ but I’m afraid to speculate) dressed as an extra from The Handmaid’s Tale, leading a sad parade of morose and crotchety-looking characters who appear to have just escaped from the local soup kitchen through an ecologically-sound rewilding area to…God knows where.
Faced with an almost universally negative reaction to the shots and the story, Disney at first lied, and said they were totally fake, and not from the production at all. They subsequently backtracked. The shots are from the production, although they’re not the official shots, and one or two of the performers in some of the shots (hard to dignify them with the term “actors”) may be stand-ins.
It appears that–originally–Disney was going for a fairly conventional remake of the classic 1938 animated feature and then ran into the buzz-saw that is Peter Dinklage, one of the contracted performers in the new movie, and a person with dwarfism himself who–a couple of years ago–said:
You’re still making that f–king backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together. What the f–k are you doing, man? Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox?
(It’s unclear which movie Dinklage was actually referring to here, or how mixed he’d gotten his metaphors.)
But that was enough. On hearing Dinklage’s magnanimous words that he wasn’t opposed to a remake of the story as long as it came with “a cool, progressive, spin,” Disney bent the knee, saying “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.”
This different approach resulted in Disney’s imagining, rather than seven dwarfs, seven “magical creatures” all of which you can see in the photo above. (No idea as to the identity of the androgynous frump dressed in blue, who appears to be leading them. Prince Charming, perhaps?)
I’m pretty sure you had a first reaction, when you saw that image and I told you where it came from.
I bet, “What absolutely magical creatures those are!” wasn’t it.
These are the magical creatures so essential to a good fairy tale, those which charm us, frighten us, free our imaginations from the surly bonds of earth, release our sense of wonder and teach us–often as children, but occasionally even as adults–about life:
One might be pardoned for thinking, after the recent box-office disasters sustained by Disney and their associated studios and subsidiaries, that they’d be interested in producing a film to redeem themselves with the movie-going public. Sadly, that appears not to be the case. Like the main characters in the first movie, it seems they just can’t stop digging. Even my mind (whose imagination is pretty robust and wide-ranging) boggles at the thought of what they’ve probably done to the actual story in this absolute freak of a remake. Shame on them. (I know. They have none.)
In the remake, I have no doubt everyone’s Grumpy.
NRO last week had an interesting thought piece on Disney in which they suggested that under Iger, Disney has been moving progressively (pun intended) away from its roots as a mass-market and common-culture brand, and deliberately positioning itself (at first quietly, and now quite vocally) as a brand explicitly associated with the cultural elite. Put another way, “to hell with the proles, the rich people have money and flatter our elitism”. Their theme park admissions prices have increased well beyond the rate of inflation, as have the prices within the park for everything from mouse ears to food and souvenir grift. Where once Disney parks aimed to be aspirational and magical for all little kids, then shifted to “Girl Power!” in the latter Eisner years, it is now aiming squarely at the upper middle class and beyond, and pricing out the riff raff.
This is reflected in their cultural obsessions, of course.
That makes total sense.