Replacing the 7 Dwarfs in Snow White With CGI Is Not ‘Progressive’
Watching the new Snow White teaser trailer, which dropped last week, you’d be forgiven for being a bit confused. The live-action adaptation of the 1937 Disney cartoon still relies heavily on animation to fill out its cast. You’d also be forgiven for being confused by the reasoning.
In the trailer, we see Snow White, played by Rachel Zegler, twirling and making merry with her seven iconic companions, all of whom are portrayed with CGI. For those who’ve been following along over the course of production, that likely doesn’t come as a surprise: Disney announced in early 2022 that the company would take a “different approach” to the septet of characters “to avoid reinforcing stereotypes” about dwarfs.
“It makes no sense to me,” said the actor Peter Dinklage, himself a dwarf, on Marc Maron’s podcast, prior to Disney’s announcement. “You’re progressive in one way”—casting a Latina as Snow White, he said—”but then you’re still making that fucking backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together. What the fuck are you doing, man?”Â
His objection quickly prompted Disney’s response. The solution the company arrived at: replacing the characters with computer-generated renderings and declining to cast dwarf actors, who have next to no opportunity in Hollywood. That doesn’t strike me as progressive.
Not everyone was thrilled. “It boggles my mind that a network, instead of listening to an entire community, [is] listening to one person,” said Terra Jolé, a reality television star with dwarfism, who added that some of her family members auditioned for the film. “That’s just how much pull this one person has created in this society because o
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