Look into the abyss of the new Seven Dwarves

Lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes.

It’s like a Magic Eye puzzle, except the harder you look, the worse it gets.

I’m not a Disney hater, let me get that out of the way. I have fond memories of watching old classics like Cinderella and The Jungle Book when I was a little girl, and even fonder memories of watching modern classics like Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo with my daughter when she was a little girl. I’ve been to Disney World and Disneyland, and had a wonderful time at both. Disney adults, fine, live and let live, I envy the disposable income that must require. It’s all mostly harmless.

I do have a problem with whatever the hell is going on here:

Lord have mercy.

It's a real race to the bottom over the most unsettling part of this image. Is it Alfred E. Neuman front and center there, or is it Tommy Lee Jones on the far left? Perhaps it’s the one at bottom right, who inexplicably looks like character actor and Miracle-Gro spokesman James Whitmore. But we all know what it really is. It’s the flat, dead eyes.

Those who prefer hand-drawn animation over CGI realize we’ve long been fighting a losing battle. It’s a useful tool to, at minimum, give a movie some polish, if not create entire dazzling worlds where the audience won’t be able to see the seams in the fake backdrops. Indeed, the new and “improved” Snow White and the Seven Dwarves looks very polished. Look at those perfect beams of light coming through the windows in the top image, natural sunlight could never do that. I do not doubt that several underpaid Disney employees overseas spent 18 hours a day for months animating each individual beard hair on the dwarves’ faces.

But they still haven’t figured out the correct combination of ones and zeroes to give CGI characters even the slightest sheen of humanity in their eyes. The Polar Express came out twenty years ago, and still CGI cannot improve the creepy, empty stares of its characters. If you’re wondering why your first response to seeing images from movies like this is vague discomfort, that’s probably why. It’s a real accomplishment to put so much effort into something for which the general reaction to it so far has been the equivalent of that emoji with a straight line for a mouth.

New Snow White has already met with considerable debate. You can tell because it feels like it’s been in production for approximately eight years. First, there was the fact that it exists in the first place, as part of Disney’s new and very puzzling direction of simply remaking all of their animated movies into “live action” versions. I put “live action” in quotes because they’re predominantly CGI, but feature human actors (or, if you’re the remake of The Lion King, it’s just because they say it is). Stripped down of most of the things that made the originals beloved classics (like catchy songs and joy), they exist mostly for Disney to point at and say “Look what we can do! That looks great, doesn’t it?” and sell unfortunate looking dolls.

It would be easy to point to COVID-19 and the lukewarm response to such recent original stories like the delightful Luca and Encanto as the reason why Disney is going.hard into remakes, with a whopping four scheduled for release between now and the summer of 2026, and four more in development. But they’ve been doing these for over a decade. Aladdin and The Lion King were both released a year before COVID-19 shut everything down and made the future of the entertainment industry murky at best. I don’t know about you, but I forgot that there have been live-action versions of Cinderella, Mulan, and Lady and the Tramp. That seems like something I should remember, or that should be mentioned every now and then. But most of them have come out, made a bunch of money (because like it or not these things make a shitload of money, nostalgia pays, baby), and then were Men in Black-ed out of our collective consciousness.

At this point it’s not even a question of “Who asked for this?” when it comes to remaking Snow White into a (partially) live action film, but more like a shrug and “Well, I guess they had to get around to it eventually.” Still, online reaction was decidedly negative, and that’s not counting the loud contingency of Twitter and YouTube cave trolls who are grievously offended whenever anyone whose skin is. a shade darker than “porcelain” is hired to play a character originally written as white. In this case it was Rachel Zegler, last seen being the best part (along with Mike Faisst) of Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story. The casting of Zegler, who is Latina on her mother’s side, drew the ire of all sorts of people who normally would dismiss Disney movies as being for girls and homos, but suddenly cared very much about maintaining the purity of a nearly 90 year-old cartoon about a teenager who goes to live with a bunch of little people.

Disney’s response was to make Zegler look as much like the original Snow White as possible, so much so that she looks AI-generated, with an unflattering, slicked-down hair helmet and Disney Princess costume. So too do the Seven Dwarves, originally a bunch of cute little cartoon guys and now these fleshy monstrosities. They all look so exhausted, don’t they? Is it from a hard day working in the mines, or seeing what they’ve been made to look like for a contemporary audience? Look at bro in the yellow cap, you can almost hear the labored sigh coming out of him. They’re like the dwarves in the live action Hobbit movies if they had just been released from a prison camp.

Hey, there’s an idea: the dwarves in the live action Hobbit movies were all created with the magic of forced perspective. It’s just a camera trick, but one that allowed them to be played by actual living, breathing human beings with light in their eyes, and not sleep demons who hate what they do for a living. Why not do that here? Who can say? Clearly someone (Bob Iger, presumably) thought people would enjoy them, just as it was believed that people would enjoy the “Futterwacken” dance in the live action remake of Alice in Wonderland, a movie moment I’ve heard is now used to torture and reform juvenile delinquents.

But, who am I kidding. I’m not an entertainment industry expert, but I know Snow White and the Seven Dwarves will make a fortune, as will the live action Lion King prequel coming out later this month (you know, in case you absolutely had to know how Scar got his scar), and the live action Moana coming out next year, and the live action Hercules, and Robin Hood, and Bambi, all slated for the next few years. Disney knows what we like, and that’s cheap nostalgia that goes down easy, like a nice cup of cocoa, and considering what the immediate future looks like on a worldwide scale, that’ll be more appealing than ever before. Sometimes there is no fighting, but only acceptance.

“It really do be like that sometimes.”