REVIEW: ‘Snow White (2025)’ Is About Kindness, And You All Need Some More Of It

Directed by Marc Webb, Disney’s Snow White (2025) retells the ultimate Disney classic in live-action starring Rachel Zegler as Snow White and Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen. The Evil Queen comes to Snow White’s kingdom with nothing but a thirst for power and a desire for physical beauty. She tricks Snow White’s father, the king, into leaving the kingdom, and in his absence, the Evil Queen turns it into a horrid place where Snow is relegated to a mere servant. But evil cannot last forever, and outer beauty isn’t everything. Snow bonds with seven dwarfs and a team of bandits who learn that kindness is the key to conquering evil.

Disney has been on a grind remaking their animated classics for over a decade now, and fans and critics alike agree that the majority of them are mediocre at best. Sure, there are high points, and many of the movies have been box office smashes. But Snow White (2025) had a particularly difficult hill to climb before ever hitting theaters.

The most obvious hill is that it’s remaking the single most classic piece of American animation of all time. The original Snow White (1937) was the very first American feature-length animated movie. It’s the movie upon which Walt Disney built his entire empire. While it’s possible that a great portion of Snow White’s (2025) audience has never seen the original, or at least not in some time, the 1937 classic still holds massive cultural significance. Even if that legacy has been tainted repeatedly by bad non-Disney adaptations.

The other challenge for Snow White (2025) is audience expectations. This movie has gone through numerous destructive press cycles thanks to years of delays to its release. The film also features one of Hollywood’s most misunderstood actors, Rachel Zegler, and one of its worst in Gal Gadot. Combined with waning enthusiasm for live-action remakes among specific cohorts and a theatrical release cycle that nearly guarantees the movie will be available digitally in a matter of weeks after its release, Snow White (2025) has attracted a lot of unkindness.

Release your expectations of Snow White (2025) and approach it with kindness.

Approaching Snow White (2025) with an open heart and kindness reveals a well-conceived adaptation. There are glaring issues with the remake, but as a whole, this is a movie with a strong hypothesis and a thorough execution—a rarity among family movies of late. Snow White (2025) clearly states from the beginning that kindness is the only way forward in a world sullied by evil.

It’s a sincerely held belief of the movie but rarely overstated. Perfect for viewers inclined to see it through a prism of modern politics, but universally important a message for those who cannot. Snow White is kind to everyone and everything. She knows the names of everyone in her kingdom and the things that bring them joy. She forgives people who mean well but show it with unbecoming grumpiness. And she tends to animals, who in turn tend to her. With all creatures, big and small, the relationship of kindness is mutual and benefits everyone.

And Snow White is a real character with a past, motivations, dreams, and self-determination. A few cheeky jokes lampshade how Zegler isn’t playing your grandmother’s Snow White, although few of them land well. But it’s fundamentally true and well done. This Snow White isn’t just whimsical; she believes to her core that helping others is a personal and universal responsibility. And because she is a small, young person, she surrounds herself with others who can provide the fight that must accompany her leadership if evil is ever to be overthrown.

The movie never says kindness is the only thing needed to defeat the Queen. It’s just the key ingredient required to be worthy of trust and adoration and to be a good ruler were she to restore her throne. It would be all too easy for Snow White (2025) to end with all of the Evil Queen’s soldiers dropping their arms and banishing the queen without a fight. While there isn’t much of a battle, Snow White and her allies still achieve a clear monopoly on violence against the Evil Queen that allows her not-non-violent defeat to feel more satisfactory in a real-life political moment where power is lacking from the right hands just as much as kindness is.

Rachel Zegler was born to be a Dinsey Princess, but Gal Gadot should stop being cast in movies.

Aside from being a well-written character, Zegler brings exactly the right tone to her character. She was born to play a Disney princess. She has often been criticized for over-acting, feeling like too much of a theater kid in a production that doesn’t suit that energy. Snow White (2025) is exactly the kind of project she belongs in. Her place in this movie allows all of her substantial talents in acting and singing to shine.

Zegler is by far the stand-out actor in the movie. Every movement of her face bestows emotion on her character and catches everyone else in her glow. She moves with the grace of somebody trained for precisely this role. And when she sings, she brings down the house. Which makes it a horrible shame that she has to share this movie with an all-time horrendous performer. Gadot is not and has never been a good actor. Her stoicism is a detriment to every character, especially the Evil Queen.

There is no menace in her performance whatsoever. She constantly plays for the bleachers but barely acts loudly enough for the front row. Nearly all of her scenes are shot in isolation from other actors, which helps because nobody has to out-act her if she’s alone in most of her scenes. But when she starts singing, it’s offensive. Zegler has such a rich tone, and Gadot is so clearly not adept at singing. Zegler’s singing voice sounds natural in the sound mixing while Gadot’s sounds completely altered. Plus, her songs are forgettable.

In her grand villain song, the only two things to latch onto are that it gave dancers a paycheck and that her dress and makeup for that song are phenomenal. Most of the Evil Queen’s outfits are the best in the movie, but the one during her big number is the most authentic to the original film and features stunning sparkly lipstick.

Zegler, however, is a phenomenal singer, proven now on film and Broadway. Her songs here prove it once more. While neither the lyrics nor the melodies stand out as earworms, Zegler’s delivery does. Any song she sings— solo, duet, or with a group—is wholly listenable, let alone enjoyable. The sound mixing when she is not singing is not great. Instruments become too loud in some songs, making the lyrics hard to catch. But the remakes of the original songs suffice, especially when Zegler is involved in bringing joy to the choreography.

Snow White’s (2025) biggest downfall is all technical.

The visuals in Snow White (2025) are, on the whole, bad. No matter how accustomed to fully digital backgrounds, characters, and perhaps even costumes audiences might be forced to become, they still do not feel good to look at. It’s strikingly so in this movie. When the movie takes place in fully digital locations, like the castle or the dwarfs’ house, it looks uncanny because the real elements aren’t blending well with the digital.

In scenes where the world is almost entirely an actual set, like during some wooded scenes, Snow White stands out because her outfit is so bold and because our eyes are used to looking at a digital forest moments before. It’s a profoundly unpleasant whiplash of visual experiences. In a movie like this, there is no middle ground. It would have to have been entirely digital or entirely practical to feel right.

And still, neither would feel right. The design concept of the entirely CGI dwarfs is bizarre. At times, looking at them makes you wonder why they weren’t just cast with live actors. Most of the scenes where the dwarfs are present with humans are very clearly edited to either put them deeper in the background, standing still next to live characters, or placed into frames by themselves, cutting rapidly back and forth from dwarfs to humans.

Yet, when the dwarfs are together with humans, especially the bandits, it feels right that these are digital characters and the bandits are live people. It gives the dwarfs a sense of magic to them that lessens the impact of their uncanny digital nature and sometimes unsettling design.

The woodland creatures sit in a similarly precarious spot. The small ones look natural, while the larger ones look like glaring digital creations. But because the animals are slightly anthropomorphized to show expressions or give a little thumbs up, the more they’re doing, the more they look unsettling. On the other hand, it’s a bit aggravating that Disney can clearly create wide-eyed and emotional creatures for this movie but struggles to do so in their purely digital animal movies like Mufasa.

The worst thing that Snow White’s (2025) digital assets portend is the mucky, dark, and unpleasant color grading and visual language of the movie. Digital projects have become famously lit poorly and unpleasant to look at. It’s especially upsetting in a movie like Snow White (2025), where color and light are fundamental to the original animated movie. While there are plenty of colors around, everything is saturated. The townspeople’s clothes are muddied, just like the castle itself. The only visually striking moments are when the Evil Queen talks to her Magic Mirror (Patrick Page), and colorful smoke surrounds her. A few rare moments with colorful birds brighten things up, but only briefly.

Otherwise, nearly every scene feels like it’s begging for more color. The greens aren’t green enough, the flowers are too few and far between, and the mine where the dwarfs work fills with light that never feels like it’s shining. But worse yet, when Snow White does appear in her iconic yellow and blue costume, it’s so bright that it stands out uncomfortably against the rest of the world. It even looks like a digital creation at times. The costume should absolutely be as bright as it is. The rest of the world should match it.

Save for one bad actor and its visual strife, Snow White (2025) really does work.

A stupendously poor performance and weak visuals detract from Snow White (2025). But on the whole, this remake does work. Its enhancements to Snow White’s character feel natural rather than shoehorned or on the nose. She is always the character at the center of the movie whose self-actualization drives the plot and its resolution without any of the myriad male characters having to usurp her. A bit of sappiness and a poorly timed callback joke at the end nearly ruin it all, but the intention is pure enough that the movie lands on a dramatically and morally satisfying note.

Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), the leader of the bandits who help Snow White and the man she falls in love with, doesn’t overshadow her. He’s proven just as naturally kind and caring as she is. When they fall in love, sure, it’s sudden and silly, but that’s allowed in a fairytale. What’s important is that she doesn’t have to fix him, nor does she have to change herself to appease him. There’s no unnecessary fight or misunderstanding between them, just pure, lovely, equitable partnership.

Approach Snow White (2025) with the kindness it deserves. It deserves criticism for what clearly doesn’t work and should be abandoned by the industry. But its merits are many. Zegler finally has a follow-up to West Side Story (2019) worthy of her talents and built upon a legitimately good moral and character foundation. Everything pertaining to Snow White herself is fair, if not good. It’s just sullied by bad casting for the Evil Queen and an over-reliance on eternally underperforming digital aspects. Plus some requisite bad jokes.

Disney’s Snow White (2025) is playing now in theaters everywhere.