Why Did Disney Erase The Dwarves?
The seven dwarves in Snow White have gone from being off to work to being out of work. For Disney, the path to live-action remakes has never been smooth. From racist backlash to Halle Bailey’s casting in The Little Mermaid to political boycotts of Mulan, the studio’s had its fair share of issues when bringing classic animated movies into the human realm. And the most recent reboot to spark controversy is the hotly anticipated adaptation of Snow White – where the seven dwarves have been replaced with seven… ‘magical creatures’. The creative decision generated a lot of conversation about the good and the bad: whether this was done out of respect for people with dwarfism or if it was really just taking jobs away from people with dwarfism. And the response from actors within that community is mostly one of shock and disappointment. Many are accusing Disney execs of being so desperate to appear politically correct that they’re losing sight of the other ways they could make a real difference in the industry. And that’s not just a pattern of behavior at Disney – there are plenty of current examples of Hollywood trying so hard to be on the right side of history that it ends up getting in its own way, muddying the story, and possibly even causing more problems for itself.
So what’s the true scoop on the Snow White debacle? And how can Hollywood toe the tumultuous cultural line without overcorrecting in either direction? Here’s our Take.
Back To The Drawing Board
The controversy started when celebrated actor Peter Dinklage appeared on Mark Maron’s WTF podcast in January 2022, and questioned the very existence of the Snow White remake. Many writers and film critics agreed with him, creating a flurry of thought pieces about how the dwarf representation in a live-action remake would require an overhaul. When Dinklage’s comments went viral, Disney seemingly went back to the drawing board, telling the Hollywood Reporter, “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.”
But what they came back with didn’t please everyone, and is potentially the less favorable outcome. In the live-action remake, the seven dwarves will officially be replaced with ‘seven magical creatures’ – and six of them are average height.
To give Disney the benefit of the doubt, in the very earliest portrayals of dwarves in mythology, their height doesn’t always feature – but they were always magical. So in some ways, Disney is bringing the historic, folkloric definition back into play. But realistically, the studio does so at the cost of casting and bringing exposure to actors with dwarfism, who are incredibly underrepresented in Hollywood as it is. Thus, in righting a perceived wrong and denying the possibility to tell the stories of people with dwarfism in a more positive way, all but one of the dwarves have been effectively written out of one of the only cinematic stories that they’ve always been a major part of, with their names written right there in the title. As a result, many actors with dwarfism are understandably devastated and upset with Dinklage for his role in the decision, peeved by the fact that his voice was seemingly the only one considered in the entire community. Choon Tan, who’s played one of the seven dwarves onstage, worried about whether other productions would follow suit elsewhere, too, putting him and his colleagues out of more work because of concerns about public backlash for potentially misrepresenting people with dwarfism.
What it really boils down to is that Disney missed a huge opportunity here – to rewrite its own history, which created seven one-dimensional dwarves whose personalities were based on single adjectives. While there certainly would be backlash should Disney choose to include or exclude the dwarves, there was another option. Instead of opting to exclude the dwarves, the studio could have drafted seven fully fleshed out, heroic dwarf characters – nuanced, interesting people, who are more than just labels of ‘dopey’ and ‘grumpy’. And in doing so, Disney would have provided positive representation for actors with dwarfism, who so rarely get an opportunity to be celebrated on screen. Actually, even Dinklage himself said there was a way of sticking to the original Disney story – which Walt Disney himself adapted from the Brothers Grimm – while putting a positive spin on it. There’s also the option of making other, fully-realized characters in the story dwarves. Dwarfism clearly exists in the world of the story, so why limit their appearance to only the seven people that hang out with Snow White? The idea that a character like Snow White or The Prince could themself be a dwarf often seems to be left out of these debates.
This all feels like an even greater missed opportunity when considering the fact that Disney has already attempted to rectify some of the mistakes of its past, adding warnings of racist stereotypes to its older films and channeling new interpretations of its stories. Take the recent Little Mermaid remake, where Ariel’s motivation is rewritten to reinforce her own empowering journey of self-discovery rather than just to dedicate her life to being a man’s mute wife. The film also hits on another positive decision Disney has made recently to diversify its casting. They cast Halle Bailey as Ariel – and chose a diverse group of women to play her sisters, too. Patti Harrison played the Tail Chief in Raya and the Last Dragon – the first trans person to take part in a Disney animated film. So it seems strange that, in this instance, Disney refuses to create 21st-century interpretations of characters with physical differences. The impact that seven brilliant, interesting characters with dwarfism could’ve had on children is huge, and just imagine how it could have landed for people with dwarfism who could finally see multiple different facets of themselves positively reflected on screen. Instead, it feels like what we’re seeing is an example of Hollywood getting in its own way, and this is sadly all too common today.
Hollywood Overcorrects Its Issues Because…
We’re living in an era where being politically correct is an important value for a lot of corporations and entities. As society modernizes, Hollywood has been forced to reckon with its long-standing negative portrayals of different communities on screen, with calls from the left to do better. Yet, at the same time, attempts to push stories in a more progressive direction have been met with criticisms by the right that Hollywood is going too “woke” and losing sight of the bigger picture for the sake of appeasement. And truthfully, Hollywood hasn’t been doing the best job at managing this balancing act. There are still tons of tropes, characters, and stories that feed off of archaic stereotypes, many of which we’ve covered extensively on this channel. But on the other end of the spectrum, when writers attempt to funnel in every smart, modern quip, and create characters who embody ideals of “wokeness,” they often forget to emphasize the things that make us want to watch TV and films, like character development and engaging plots.
Take the Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That. The writers tried to update the existing format to the current climate so dramatically that viewers can hardly keep up. In Season 1, Miranda’s new partner Che is non-binary, a positive step in representation – but their storyline is filtered almost entirely through the lens of gender, making the character still feel completely one-dimensional, unrelatable, and inhuman, as if the writers were just attempting to cram every possible talking point about the structural issues surrounding gender identity into this one character. Che is forced to suffer the pains of those fighting for gender inclusivity as the seemingly central part of their characterization. And it’s not just the character that suffers, it’s the audience too. It’s one thing for a diverse character’s plotline to include nuanced and thoughtful takes on modern politics, but another when it feels like viewers are just being beaten over the head with it through their dialogue. This on-the-nose writing comes off as preachy and at times, uncomfortable, violating the golden rule of good cinema: show don’t tell. And beyond Che, the series as a whole is often dragged down by this problem. The need to prove that the writing has been updated to be politically correct has often taken over at the expense of a good story, like with an early plotline of Miranda learning a lesson about being anti-racist while also not being a white savior. It’s as if the characters have been written just to model appropriate and inappropriate behavior, rather than to engage us in a compelling story that can have a more resounding and meaningful impact. The movie Bros was supposed to be an uplifting, mainstream, gay rom-com, but it bombed at the box office. It turns out audiences just didn’t want to hear Billy Eichner on a soapbox for almost two hours – As the Independent newspaper pointed out, in attempting to be inclusive, the movie cast a host of queer actors of color – but didn’t develop their characters, reducing them to caricatures.
Meanwhile, in Pam and Tommy, the creators cast Pepi Sonuga as Pamela Anderson’s best friend, Melanie. In reality, Melanie isn’t black – and by casting a black woman in this role for diversity points, the show basically ended up feeding into the “black best friend” trope, a tokenistic Hollywood cliche where black characters have long been relegated to supporting roles. Like Snow White, this attempt to solve one problem actually created another. Clearly, the idea isn’t to avoid casting minority characters in certain roles for fear of backlash, but to handle those roles with care and to be intentional about those character’s stories. And this speaks to a larger problem in Hollywood: a lack of diversity behind the scenes. It’s one thing to shoehorn as many diverse characters as possible in to appear progressive, but when it comes to enriching these characters’ lives we often get shallow writing. Unless there are other people developing the story who can speak to the lived experiences these characters might have had, it’s likely that, as Fernanda Galan wrote for State Press, we end up with ‘diverse characters who only have white problems.’ This model of diverse “values” as a set of checkboxes doesn’t truly accomplish anything.
Variety reports a serious lack of progress when it comes to employing women and minorities – in fact, compared to 2021, 2022 saw a backslide in terms of women, Black, Asian, Hispanic/Latino and multi-racial and multi-ethnic people directing top-grossing movies. And the only real way for Hollywood to get out of its way is to employ the people it wants to show onscreen behind the camera, too. While the industry still has a long way to go in terms of being genuinely inclusive, there are some great examples of authentically representative filmmaking emerging – and research shows that those movies actually make more money at the box office. Pixar has been praised for Authentic Inclusive Representation in Turning Red, while The Woman King is already being held up as an example of how to teach colonization through film.. But many of the best examples remain small-scale, independent productions – often TV shows. Shrill, for example, included plus-size characters, characters of color, and queer characters, all of whom were real, robust, well-rounded people. Orange Is The New Black – which started out as a budget production, and became one of Netflix’s biggest hits – was an example of genuine onscreen representation, sensitively and forensically portraying the experiences of all kinds of women.
So the moral of the story is it’s not what you say, but how you say it that truly counts. The biggest lesson Hollywood can learn from both the Snow White debacle and other instances of controversy is that truly being inclusive means taking the time to inform the writing so that the story can inform viewers—not through shoddy dialogue, but through impactful entertainment.
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