Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

In Snow White, the evil stepmom/queen puts her daughter to sleep. In Sleeping Beauty (1959), Maleficent attempts to kill Aurora, but the three fairy godmothers step in and change the spell from death to sleep. It's no wonder I end up getting the two films confused, because in some ways, they use the same plot.

Snow White is a cute movie, but like Sleeping Beauty, it leaves a lot left unexplained. Like, where is everyone? We have two kingdoms represented, and all we ever see is the Queen, the daughter, the Woodsman, and the Prince. Where are all the people? For that matter, what happened to the King? What happened to the first Queen?

I understand that a lot will be left unexplained, but sometimes in Disney movies, the plot is an afterthought. They spend 10 minutes focused on Snow White cleaning the "dollhouse" the Dwarfs live in, but nothing on backstory, nothing on the PTSD that Snow White might be experiencing being forced to run for her life. Did she not know the Queen hated her?

The movie uses the storybook frame, as well as an additional place card or two as transition. Maybe that's a remnant from the silent movie days, but if kids are watching this, why didn't they use a narrator to read the words?

Of course, the Queen dies. So, what happens to the Kingdom? Snow White is not interested in being Queen. The idea never seems to cross her mind.

I was also curious about her life in the castle. Was she treated like a Princess or not? In an early scene, she's dressed in rags like Cinderella, but for most of the film, she wears her princess dress.

Seven dwarfs are a lot of dwarfs to keep straight. Why not just use three or four dwarfs? And are there any female dwarfs? Grumpy is so against women, but here we have a movie world where no women are present.

I wonder when people write scripts and make movies, do they think about all this stuff, or do such questions never get thought?

Comments

"Digging for the Truth" Experiment #4 -- The Federalist Radio Hour

I first heard of Sean Davis last week. He created an online magazine called The Federalist in 2011, and he currently has about 500,000 followers on X. It was about last week that he posted something amazing. He suggested if the Supreme Court doesn't rule the way they should, not only should Trump just ignore the ruling, if they keep obstructing the administration, he should just dissolve the Court altogether. And I thought, wow. This guy is saying outrageous stuff like that, and there's an audience for it. So, I decided I'd listen to an episode of The Federalist podcast: April 17, 2025 -- Deportation, Due Process, and Deference to the American People (40 minutes) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deportation-due-process-and-deference-to-the/id983782306?i=1000703904873 In the 40-minute conversation, the host and guest discussed why due process wasn't required for illegal immigrants. The case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was mentioned for a brief second, but...

In Utero

In 1994, I wore my In Utero shirt to college. I’d walk down the hall, and people would look at the shirt. I still remember a professor looking at it, not apparently hip to the scene. She asked, “Bret, is there something you’re trying to tell us?” I had no idea what I was trying to say. Kurt Cobain had just shot his head off with a shotgun. Before that life-changing event, I hadn’t been the biggest fan of Nirvana, but I did recognize the immediate impact “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had on music, or at least on MTV. Nirvana had seemingly killed and buried Hair Metal, and they had done it single-handedly. What exactly was this “Alternative” sound? It was weird, because soon it felt like everything was “alternative,” and that didn’t make any sense. Once everything is the same, how can it be anything but standard, normal? Nirvana was okay, but at least at the time I was wearing the merch, I was much more into Offspring and Green Day and Tool. And that’s about as far as I went into...

I Must Betray You -- Ruta Sepetys

I appreciate the pacing. The author's epilogue includes her mission statement -- historical fiction as a way to keep history alive. Romanis is an obscure place, but she hopes people reading the book will take an interest in its history. She also makes the point that there are no clean endings. So, the evil dictator and his wife were killed, but the problems they created didn't magically go away, the country still had to find its way and move forward, and it was a process.

The Writer's Poke

Search This Blog