Snow White is a fairy tale that is possibly thousands of years old. While the version known today comes from the Brothers Grimm in the 19th century, it’s believed that many of the stories in their collection were derived from much older traditions. The roots of fairy tales like Snow White could trace back to oral traditions that span millennia.
The beloved 1937 Disney film was the first full length animated feature film. It should be remembered it was made at a time modernist aesthetics were in vogue. The fragmented view of the world was reflected in the work of the surrealists. Disney’s traditional narrative and aesthetic went counter to the trends in modernism. So the film is displays concepts far more complex and intricate than one would expect from a mere fairy tale.
The Grimms’ story accounts for the origin of Snow White’s name. As a young queen was sewing by a window during winter she pricked her finger and seeing the blood she made a wish that she would have a child with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as black as ebony. Later her daughter was born that fulfilled her wish but Snow White’s mother died while giving birth. A year later, the king married again, his new wife was beautiful but very vain and proud. Disney 1937 film begins at this point.

The opening scene shows the evil queen conjuring a spirit within a magic mirror by saying, ‘Magic mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all.” Ancient cultures recognized the danger of devices, as Oswald Spengler wrote, “he who was not himself possessed by this will to power over all nature would necessarily feel all this as devilish, and in fact men have always regarded machines as the invention of the devil.”

The very soul of storytelling is flattened in Disney’s 2025 film — the remake is actually possessed by a will to power. The evil queen which could be seen as a Jungian shadow of Snow White herself; Snow White’s own darker impulses, desires, and potential for envy, jealousy, and pride. The danger of the shadow is brilliantly presented in Star Wars. Luke’s goal was not to replace Darth Vader. The key moment of Return of the Jedi is when Luke refuses to kill Vader, recognizing that to do so would be to embrace the very same path of darkness that his father did. The new film has Snow White seek the power of the queen.
Although the queen may have political power, she is dependent on the mirror to appraise her worth. So she is a slave to the mirror. In the original narrative the aim was for Snow White to mature from this vain dependency. In the 1937, film the Queen sends a woodsmen to kill Snow White, but he can’t bring himself to commit the horrible act because he witness the compassion of Snow White helping a lost baby bird. So he warns her and tells her to hide in the forest. The animation expressing the fear of Snow White is excellent.

But in the 2025 film, Snow White doesn’t help the little bird, instead she offers the woodman an apple, which breaks the symbolic chain of the apple in the original narrative. When the woodsman pulls out the knife Snow White doesn’t respond in terror, she actually steps toward the knife! Instead of begging Snow White to forgive him acting to kill her, the woodsman says, “Flee, before I change my mind!” Radically removing the moral of the scene.

In the 1937 film, Snow White has a gift of communicating with animals. After initially being terrified by the forest, cute animals curiously approach her. She makes friends with the animals by singing them a song. Her forest brethren then lead her to the cottage of the seven dwarfs. When she enters the dwarfs’ cottage, she to finds it a poorly kept home. Realizing the home needs a woman’s touch, Snow White begins singing “Whistle While You Work” to her fury companions, showing a pleasure in working. I was reminded of Kira from the Dark Crystal, she had the ability to call trapped animals to freedom. So this scene is not just about the physical act of cleaning, it is symbol of a broader cultural context. Snow White’s willingness to work without being asked. Her act of working shows the she is maturing beyond the vanity of the shadow.

But in the new film, Snow White doesn’t have the same connection with animals. For example, when forest animals curiously approach her, she doesn’t sing to them as form of communication rather she offers a deer a piece of food as modern person would. After the animals lead her to the dwarfs cottage, she just falls asleep in the bed: it signals a disconnection from labor and nature, perhaps reflecting the presumption that work will be taken care of by machines or external systems. Spengler described the “devastating shallowness” of modern movements that promoted the ideal of utility, “The aim of mankind was held to consist in relieving the individual of as much of the work as possible and putting the burden on the machine….In place of the honest religion of earlier times there was a shallow enthusiasm for the “achievements of humanity,” by which nothing more was meant than progress in technics of laborsaving and amusement making. Of the soul, not one word.”
In the new film, it’s rather amusing- Snow White directs the dwarfs to clean their own house! What gives her the authority to command the dwarfs in working? In the past one would need to work to have the respect of a position of authority. But of course the parasitic imbeciles who made this film did not really work for their positions, so they fail to understand the growth that comes from actual work.

Snow White’s father didn’t protect her from the jealousy of her evil stepmother. The short stature of the dwarf is symbolic of Snow White’s poor view of men. But her arrangement with the dwarfs is step in the right direction from a psychic that is overly feminine. She is learning to respect the hard working dwarfs, their work could symbolize retrieving treasures from the unconscious. For example one would not expect the great Jedi mater to be living in a swamp in Dagobah.

But Disney’s utilitarian remake has failed to recognize these dimensions. Snow White’s home was broken in the original narrative. Disney took an unexpected turn in by presenting Snow White’s warm memories of childhood. But this only to motivate her to take the role of her father. The postmodern agendas presume that the social relations within culture need to be turned upside down to “empower” women and ethnic groups. Much of it comes from Foucault’s theory of power. A terrible song the evil queen sings “All is Fair” seems to reflect Foucault’s view of truth, fairness or truth is a historically given thing which changes with the power structures

The psychoanalysis Eric Fromm who studied the rise of power of the Nazi German had a profound insight in the perception of life of those who see power as the greatest achievement. He recognized the danger of the necrophile who is driven by a hatred of life and a preoccupation with all that is mechanical, he wrote,” Just as for the lover of life the fundamental polarity in man is that between male and female, for the necrophile there exists another and very different polarity: that between those who have the power to kill and those lack this power. For him there are only two “sexes”: the powerful and the powerless; the killers and the killed.”

This passage is not only relevant to the reason why the romance of Snow White was seriously down played, but also why the culture favors destructive themes. The Faustian woman does not see her body as a vessel that can bring forth life, the polarity between male and female is held in contempt. The word “biological woman” is considered an offense. She seeks to maintain a self-segregation from the totality of which she is a necessary part, she chooses to be unrelated to the original context of all created things in which she too has her place. This act of apostasy is the presumption of Faustain magic — woman seeks an authority of the self, placing herself above the law of the universe by attempting to separate the inseparable.

In the 1937 film, after Snow White has dinner with the dwarfs, they make an arrangement that she will sleep in their beds while they sleep downstairs. Before she goes to bed she prays, thanking God for meeting the dwarfs — something the Faustain woman could not do!

The evil queen uses magic to transform herself into an old hag and to create a deadly apple to offer to Snow White. The symbolism is obvious a reference to the apple that Satan offered to Eve in the Bible. The essence of Satan’s temptation to Eve was the idea that she could have god-like knowledge and power. Eve took the bait because she wanted to bypass the pursuit wisdom that would be in God’s way. Through out mythology of all cultures, the danger of hubris, the pride that has over-reached itself. The punishment for this sin was death. In the 1937 film the disgusted queen tricks Snow White into taking a bite telling her it’s a magic wishing apple. As Jonathan Pageau says, “technology is misunderstood magic.” The 2025 film doesn’t recognize this dimension. In the original film, she is waiting for her prince to come, in the last chapter of the book of Revelation, the Church, the bride of Christ is waiting for Jesus, the Prince to come. By accepting the kiss of the Prince, Snow White is saved.

In the 2025 film Snow White’s communion with her forest brethren is lost: she is no longer has the innocence of Eve. She has a disconnect from nature that reflects the modern pride to be above nature. In the new film, the young Snow White wears a neckless that has the inscription, “Fearless Fair Brave True.” These traits lack the compassionate virtues that are characteristic of women. Although the term “fair” may seem to refer to compassionate value, the new song the Queen sings,”All is Fair,” confuses the meaning of fair. Rather those traits reflected the values of power of the strong over the weak, that was promoted by Nazi propaganda. The disconnect Snow White has with nature reflects the necrophilious character of the new film. Wilhelm Reich also examined societal values that were perverted by faith in modern technology, he wrote:
“It is striking that man invests the animals he portrays precisely with those traits he misses in himself and does not give to his homunculus figures. This, too, is excellently brought out in Disney’s animal films… for man the machine civilization constituted not only an improvement of his animal existence, over and above this it had the subjectively far more important…that he is indeed a man and not an animal; that the higher task of human existence is the “slaying of his animal side.”

The 1937 Snow White portrayed a heroinene whose compassion, humility, and spiritual openness aligned with timeless archetypes of growth, sacrifice, and reconciliation. In stark contrast, the 2025 version reimagines Snow White within a postmodern framework where power, self-definition, and severance from nature dominate. This transformation mirrors what Wilhelm Reich warned about in The Mass Psychology of Fascism—a culture that seeks to “slay its animal side,” rejecting instinct, interdependence, and empathy in favor of mechanistic control.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés warned that, “Sometimes an entire culture colludes in the gradual destruction of its own panoramic spirit and breadth of its teaching stories.” And perhaps that’s what we now witness—not merely a reinterpretation, but a narrowing. A sacred story stripped of nuance, disconnected from the feminine soul and nature, retold within a culture that has lost faith in the healing power of the archetype.
Disney, once a subtle critic of authoritarian conditioning—as seen in its wartime films exposing the psychological manipulation of Nazi youth—now inadvertently echoes those same patterns. What was once a tale of humility and redemption becomes a technocratic myth of domination. Snow White no longer awakens by love’s kiss—but by the cold, isolating logic of power.