WE GOT MOVIE SIIIIIGN!
First we get the opening credits, which has a message from Walt thanking the whole crew before showing a single real name. That’s a nice touch. :)
When that finishes, we open on live-action footage of a Snow White book that opens by itself (how do they do that, BTW?) that lets us read the story of Snow White. Snow was a beautiful, happy little princess before her evil stepmother screwed it all up. She’s got some superiority issues that are a little drastic even for the Middle Ages and wants to be the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. To cut down on the competition, she forces Snow White to dress in rags and work as a scullery maid. This still doesn’t satisfy her, so she accosts her magic mirror every day with the same ol’ question: “Who is the fairest one of all?” The mirror tells her that she’s hot stuff, and Snow gets to live another day. But you guys knew that already.
So we fade in and zoom in on the castle, which looks like a pretty nice place until we see the queen’s mirror room. It’s Mirror-Annoying Time, and we get to watch! Right off the bat, it’s quite obvious that the queen has sold her soul to something. She strikes an Indian brave pose as she summons her “slave in the mirror” to come to her “from the farthest space, through wind and darkness.” It does so in a burst of flame, having mastered its ability to look like The Mask on valium. It’s contractually obligated to ask what the queen wants to know, so it gets that out of the way. The queen asks who the fairest one of all is, and it’s kind enough to not cut straight to the brutal point.
"Famed is thy beauty, Majesty," he says without letting her know that the peasants just say that, “but hold! A lovely maid I see. Rags cannot hide her gentle grace. Alas, she is more fair than thee.”
The queen demands to know the name of this upstart little b****h at once, but the mirror decides to just describe her instead. “Lips red as the rose, hair black as ebony, skin white as snow.”
Luckily, the queen gets the idea. “Snow White!”
Whereupon we see the girl herself, scrubbing the castle steps. She looks up at her home and sighs before pouring what remains of the water in her bucket onto the ground and going to the well for more. Apparently believing herself to be in an opera, she immediately starts singing to the birds who have followed her.
"Wanna know a secret? Promise not to tell? We are standing by a wishing well!” She tells them that if you wish into the well and hear your echo, then your wish will come true. Then she proceeds to not only demonstrate this but exploit the hell out of it.
"I’m Wishing," the first song in the movie, is a call-and-response number where Snow sings directly into the well about how she’s waiting for her twoo wuv to find her and say nice things to her. The birds are pretty freaked out by her echo, but she starts getting into it. So into it, in fact, that a wild prince appears and is enchanted by her voice. Either that or he’s happy to have finally found another knucklehead who likes singing into wells. He climbs the wall of the castle courtyard and joins in the fun. It seems that Snow wasn’t expecting the well to actually work, because she freaks out and runs into the castle.
The prince takes it upon himself to butter her up by singing about how he has only one song for her and no one else. This works, as Snow comes out onto the balcony and strikes up a duet with him. None of this is impressing the queen, who watches it all from a window. She looks rather insulted to be in the same movie as these people as she shuts the curtains and goes off to plan a suitably gruesome demise for them both.
It’s probably a good thing that she left, actually. She gets to miss watching Snow kiss a bird on the beak and send it to kiss the prince. Way to give your love interest bird germs, Snow. That’s right, go back into the castle and think about what you did.
After this, the scene shifts to the queen sitting on her peacock throne as she gives her marching orders to the Huntsman; take the princess out into the woods, let her pick wildflowers for a bit, stab her to death…the usual procedure for eliminating undesirables. The Huntsman isn’t really up to it for obvious reasons, but the queen has a timeless argument ready to convince him; do it or I’ll kill you. And because she’s feeling a little creative today, she also tells the Huntsman to give Snow the Mola Ram treatment and bring her heart back in a pretty little box. Probably for either display or dinner. Lovely woman, isn’t she?
Then it’s off to a field outside the forest, where we see Snow in the dress she’ll be wearing for the rest of eternity. The Huntsman watches from afar as she sings to herself, makes a bouquet and even helps a lost baby bird fly back to its parents. That’s when he comes up behind her with a knife. She backs against a rock and screams as he raises it up and…brings it right back down again. He can’t do it, of course. With little explanation beyond the queen being bonkers, he urges Snow to flee into the forest and never return. Snow doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening, but she does as he says and runs right into our first example of good old-fashioned Disney horror. Yay! :D
Our heroine spends the next minute and a half running through the dark, shadowy forest and screaming at everything she collides with. Her frightened little mind imagines the branches as grasping hands, the trees as angry faces, logs as water monsters and angry-looking eyes everywhere. It’s an unsettling-yet-cool scene filled with adrenaline and flashing images, but it quickly becomes too much for Snow. She falls to the ground and starts sobbing just as the sun comes back and shows us that this place isn’t so scary after all. There’s a nice clearing, pretty colors, and cute little animals. Lots of cute little animals.
Upon encountering a human who might be willing and able to feed them, the critters gather around Snow. A rabbit gets in her face, which makes her start and scare them off. She begs them to come back, admits that the Melanie Bush approach to danger might not have been the smartest move and tries singing instead. During “With A Smile and a Song,” the animals surround her again (including a deer who acts far more like a cat) and decide that she’s not so bad after all. It’s actually really cute.
After revealing herself to be a very early follower of Liebniz (“Everything’s going to be alright!”), she starts brainstorming ideas for where not to find shelter. The animals inform her that they know of a place she can go and are happy to take her there. The birds pull her down the path by her cloak while the rest of the pack brings up the rear. We then get a dialogue-free scene and some pretty sweet scenery as Snow’s new friends lead her through the countryside. They finally stop at a cluster of bushes, which they part to reveal…
…whatever’s going to be in Part 2, I guess.
Comments
