Much of my life I saw films that were primarily about male protagonists or about a group of males and I began to feel it was boring. So, I started to prefer films about female protagonists or mostly females and in particularly original Disney Princess films. I’ve seen all of them sometimes more than once. The director for this film is a man, while the screenplay is by a woman, Erin Cressida Wilson. Also, listed as writers are the Brothers Grimm which is somewhat misleading saying that the brothers wrote these stories since, while they edited them, they only collected stories from others. And in most cases these sources of stories were women – Jeannette and Marie Hassenpflug, Jenny von Droste-Hülstoff, Dorothea Viehmann and many stories told by Henriette Dorothea Wild. Also “‘Aschenputtel’ [Cinderella] was told by a poor old woman in a workhouse in the small medieval town of Marburg” and it was the sisters of a friend who told ‘The Bremen Town Musicians’ see here:
https://vasilisathewise.com/2020/04/29/the-secret-history-of-the-grimm-fairy-tales/. This is part of the erasure of women from history.
Rachel Zegler has mixed ancestry, with her mother being of Colombian descent and her father of Polish descent. According to the US department of the census Hispanic or Latina is an ethnicity and not a race so a Latina could be “White” or “Black.” Rachel Zegler appears to have a “white complexion” as that term is usually used. Very few people have a true white complexion. I feel the notion behind the Snow-White fairy tale that someone with skin as white as snow would be the fairest (most beautiful) of them all is a bit racist, although in the not so distant past many people felt that to be the case.
The fairytale “Snow-White” contains overlaps with other fairytales. A princess in a deathlike sleep as in Sleeping Beauty, an orphan girl mistreated by a stepmother as in Cinderella and lost children finding a cabin in the woods as in Hansel and Gretel. Even among the Grimm Brothers versions (between 1812 and 1857) there are some differences, with the 1812 version having the evil queen being Snow Whites biological mother and as Snow White is awaken either by the princes servants dropping her in her glass coffin dislodging the bit of apple or a servant angry at having to carry the coffin with the girl inside slaps her again dislodging the bit of apple. The story itself existed prior to 1812 as shown by it being the bases of a play manuscript published in 1809, by Albert Ludwig Grimm (not related to the Brothers Grimm) and a literary tale all about the Evil Queen, where she was born and how she got the mirror. This is the story of Richilde. An outline of the story can be found in the following
YouTube video:
. Kindly watch the other videos on that channel.
An early story containing some elements used in “Snow White” is entitled “The Young Slave,” (1634) by Giambattista Basile. There is in this story seven-year-old girl who appears to have died when a comb gets stuck in her hair and much later becomes alive when the comb is removed (also in the Grimm’s story). The girl is enslaved by a “step aunt” until the girl’s uncle, the step aunt’s husband realizes who she is. She is then freed and eventually can marry a handsome husband.
Tom,
