I didn’t like it. First, it makes no sense, and to have to say this about a fairytale! Second, Snow White is not very likable, and she’s closer to being an extra than to a title-character. They should have called this movie: “Elspeth, the real story of SnowWhite’s stepmother”, and make it all through her point of view. There would still be things that make no sense, but it would have been a good start, and it might explain why Snow looked so cold.
There are many things that are different from the usual depiction of this story: the dwarves have been changed in a foolish attempt to do something new, perhaps: they are now five little man, one little woman, and a tall man, who knows why. I mean, the woman is ok, after all it’s seven dwarves, not seven dwarfmen, but the tall annoying one? Why? To be fair they never refer to themselves as dwarves, it’s not clear who they are. They dress with the rainbow’s colours, and when they are together they can travel long distances by making an actual rainbow. Unfortunately, that seems to be all the extent of their magic. It very much looks like they have been added in because they ‘must’ be , which is a shame, they should have had better defined roles. They are called like the days of the week: Wednesday is the tall yellow one Vincent Schiavelli, Sunday the violet is Michael J. Anderson, Saturday (indigo) was Warwick Davis. There’s also Martin Klebba as Friday, who had a better role as Butcher in Mirror mirror.
There are no fairies here, only a strange-looking man who can grant wishes and is therefore credited as “the granter of wishes”. He’s ok, I kinda liked him and his role, although the movie doesn’t explain why he was trapped in the snow, how he got freed or even who he is.
The evil queen is called Elspeth and is the Granter’s sister. She already has magic but nothing of her is explained: why she has it, why she looks so ill, why she refuses her brother at first as if he was the bad guy here. She’s played by Miranda Richardson, and she does a good job.
The story: Josephine and John are a happy loving couple, but as soon as their first daughter is born Josephine dies. John buries her and then leaves to find milk for the baby. He goes looking for a village, but gets tired and passes out in the snow. He cries, thinking he won’t be able to save the child, and two tears fall on the snow melting it. The granter of wishes emerges from there, saying that he freed him and can now ask for anything in return. John asks for milk for the baby, and seeing how it worked he probably thought ‘might be worth a try’ and asks for his wife back, “my queen”, but of course nobody can raise the dead, but what he can do is to give him ‘a queen’ and therefore a kingdom too. He finds himself on a throne, with people calling him king despite his confusion.
We see that the ‘dwarves’ want to steal garden gnomes, because they were once alive until witch Elsbeth turned them into statues. The granter of wishes chooses his sister to be the man’s queen, and since he won’t love another woman after his wife, the granter makes her break the mirror, and she suffers doing it - why? what’s so important about that specific mirror? she still has magic and she can use other mirrors...
Anyway, she does it, and as soon as a little piece of that glass goes into the king’s eye it’s done!
We move to sixteen years later, they are of course married and Snow White is a teenager. Everybody loves the princess of course, but the queen. Snow calls her ‘madam’, and although nobody really seems to like the queen she still is the queen and the king still has the piece of glass in his eye.
The garden is now full of garden gnomes, including Sunday, Snow’s friend (he’s a statue too but she talks to him as her only friend).
A prince is coming to visit, and the queen likes him and wants to seduce him, but of course the prince likes Snow instead. The mirror still answers the queen’s question by saying that she is indeed the fairest of them all. When the king tries to hug her she fights back and even slaps his face, making the piece of mirror in his eye come out. She doesn’t care, not for it, not for him.
The queen arranges a big party for Prince Alfred, and plans to put the piece of mirror in him, but things go wrong and the mirror goes into someone else, Hector, who becomes instantly devoted to her. Now things get worse when the mirror changes his opinion and appears to her as Snow White because she’s fairer now, so the queen asks Hector to deal with her.
When Prince Alfred runs away from her, Elsbeth turns him into a bear. Who knows why Sunday comes to life again, or at least half of him does, but still he can walk and talk.
Hector can’t kill Snow White, and she runs into the woods. He takes a rabbit’s heart instead, and the queen is very happy to cook it and eat it herself.
The king gets trapped inside the mirror. The bear keeps following Snow so Elsbeth traps him into a snowball. The queen leaves a foulard for Snow to find it, so when she wraps it around her waists and it starts squeezing, she faints (good thing she didn’t put it around the neck, the usual thing to do with a foulard, or she’d been strangled...)
Half-normal Sunday comes back to them and saves her and tells the others who she is. Yesterday makes a big fuss against helping her, but obviously she will win him over too... :-/
They leave her at their home and travel by rainbow to go to the palace to retrieve the king, the prince and the gnomes. The queen poisons half an apple and turns herself to look like Snow’s mom, then she goes to give her the apple. Just one bite and she’s down. Sunday frees the bear, knowing who he is. The put Snow in an ice-casket.
When the queen tries to go back to her appearance, she’s ugly-looking and the mirror stops working. Maybe Sunday could move again because her magic was weakening, for whatever reason...
Her brother appears to tell her that she ruined it all: “I gave you a life that would make anyone happy, but look what you did! She was no threat until you imagined her to be one”.
He tells her that he can’t help her now, not anymore. She throws her mirror at him and it smashes on the wall, and when it breaks, all her spells are broken too. Snow wakes up, the prince is a man again, the king is free and all the gnomes are moving again ( but they don’t become dwarves, they still look like moving statues...)
Snow White goes back to her father with Prince Alfred, and he’s there waiting for her.
The end...finally.
ITA la vera storia di Biancaneve
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