Disney’s original 1937 animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs starts off with a prologue in the form of a storybook, with a couple of gorgeously illuminated pages setting up the story.
The 2025 live-action version also begins with a storybook, but once it opens, a narrator voices over the scenes that unfold, telling us all about Snow White’s birth, her brave and kind parents, and how they all used to bake pies and dance together in the streets of the kingdom.
But that narrator isn’t just a narrator — it’s a plot twist for one character who gets a mini-arc in the new movie that they didn’t get in the original version. It’s an attempt at the “Narrator All Along” trope that just ends up confusing the movie’s tone even more.
[Ed. note: This post contains major spoilers for the 2025 Snow White.]
Okay, short version: The narrator is Dopey the dwarf, the youngest of the seven dwarves, and famously the one who doesn’t talk. But in this version, he’s voiced by Andrew Barth Feldman, of Ratatouille the Musical and Saturday Night fame.
Longer version: Dopey has a reason for his silence in this movie — he’s too scared to speak and make his voice heard. Snow (Rachel Zegler) teaches him how to whistle, so he can express his feelings without actually having to say anything. And then she gets all the dwarves to clean up their filthy house. (Which maybe some Snow White purists might have a problem with, but I personally think they could stand to help her with the household chores.)
By the end of the movie, though, Dopey is so inspired by Snow’s bravery and the fact that she’s decided to go and face the Evil Queen that he decides to speak up. And lo and behold, in the movie’s last big song-and-dance sequence, Dopey sits and reads the movie’s opening storybook to a group of children — he is the narrator! Huzzah.
Image: Disney
That’s supposed to be an inspiring moment, but it comes off as a little cringey. Part of it is the uncanny CG dwarves, who can’t really sell any emotional moments because they just look so damn unsettling. In some scenes, like when they clean the house during “Whistle While You Work,” they’re all right, particularly because they’re the only characters in the movie who match Rachel Zegler’s fairy-tale energy. But what’s supposed to be a big emotional moment about being brave enough to speak up just ends up feeling like a bad cutscene from a video game, doubly so because Dopey isn’t actually saying anything brave — he’s just supporting Snow’s bravery.
The “Narrator All Along” trope can be fun. Sometimes it’s because the narrator is someone comically unexpected, like the Oompa-Loompa in the 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or the frog in Over the Garden Wall. Sometimes, it’s because the narrator is someone intimately acquainted with the story, but from a different perspective — Disney did a version of this with Maleficent, which was revealed to be narrated by Princess Aurora. But Dopey of all possible characters?
His narration plays into another, dumber trope, where a silent character is only given a few lines, but those few lines are supposed to be huge, groundbreaking revelations. Dopey’s almost like that, but the dwarves up until this point have been comedic elements in the movie, so any emotionality is undermined. (Also, they look ridiculous.) Like the movie itself, the reveal is a tonal mismatch that doesn’t preserve the movie’s legacy or coherently do anything new.
Snow White is out in theaters now.
Content shared from www.polygon.com.