With its creepy CGI dwarfs and muddled tone, Disney's latest live-action remake is "not calamitous" but is a "a mind-boggling mash-up".

Live-action remakes of Disney cartoons aren't usually given a warm welcome by critics and commentators, but none of them has faced as much hostility as the new remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Are we succumbing to Disney Princess Fatigue? Maybe, but there's more to it than that. One issue is that the 1937 original was Walt Disney's first ever full-length animated film, and, while parts of it have aged badly, it still stands up as an exquisite, heart-lifting masterpiece. Remaking a revered, all-time great animation as a live-action film is about as sensible as remaking Singin' in the Rain as a cartoon.

Another issue is that Disney's Snow White – to use its official title – has been attacked from both sides of the political spectrum: it has been condemned for being too progressive ("A Disney princess renowned for her pale skin being played by an actress with Colombian heritage? How dare they?"), and not progressive enough ("Caricatured dwarfs in this day and age? How dare they?"). Throw in the pronouncements on the Israel-Gaza war made by its stars, Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, and you've got a perfect storm of bad publicity.

The good news for the studio is that the film itself is not so calamitous. It's not the worst of the studio's live-action remakes (that's Robert Zemeckis's straight-to-streaming dud, Pinocchio), and while it's not the best, either, it's undoubtedly the most fascinating. What's so unique about Disney's Snow White is that it seems as if some of the producers wanted to make an old-fashioned tribute to a feudal fairy tale, and the others wanted to make a revisionist, Marxist call-to-arms. Rather than settling on one option or the other, the producers apparently compromised by making both versions at once, so the results are like a mind-boggling mash-up of two different films.

For the first few scenes, what we get is the subversive version. In an overlong opening sequence, we hear that Snow White (Zegler) isn't named after her skin colour, as the traditional story would have it, but after the blizzard that was blowing when she was born. It's not entirely clear why the King and Queen chose to name their daughter in honour of the weather, but considering she could have been called Drizzle or Gusty Wind, she should probably count herself lucky. The exposition continues with speeches and songs about the days when Snow White's benign parents ruled "a kingdom for the free and the fair", where "the bounty of the land........

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