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One of the (many) controversies about the recent live-action adaptation of Snow White, is the decision to use computer generated dwarfs, rather than casting actual actors in the roles. This is made all the worse by the fact that the end product on screen looks absolutely horrific, a cross between something from a cheap horror rip-off, and the kind of CGI that used to appear in 1990s movies.

But why is it that these seven abominations are so bad, and are guaranteed to give kids nightmares?

The dwarfs in the original 1937 version were cartoons, and they acted like cartoons. They did a lot of falling down stairs, tripping over things, and being hit in the face with heavy objects, without suffering any serious damage. No real actor could do that, so any switch to live-action would have come with some necessary changes, but instead they tried to keep that same animated aesthetic, but put it into live-action.

The problem is that this gave them the worst of both worlds. If you have a live-action movie with human actors, you can’t have people getting hit in the face with doors, or suffering serious trauma without injury, and keep the sense of believably. If they did, it would either be slapstick funny, or extremely disturbing, and would ruin the rest of the movie and seriously test your suspension of disbelief.

So they tone that part down a little, to try and make the dwarfs more “real” and “normal”, and what you get is a bit of both styles seeping together to create something else, this weird halfway point, where they act like animated characters in a live-action setting without fully committing to either style, and becoming an unsettling chimera as a result.

Disney’s live-action Cinderella, for example, didn’t have this problem. It included the mice from the cartoon, but made them look and act more or less like the real thing. There was some anthropomorphism in their characters, but they still appeared like rodents; they didn’t wear clothes or sing and dance, so they fit in with the rest of the movie.

The dwarfs don’t fit in. Not least because they look so bad, and would look just as terrible in a fully-animated movie, just like the dead-eyed monsters from The Polar Express. But it’s exacerbated here because they are out of place with every other character in the film. While the dwarfs in the original were more outlandish then, say, Snow White and the Prince, all of these characters were cartoons, and would over emote and move in exaggerated ways, and when viewed alongside the hag and the animated animals, they blended in nicely.

In the case of things such as Mary Poppins, where Disney has cartoon penguins dancing alongside Dick Van Dyke, that worked because they were so obviously animated, we don’t have to try and believe they exist in the same world.

But in Snow White we are supposed to believe these are just normal, everyday inhabitants that you might meet walking down the street, meant to be as real as Snow White or the Evil Queen, and that just makes them look creepy and uncanny.

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