Disney has finally released its remake of Snow White and The Seven Dwarves, and somehow, a story about a girl avoiding a witch (aunt? She’s magic anyway) has managed to impact real people in the real world. No, it’s not because I am a witch, and although on a good day, I may feel like the fairest of them all, it has nothing to do with what my mirror says about me. It’s because the biggest on-screen storyline involving little people this year has given me reason to be…Grumpy.
You see, this issue is fairytale thorny. I am a little person. I have a condition called achondroplasia, and I campaign for more on-screen representation of people like me. So far, so good, as there’s a new film with SEVEN little people in it, which should be the jackpot for a community that struggles for media representation.
Unfortunately, what my community struggles for is authentic representation. We actually get quite a lot of roles. There is a long and storied history of little people being employed in bit-parts on stage and screen (panto season is a big deal). Actors from our community have played munchkins, silent side-kicks and mythical creatures for centuries now. The problem is that we have rarely been employed to play Actual. Human. Beings.
Which is tough. No one wants to take roles away from hard-working actors, but someone has to question why these roles must be either magical or mute. I have powers, but most of them are comedic or involve Afrobeat; rarely do they require me to save beautiful white girls while working in a mine.
This might sound like a joke, but I’m serious. There is a fundamental problem with the Seven Dwarves storyline and it isn’t just that little people are capable of embodying more than one emotional state (I can be happy and bashful and, err, sneezy). The problem is that dwarves are magical creatures, and people with dwarfism are normal human beings.
We've waited long enough, and it's finally almost here.
This is an issue because society uses the same word to describe people with a disability and creatures from fairytales, and there is not much room to separate the two. It’s as if dyslexia referred to both a learning challenge and a winged horse-man, or diabetes also meant mermaid.
That creates the difficult situation where a child goes with their parents to see a film or pantomime and watches a series of comedic dwarves constantly being presented as jokes, then goes out into the world where their parents tell them to treat people with achondroplasia entirely seriously. They have just spent two hours laughing at the little people alongside hundreds of others, and ten minutes later they are being told that the little person in the street is different, and shouldn’t be laughed at. I mean how hard is that for a child? We need to separate myth from reality, and that isn’t easy.
Snow White and the Seven Small Emotionally Limited Men doesn’t quite work. It doesn’t roll off the tongue. Moreover, Disney tried to get around the problem by keeping the dwarves' names, but having CGI voice actors play them. So we lost the roles but kept the association. It’s the worst of both worlds. I get that they are in a bind. They have some valuable IP, and rather than make an actual new film, they can just remake a remake of a German fairytale from 1812.
This puts the Snow White debate in perspective but does not render it defunct. There are far greater challenges facing disabled people worldwide than seven CGI dwarves, but that does not mean that this is not a problem.
Threatening to take away our independence, safety and healthcare is not only cruel, but inhumane.
I don’t have a great answer for an issue that boils down to 19th-century values getting 2025 release dates. I do have suggestions for alternative films. How about a storyline which involves a proud person with dwarfism living a distinctly un-magical life, maybe helping the odd pretty girl if she’s in the mood, but focusing mainly on making their own way in a world which often treats them differently to others?
Or we could just keep on going around in circles debating bad remakes.
It is with great sadness, then, that I take my name out of the running for the role of Rumpelstiltskin in 2026, and instead carry on advising another generation of little people on what to do when they are treated like creatures, rather than humans.
