

In Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, the Magic Mirror appears as a boss when the queen grants it the power to draw in its foes and confront them in a mirror realm. The queen's jealousy leads her to poison Snow White with a tainted apple, sending the girl into a deep sleep. However, the mirror responds that the fairest one of all is in fact Snow White. When the narcissistic queen asks "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?," she expects it to respond that it is she that is fairest.

We want to hear what you think about this article.The Magic Mirror is a sentient magical item possessed by the Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Snow White insouciantly offers the Queen a slice, and sneers, "Age before beauty." Even for as accomplished an actress as Roberts, in Hollywood, this ending still hurts the most. In Mirror Mirror, the Queen arrives as a wizened old raisin with the poison apple-that old symbol of the fallen woman-in hand. In the Disney version, she is rather anticlimactically struck by lightning while trying to throw a dwarf off a cliff. In the Brothers Grimm telling, the Queen is invited to the royal wedding and presented with a pair of iron shoes that had been heated over burning coals: "She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead." Her vanity could not go unpunished. Which is why the end is such a drag, when plucky, pretty Snow White marries the Prince and cuts the Queen down to size. Roberts and Singh add a new layer of humanity, making the Queen not just a didactic shill for the perils of vanity, but a simply a devilishly selfish person who makes her own choices. She possesses the power and confidence that the Queen herself struggles to maintain." This portal into her inner life adds even more dimension to the character, showing that somewhere deep down she does indeed possess a moral compass, but chooses to ignore it because it's just more fun to tax the townspeople to pay for lavish parties and cast love spells on a young hunk. As Roberts puts it, "The Mirror Queen is calmer and more collected. The face in the magic mirror is her own, rather than the menacing disembodied mask of Disney's telling.
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This is my fight."īelieving in yourself is nice, but personality is even better, which is why the movie still belongs to Roberts. When Snow must face the Queen in the dark woods for their ultimate battle sequence, she says to Prince Alcott, a handsome nothing played by Armie Hammer (a Romney son would have worked just as well), "I've read so many stories where the prince saves the princess. The dwarfs are still creepy-they lavish a little too much attention on Snow White's first kiss-but teach the princess to believe in herself in a Rocky-esque training montage of swordplay and thuggery. They live in exile on the edge of town and earn their living as highway robbers because, as one of the little guys says, "Years ago when the Queen expelled all the undesirables, no one stood up for us," echoing the bullying epidemic from nightly news headlines.
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Snow White stumbles upon a Dickensian street scene where the villagers are starving because the Queen is taxing them (an appeal to the Tea Party?) to protect them against a shadowy enemy called "The Beast" that lurks in the forest (terrorism?).Īs a part of a eugenics campaign in the kingdom, the Queen banished all the "uglies" from the town proper, including the seven dwarfs (although they are never referred to as such, nor are they called "little people" or "vertically challenged," or any other PC term). In addition to delivering a self-esteem massaging message, Singh taps into our convoluted political zeitgeist. Her victimization and isolation still reflects the bedroom angst of teenage girls. She still is under the thumb of the stepmother, who keeps her sequestered as a servant for 18 years until one day she decides to leave. As to be expected (and applauded), Snow in Mirror Mirror gets a self-conscious, you-go-girl makeover.

Of course, filmmakers today couldn't get away with that old vision of the passive princess. The Queen's struggle to maintain influence over the kingdom-whether through vanity or violence-is far more compelling than the plight of a waif who cooks and cleans and waits for her prince to come. I immediately feel in love with the wicked queen." You can understand why. Director Tarsem Singh ( Immortals, The Cell) immediately recognized her appeal, telling the press that he "saw the Queen as someone who is wicked, dark, and malicious but also irresistibly charming." As Woody Allen kvetched in Annie Hall, "When my mother took me to see Snow White, everyone fell in love with Snow White. As children, the Queen is our first introduction to the power of the Bad Girl.
