so what’s the scoop on red shoes? I vaguely remember seeing a scathing post months ago before it came out calling it fatphobic, and I haven’t seen anything since until recently
okay, so as someone who avoided this movie like the plague based on the pre-release marketing until someone i trust spammed my dash with it, i understand if people are confused by my sudden praise and obsession, so i’m going to do my best to explain why i love it so much
the tl;dr version
the marketing campaign was REALLY gross and fatphobic and i have no idea how or why it was approved, because that is the exact opposite of the movie
long, spoiler filled version
these are two quick grabs i made from googling for the marketing for this movie:
that first image? that is BAD and it should never have been approved for obvious reasons, but also because it does a really bad job of portraying what the movie is actually about, which leads me to the second image, which is slightly better, but feels like the blurb for an entirely different movie
it makes it hard not to want to be like the others...she learns not only to accept herself, but to celebrate who she is
what? that’s not the movie i watched at all and i’ll explain why in a moment
first i want to touch on the seven dwarfs and the evil queen
the seven dwarfs are actually seven handsome princes who were placed under a curse at the very beginning of the movie by the fairy princess, who they attacked after mistaking her for a witch. their excuse for this was that ‘she didn’t look like a princess, she looked like a witch, and everyone knows that a princess should look like a princess!’ yeah, that held about as much water with her as it does with me and she cursed them to turn into short, green dwarfs whenever anyone is looking at them--they go back to normal when they aren’t observed--until they get a kiss from ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’
regina, snow white’s evil stepmother, is an aging witch whose desperation for youth and beauty have her obsessively trying to grow a pair of magic shoes from an enchanted tree that will grant her both forever. snow stumbles across the tree growing the shoes when she is searching for clues to find her missing father, the king, and for some reason puts them on. the shoes transform her into the form she eventually names ‘red shoes’, which is a thin, tall, ‘beautiful’ version of herself
now let’s go back to my comment that i felt like the marketing team watched another movie and get something settled: snow white is fat. and she is fine with that. the movie is not about her wanting to be like anyone else or having to learn to accept herself. from her very first moment on screen, she’s already there. snow is genuine and kind and determined and loyal and both emotionally/mentally and physically strong; she laments a couple of times that she dislikes that she’s physically weaker in her red shoes form and at one point comments that without the shoes she’s ‘able to bench 250’ *swoon*
she’s also smart. smart enough to catch on really quickly that the primary reason the dwarfs are falling all over themselves wanting to help her is because they think she’s ‘beautiful’, and at the end of the day the thing snow wants more than anything is to find her missing father, so she uses it. she doesn’t show any extra skin or act ‘sexy’ or behave any differently than she otherwise would, she simply exists as red shoes, because she recognizes that it gives her an advantage that she currently needs. she wants to be back in her original form--in fact, the first time she’s alone after initially putting them on, she takes them off and expresses relief. the movie and snow both make it clear that she’s not comfortable as red shoes and that she wants to be snow white. but she wants to get her father back more
which leads us back to the dwarfs. they see red shoes and her ‘beauty’ and their immediate thought is of how they can use it to their own advantage; ie their entire reason for helping her in the beginning is to convince her to kiss them so that they can break their curse. merlin, who is snow’s love interest, starts the movie as a shallow, book cover judging asshole, who clearly equates someone’s looks with their worth (he...gets better. this sounds like i don’t like him and i do, he’s a dumb, charming goofball and i love him, but let’s call an asshole an asshole and for a good chunk of the movie he is an asshole)
snow doesn’t care that merlin is a short, green dwarf--she flat out says toward the beginning of the movie that the handsome, human versions of the princes aren’t really her type and multiple times tells him she thinks he’s cute as a dwarf--but until about 3/4 of the way through the movie merlin definitely cares that red shoes looks like red shoes
because here’s the thing: merlin and red shoes kiss about halfway through the movie, and do you know what happens to merlin? absolutely nothing. the curse remains. because the princess who cursed him was a fairy princess, and fairies never address things completely straight on. it’s not until after merlin sees her as snow, realizes that there’s no question that she’d choose the fun, goofy dwarf over the vain, shallow man, and starts to look past red shoe’s ‘beauty’ to snow white’s goodness that things start to really, truly change with him
near the very end of the movie, merlin tells snow, who’s in her true form, “you’re the most beautiful woman in the world, whether my eyes are open or closed,” which is a callback to earlier in the movie when snow tells a dwarf!merlin, “eyes open or closed, to me you’re still merlin”
and honestly, i feel like those two lines sum up the entirety of the movie. by the end of the movie, merlin can see her with his eyes closed: he sees who she is, not just what she looks like, and when they kiss again after that is when his curse is finally broken. that’s what the fairy princess was trying to teach him all along
that bodies, regardless of what they look like, are ultimately secondary to who we are. the parts of us that really, truly make us aren’t visible on the surface, and the inability to look deeper is a curse that keeps all of us trapped in a small, ugly life
