The Hidden Mirrors in Disney’s ‘Snow White’ (1937) | Fairytale Analysis

Magic Mirror on the wall…please don’t let Disney copyright strike me

Anonymous Bird
5 min readJun 16, 2023
Photo by Tuva Mathilde Løland on Unsplash

My mother’s Disney+ subscription that she got for free with a new phone is soon running out. It is therefore incumbent upon me to watch as many old Disney movies as I can. This is partly because I am a snob and I dislike modern entertainment. I also hate live-action Disney remakes and having to scroll for 30 minutes before I can decide what to watch. But this is neither here nor there.

The point is, I rewatched Disney’s Snow White for the first time since I was young enough to wear her costumes to birthday parties, and I noticed something strange about the use of mirrors in the movie.

(And no, it’s not because most people including myself, remember it being ‘Mirror Mirror on the wall’ instead of the ‘Magic Mirror’ the Evil Queen said in the movie. What happened there, I’m not quite sure. It’s like the Febreeze versus Febreze thing. I’m filing it under ‘Mundane things that I refuse to think about because they are actually quite unsettling.’)

Mirror Symbolism

The Magic Mirror introduces an important theme into the film: beauty and artifice.

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