The recent re-adaptation of Snow White is the latest chapter in what feels like Disney’s ongoing identity crisis – a glossy, big-budget stumble dressed in progressive ideals. Once again, the shadow of so-called “wokeness” looms large. From the reimagining of fairy-tale classics to the sanitization of authors like Roald Dahl, beloved children’s literature and film are increasingly being filtered through a lens of social justice, where “moral instruction” often takes precedence over narrative integrity.
While conservatives have been the loudest to point out these cultural recalibrations, the deeper concern goes beyond political agendas. It is the destruction of compelling storytelling, the rupture in the moral compass, and a troubling decline in readers’ and viewers’ ability to engage with life’s discomforting truths that’s at stake. While political agendas may play a role, the greater danger lies in losing our capacity to approach reality with critical thought and emotional resilience.
Roald Dahl was among the earliest targets of this trend. His description of the Oompa-Loompas was deemed racially insensitive, and his portrayal of female villains criticized as misogynistic and cruel. The irony, of course, lies in the growing insistence that evil must be made more palatable – or at least that monsters who revel in their atrocities must be humanized. At first glance, this might seem healthier for young readers. Yet paradoxically, it distances children from the very realities of life that Dahl understood so deeply – and which, at some point, we all must confront and learn to cope with.
Dahl demonstrated that evil exists in both men and women, and that children are not exempt from encountering it – especially in an era when such experiences were often dismissed or even normalized by figures of authority. His stories are a testament to the moral complexity of childhood, acknowledging that children themselves can participate in cruelty or respond to it in unexpected ways. This is evident in the behaviour of the children who win Willy Wonka’s golden tickets – each embodying a particular vice – and in The Witches, where the threat comes from seemingly ordinary women determined to exterminate children. Similarly, in George’s Marvellous Medicine, Dahl defies the stereotype of the nurturing grandparent, as George has to confront the maliciousness of his own grandmother. These stories don’t shield young readers from darkness; instead, they prepare them to recognize it – and, crucially, to consider how they might respond.
To revise his work in a way that sanitizes these truths not only distances us from that uncomfortable reality but also erases the historical and cultural context that gives his stories their educational power. The true strength of Dahl’s writing lies in its willingness to explore unsettling dualities: reason and irrationality, innocence and depravity, curiosity and vice. His work captures how children begin to identify aggression as moral corruption or learn to interpret rules and authority through the lens of fear. These are not themes that yield to surface-level interpretation; they demand immersion in a world where parental protection is unreliable and where adults – having forgotten or misunderstood the struggles of childhood – leave children to navigate both internal and external conflicts on their own.
A similar trend can be seen in modern portrayals of villains in mainstream media. Disney villains, for example, must now always have a backstory – not simply to explain their turn to evil, but to justify it. The villain is no longer a cautionary figure, but rather a victim of societal injustice or, in some cases, even of the story’s hero. The viewer, along with the protagonists, is expected to respond not with fear or moral clarity, but with empathy – if not guilt.
Of course, Disney has never been a true bastion of traditional morality, as many nostalgic viewers would like to believe. One need only revisit the sexual innuendo and scenes of servitude in Pinocchio, or the glorification of immaturity in Peter Pan, to see the cracks. Still, there was once an underlying notion of moral choice. Its heroes, too, had endured adversity, yet chose to respond in productive, often self-sacrificing ways – unlike the villains, who not only embraced destruction but found pleasure in it.
What has changed is not that Disney now strays from tradition, but that it increasingly prioritizes ideological messaging over genuine storytelling. Today, the role of female characters must be explicitly heroic. Where Snow White once embodied warmth, empathy, and the organic harmony of nature – contrasted with the Evil Queen’s cold dependence on vanity, magic, and the artificial – she is now recast as a warrior fighting for her kingdom, with her independence framed as a rejection of the need for a prince. After so many such reinventions, one begins to wonder whether inclusivity has come to overshadow the very diversity it once aimed to promote.
When an audience is repeatedly shown the same types of characters, plots, and messages, uniform in both description and meaning, we risk replacing the richness of literature and film with a kind of narrative monotony. Not only is this a recipe for poor storytelling, but it also ignores the reality that people are different, and that motivations and roles are diverse, though often shaped by cultural norms and biological necessity. Woke storytelling contradicts itself by claiming to promote diversity yet often ends up reinforcing sameness. This is particularly evident as more films shift their focus from epic plots that once shaped character development to an emphasis solely on character personality. Villains are no longer sinister – they are victims. Female characters must always be heroes, and minority characters must always be celebrated – such as the portrayal of the mentally challenged dwarf in Snow White. The same can be said for the casting decisions that rob many beloved characters of their original identity.
Changing a character’s appearance or behaviour from their original portrayal distorts the identity that is crafted by the author and is familiar to the public. Unsurprisingly, “wokeism” carries the assumption that technological advancement is equal to progress in entertainment. In practice, however, this shift comes at the expense of the abstract and exaggerated expressions that once vividly demonstrated a character’s emotions – particularly in cartoons. These changes usually favour supposedly more realistic, tech-driven adaptations, which can render the narrative flat. As a result, characters lose their vibrancy – and with it, their believability and relatability. There is a kind of realism in the absurd, and it is precisely this exaggerated, imaginative quality that gives characters emotional depth – because expression and experience are often absurd themselves.
Beneath all of this lies an Orwellian risk – one that conservatives are all too familiar with. The control of language and imagery in literature and film enables control over the thoughts, emotions, and behaviours that people come to see as intelligible or acceptable. Children, of course, are at the forefront of this cultural shaping, and conservatives should view their protection as a generational duty – a trust inherited from those who once safeguarded values. These values recognized danger for what it was, rather than rebranding it through forced sympathy and emotional softening until it became the new standard of what is considered “good” – and even of what is believed to be true about individuals’ intentions and actions.
As the case of Roald Dahl illustrates, this effort often involves erasing the past, leaving little room to learn from mistakes or to understand history and culture in their original context. While an author like Dahl was far from flawless, his work offers a candid glimpse into how society once saw itself – even in ways we now find uncomfortable or offensive. The real world is not a sanitized place. Moral ambiguity – and even outright viciousness – can be found in both the powerful and the powerless. Acknowledging this in storytelling teaches young readers to approach life with discernment and caution. Cleansing or eliminating such figures from fiction does not protect children; it misleads them. It denies them the opportunity to confront moral complexity, make judgments, and develop personal accountability.
Worse still, this trend is amplified by the push to “diversify” storytelling through a rigid ideological lens. While these efforts aim for representation, they often result in narratives that are as one-dimensional and disconnected from reality as the very tropes they seek to replace. When every story and character begins to sound the same, audiences are left not with a richer understanding of the world, but with a diluted moral vacuum. This is the danger of woke storytelling: not merely a political imposition, but the erosion of reality, truth, and storytelling itself.