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.
Sofi Adams
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.
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.