Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot in a Better Remake

With all the turmoil besetting the real world, you’d think there might be more important things to inflate into controversies than the pre-release kerfuffles that have plagued “Snow White.” As it turns out, this is one of the better live-action adaptations of a Disney animated feature. And I say that as someone who mostly doesn’t like them. Yes, I’ve enjoyed a couple (“Cinderella,” “The Lion King”). At heart, though, I still don’t truly get the idea of Disney strip-mining its animated IP — and doing so not because there’s anything inherently appealing about turning painterly fairy-tale cartoons into stilted, less sublime real-life versions of themselves. What the remakes are selling is the theme-park novelty of the transformation: Look, here’s what an animated classic looks like when it’s retrofitted with sets and actors!

All that said, the chirpy, vivacious, just-romantic-enough-to-get-by “Snow White” proves to be an exception to the rule. Directed by Marc Webber (“The Amazing Spider-Man,” “500 Days of Summer”), from a script by Erin Cressida Wilson (“The Girl on the Train”), the film is lighter, more frolicsome, less lead-footed than such clomping live-action Disney remakes as “Alice in Wonderland,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Dumbo” or “Mulan.” Rachel Zegler, as Snow White, has a pertly appealing glow, and Gal Gadot, as the Evil Queen, glares divinely in her darkly purplish cloaked finery (stained-glass crown, nails like daggers, matching black lips and eyes), like the world’s most furious dominatrix. I wish Gadot’s vocal performance were more operatic and less Mata Hari, but she still makes a stylishly intense villain.    

But let’s talk about the controversies, which in a rare moment of ideological combustibility come from both sides of the cultural-politics spectrum. Is the casting of Rachel Zegler, an actor of Latin heritage, as Snow White, a character originally…