D52 Week 12: Cinderella!

(Yes, this is rather late, but I kinda sorta have a reason?)

Can you imagine being a fan of theatrical animation in the 1940s? Not only was there all that non-animated war nonsense going on, but also, you had to go EIGHT WHOLE YEARS without a proper Disney animated feature to enjoy! And this was waaaaaay before you could just buy the old ones and re-watch them endlessly on some sort of home media format, too! Perhaps that's why Cinderella is remembered so very fondly, despite being middling as Disney's features go. (At least it's not a collection of shorts about international avians or something again!) Perhaps that's also why it so shamelessly attempts to emulate Disney's biggest (and almost only) financially successful animated feature up to that point, Snow White and the Seven Drawves.

Cinderella, like Snow White, is abusively overworked yet somehow unnervingly chipper about it. Like Snow White, Cinderella is ostensibly beautiful, but being kept down by her evil stepmother and evil stepsisters. (If forced to choose, I'd rather do Cinderella than Show White.) In both cases, you can tell that the evil stepfamilies are evil because, um, they're ostensibly ugly, and ugly people are inherently worse than pretty people, of course. Like Snow White, Cinderella finds some degree of solace in diminutive comic relief friends (in Cinderella's case, the weird mice). Like Snow White, Cinderella is finally saved from her cold, heartless steprelations by a prince that she's barely met, but will gladly marry, because she's a woman, of course. And, like Snow White, Cinderella surrounds herself with cute animal friends whose cute animal hijinks will help stall for time, in the hope that nobody notices just how thin her life story actually is. Yes, yes, the original fairy tales have a few similarities, but here, they were clearly working overtime to recapture the same tone as their biggest success. Of course, you can't blame them for playing it a little safe, when you consider that the entire future of the animation studio pretty much relied on this succeeding and reversing a tide that had been flowing against them for a decade!

Ironically, though, it's that safeness that is the biggest textural difference between the two films! You have to bear in mind that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a pretty big deal back in 1937, of course, because the idea of the feature-length cartoon was new, and sort of ludicrous. There wasn't a precedent for that sort of thing, so Disney pretty much just threw a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what would stick. An ambitiously hallucinogenic nightmare sequence in the woods? Sure, that could be cool! An entire song about hand-washing? Sounds less cool, but you'll never know unless you try it, so why the hell not! The experimentation was, obviously, very hit-or-miss, but you still had to admire it. By comparison, everything about Cinderella seems more calculated, and not necessarily in a good way. Unlike Snow White, there's clearly a "Disney formula" at work now, clearly designed for mass marketability. There's even a helping of cat-and-mouse hijinks because people were still into that in the 1950s! But, again, you can't blame them or anything, a lot riding on this, etc.

And then there's Lady Tremaine, carrying on the grand Grimhildian tradition of being a loathsome, humourless C-word. She seems an oddity among Disney princess villainesses, possessing no magical powers of any sort, otherworldly levels of cold-hearted bitchdom aside. In many ways, she's an effective bad guy. There's no way you could possibly question Cinderella's intimidation, because....well, she's a genuinely intimidating person! Physically, well, I've met people who look just like her, and somehow that makes her all the more frightening. At the same time, though, isn't she sort of a straw figure here? Most of Disney's villains have pretty clear motivations for their behaviour, even if that behaviour is completely thoroughly awful. Lady Tremaine, meanwhile, is just terrible for the sake of being terrible. Her entire life pretty much just revolves around the fact that you are not supposed to like this woman at all. (She's Jim's dad, basically.) That is to say, it's pretty much impossible to grasp onto her character in any way; we can only grasp onto the reactions of those around her, particularly Cinderella. It's effective, but it's still kinda weak. But you can't blame her! She's just following in Queen Grimhilde's footsteps!

Cinderella is also the kind of Disney movie that I find just a teensy bit morally repulsive, too. I've never cared for stories whose entire premises are, "Well, if you wish really really hard, good things might happen, maybe". I've also always felt weird about society perpetuating the bizarre cultural idea that being a princess is a nifty thing for young girls to dream about. But Cinderella sends all of this over the edge into rather creepy territory. Cinderella, the character, is an abuse victim! And she reacts to her abuse by....smiling and just hoping really really hard that it'll go away. Fun! And by "fun", I mean "not fun", at all. But you can't blame this film, because there are many other films about abuse victims reacting to their torment in an unhealthily passive manner, too! Of course, very few of those films are willing to create bizarre emotional whiplash by cutting between those scenes of sadness, and scenes where abuse is played for wacky comedy, for some reason. But, that's totally what they do here, with the Grand Duke receiving a grand battering (albeit unintentional) at the hands of the King. Now, don't get me wrong, I actually kinda like the character dynamic between King McKing and Grand Duke Grandukenstein! But it is rather icky when you put directly next to Cinderella's dire life at the hands of a tormentor who doesn't even receive any comeuppance at the end of the day, isn't it?

Providing less inappropriate comic relief, we have the mice. Gus! Jaq! Fatty! I'm not as down on these guys as a certain sexy nerd is. I don't mind their quirky rodential songs, and I admire their anal beading skills. That being said, they're hardly within the realm of truly classic Disney sidekicks, that much is clear. I can certainly think of far more charming cartoon mice who have engaged in cat-and-mouse antics with far more charming cartoon cats! (The awkwardly designed Lucifer is very much the Purugly of the 1950s.) Meanwhile, Blue Fairy Godmother has somehow become beloved solely on the basis of one song, which is pretty much the only thing she actually does in the whole movie. To be fair, "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" is ridiculously catchy, though. My point's the same, though - this is a reasonably nice collection of decent supporting characters, but in a story that's this thing to begin with, they simply can't provide the degree of support that Cinderella, and Cinderella, truly need. (And then there's Prince Charming, who is....definitely a contender in the contest to be a less interesting Prince Charming than even Snow White's Prince Charming was!)

So, no. I've never really regarded Cinderella as among my favourites, and that clearly still has not changed. But, after six straight weeks of disconnected package film boringness, I can at least understand why it's a notable film. The animation quality is fairly standard fare for a Disney feature, but after years and years of animation well below that level, of course everyone was enthusiastic about it! The songs are good in that typical Disney way, but after years and years of unrelated songs performed by unfitting Special Guest Stars, of course people were just that much more thrilled to have story-related songs performed by the characters themselves in a return to the grand Disney musical paradigm! Maybe I don't like it so much, but I like that it resuscitated Disney's fortunes and allowed them to go on to make far more interesting things. So, at least there's that....

TERRIBLE AND UNNECESSARY AND DOWNRIGHT EVIL DIRECT-TO-DVD DISNEY SEQUEL CONCEPT: Cinderella and Prince Charming are happily married! But not all is well when the Blue Fairy (Godmother) misplaces her magic wand again, and it falls into Lady Tremaine's hands! Lady Tremaine, being a crafty evil person, uses the wand to travel back in time to the fateful day of the glass slipper fitting, magically expanding the glass slipper so that it fits on Anastasia's fat, ugly foot, thus changing the course of history forever. She also uses the wand to alter the prince's memory, so he doesn't realise that Anastasia does not at all look like the guy he danced with. And, when that eventually fails, she uses the wand to make Anastasia into Cinderella's creepy doppelgänger. Everything works out, though, because Princey's sword can apparently reflect magic, as it turns out. In the end, everyone lives happily ever after, with Lady Tremaine and Drizella being abused as scullery maids now, because two wrongs make a right. Hayden Panettiere sings the theme song!

...what? You mean that's actually the actual concept behind an actual movie that actual people worked on? Seriously???