"With a wave of her wand and some 'Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo,' Cinderella's Fairy Godmother transforms an ordinary pumpkin into a magnificent coach and Cinderella's rags into a gorgeous gown, then sends her off to the Royal Ball. But Cinderella's enchanted evening must end when the spell is broken at midnight. It will take the help of her daring animal friends Jaq and Gus and a perfect fit into a glass slipper to create the ultimate fairy tale ending." -- Cinderella DVD liner summary

Despite its streamlining of the particulars, Disney's feature-length Cinderella ultimately takes fewer liberties with the source material (chiefly, Charles Perrault's "Cinderella, or The Glass Slipper") than almost any of his other animated fairy tales. If anything, this telling--definitive now, thanks to cinema becoming the new oral tradition--is the most internally logical (or just plain logical, despite a preponderance of anthropomorphic creatures), but there remains the problem of a heroine who'd still be sweeping the floors were it not for her fairy godmother, the deus ex machina to end deus ex machinas. The Cinderella myth, as Perrault interpreted it, is at best anachronistic--we learn that beauty is a virtue but that grace is a gift, whatever that's supposed to mean; Disney's curiously amoral contemporization turns it into a kind of karma fable, with martyrdom paying off like a jackpot and the comeuppance of Cinderella's tormentors the real happily-ever-after of the piece. Both are inapplicable except as skylarks; neither is going to do Anne Frank a fat lot of good.

The fact that there was recently a Cinderella Man arguably attests to not only the Disney film's enduring popularity, but also its gender-neutral appeal--Russell Crowe's Jim Braddock is romanticized but not feminized by the appellation. The genius of Walt Disney--who, desperate for a hit after pro bono work for the war effort left him in hock, gazed deep into the heart of the zeitgeist--was in scaling back the Prince Charming character (here actually called Prince Charming for a change) until he was less a heartthrob than a MacGuffin, thus desexualizing Cinderella's yearning and broadening the opportunity for identification with her. Still, the film is such a perfect distillation of the American Dream that it might finally owe its success to domestic audiences being more narcissistic than they are introspective. To penetrate Cinderella's surface is to open something of a Pandora's Box.

After all, one person's kingdom is another person's serfdom, and the movie seems acutely aware that the social ladder doesn't disappear once you've reached the top, or else the birds and the mice--vermin beneath peasants--wouldn't enslave themselves to Cinderella the way they do. (And while we're on the subject, could the cat-and-mouse slapstick be more conspicuous padding?) Cinderella is that vacuous revenge fantasy of attending your high school reunion in furs--for the archetypal rags-to-riches story, it's not very inspiring: it teaches you to dream without teaching you to be proactive; Cinderella's oppressors may be scary (I have a feeling that "Wicked Stepmother" Lady Tremaine, a dead ringer for the vile woman who taught me in sixth grade, functions as a Rorschach blot of evil), but the fact that she never stands up to them disproves her lack of free will. Although I hate to come down on the Disney film that comes closest to pure cinema, able as it is to evoke David Lynch one moment (via a surreal tableau of female solitude backed by the Angelo Badalamenti-esque composition "Oh, Sing Sweet Nightingale") and honour Hitchcock the next (full of literal key imagery and sophisticated double-exposure, the climax practically upstages Notorious), but it's like Cinderella itself says: if the shoe fits, wear it.

Previews for Lady and the Tramp's Platinum Edition, Chicken Little, Cinderella III, and Disney Princess: A Christmas of Enchantment precede the main menu and join trailers for The Little Mermaid Special Edition, Bambi and the Great Prince of the Forest, Toy Story, Pooh's Grand Adventure, Kronk's New Groove, and Cars under "sneak peeks." The only other extras on Disc 1 are a batch of ten sports-themed "Cinderella Stories" (whose subjects range from Pele to Lance Armstrong) produced by ESPN Classic and the videos for "A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes" by the Disney Channel's Circle of Stars and "Every Girl Can Be a Princess" by, um, Cinderella. (Not the hair band, but the Disney character.) For what it's worth, a making-of supplements the former.

DELETED SCENES
Uh-oh, it's unctuous Don Hahn, whose presence is a tip-off that these special features will skim the surface. Hahn provides a 2-minute video intro for a pair of songs ("The Cinderella Work Song"--not the same one that ended up in the picture--and "Dancing on a Cloud") that were dropped before they reached the animation stage but for which enough artwork survived to facilitate these animatics.

MUSIC & MORE
Cinderella and Perry Como (6 mins.)
Stumping for the film, Ilene Woods, the voice of Cinderella, performs a medley with the high-pitched Fontaine Sisters on Como's variety show. A hysterical last-minute cameo by a certain Mouse House icon blessedly mollifies the fifties sap that builds up over the course of this well-preserved kinescope.

Cinderella Title Song (2 mins.)
The original demo recording, audio-only. A floral backdrop accompanies this and seven Unused Songs: "Sing a Little, Dream a Little," "I'm in the Middle of a Muddle," "The Mouse Song," "The Dress My Mother Wore," "Dancing on a Cloud," "I Lost My Heart at the Ball," and "The Face That I See in the Night."

Radio Programs
The world learns that Woods will be lending her pipes to Disney's upcoming Cinderella in a "Village Store" excerpt from March 25, 1948; she subsequently performs "When You Wish Upon a Star" for listeners. Also on board: Gulf Oil Presents and Scouting the Stars excerpts from the year of the movie's release.

GAMES & ACTIVITIES
House of Royalty
Another unnaturally enthusiastic teenybopper emerges from the Disney petri dish to host this three-part guide to "looking like," "living like," and "acting like" a princess. Anecdotes from "real-life princess" Catherine Oxbenberg are solicited in the final instalment, but of course you never hear that belonging to royalty has its disadvantages as well.

Princess Pajama Jam
Learn the moves from an assortment of Disney princesses.

The Royal Life
A ROM-enabled, interactive fashion studio.

BACKSTAGE DISNEY
From Rags to Riches: The Making of Cinderella
A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes (7 mins.)
Your basic preamble, delivered by the eclectic likes of the always-welcome animator/animation historian John Canemaker, Disney animator Andreas Deja, Garry Marshall (because he traffics in Cinderella remakes), and many others. If you possess little knowledge of Disney's participation in the "Good Neighbor" policy or excursions into propaganda, it should connect a few dots.

Of Mice and Nine Old Men (13 mins.)
The first of two featurettes focusing on Disney's top-flight animation team, who took their sobriquet from Roosevelt's nickname for the Supreme Court. It's useful for learning who drew what and how, in some cases, Cinderella eschewed "typecasting" (e.g. Bambi/seven dwarfs designer Frank Thomas taking on the harsh-looking Lady Tremaine) to brilliant effect. An interview with the late Milt Kahl from 1995 engenders sympathy for the Nine Old Men's disdain towards rotoscoping, a technique liberally applied throughout Cinderella.

A Perfect Fit: The Voices of Cinderella (7 mins.)
Surviving vocal talent Woods, Mike Douglas! (the singing voice of Prince Charming--his Chicago accent precluded his getting the speaking part), and Lucille Bliss (ugly stepsister Anastasia) reminisce alongside mini-hagiographies of Verna Feldt (the Fairy Godmother, who died the same day Walt did) and Ellen Audley (who bore the closest resemblance to her cartoon counterpart, Lady Tremaine).

Musically Ever After (11 mins.)
Daniel Goldman, PhD and Richard Sherman of The Sherman Brothers--who didn't have anything to do with Cinderella but were of course vital to Uncle Walt's sixties output--take turns discussing the Tin Pan Alley tunes written for Cinderella. Shrewd Disney had accidental hits with so many of his Silly Symphonies ditties that he not only actively pursued a number-one record this time around, he published the music himself, too. Was the soundtrack a hit? Does a fairy have wings?

The Cinderella That Almost Was (14 mins.)
Don't know whether host Hahn is responsible for the titular misnomer, but this is actually a look at the numerous revisions that were made over the years to the treatment Walt commissioned for Cinderella, replete with ridiculous voiceover 're-enactments' of production-meeting transcripts. (Whoever's playing Disney is doing a better Mr. Ed.) That being said, it's a fascinating segment, especially when Disney starts arbitrarily deciding which animals can speak English and which can only communicate via Mattel See 'n Say.

Walt's Table: A Tribute to Disney's Nine Old Men (22 mins.)
Joel Siegel moderates this roundtable with successful Nine Old Men protégés Mark Henn, John Musker, Brad Bird, Ron Clements, Hahn, Deja, and Glen Keane. However vacuous, Siegel's questions rupture a dam of nostalgia; Hahn, of course, has to have the last word, veiling a passive-aggressive plug for The Lion King in a toast to the animation giants of yesteryear. All in all, a nice tribute--but why two celebrations of the Nine Old Men (and one salute to honorary "old woman" Mary Blair (see below), conceptual artist extraordinaire) and not a single mention of Clyde Geronomi, Hamilton Luske, or Wilfred Jackson, Cinderella's co-directors?

The Art of Mary Blair (15 mins.)
Keane succinctly observes that there are "Mary Blair-like colours" in childhood dreams, while Canemaker takes the definitive approach, signalling us to specific examples of Blair's influence on the Disney canon. Short-changed but thankfully not dismissed is the rarity of someone like Blair in a male-dominated field circa the Atomic age--but be warned: afterwards, you'll have an intense craving to visit the Blair-designed "It's a Small World" ride.

Storyboard to Film Comparison: Opening Sequence (7 mins.)
Self-explanatory; includes Photostats from the rotoscoping sessions.

Cinderella Galleries
Galleries highlighting the "visual development," "Mary Blair art," "character design," "cast," "storyboard art," "layouts and backgrounds," "live-action reference," "production photos," and "publicity," viewable as either still frames or in a prepared slideshow.

1922 Laugh-o-Gram: Cinderella (7 mins.)
Derided by Hahn as unsophisticated elsewhere on the disc, this bizarre, Walt Disney-helmed artifact tells a Cinderella story so removed from the beloved feature film that one can hardly call it primordial. The R. Crumb-style artwork is plenty intriguing, though.

Excerpt from "The Mickey Mouse Club" - January 24, 1955 (4 mins.)
Helene Stanley, the naughty housewife-hot physical model for Cinderella, materializes when a little boy starts slobbering over Polly Crockett. (Stanley played Davy's wife on TV's "Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier".) Then she ushers off the Mouseketeers in a nifty scale model of the Cinderella 'pumpkin' carriage.

Trailers for the 1950, 1965, 1973, 1981, and 1987 theatrical issues of Cinderella and a PSA for the "Dreams Come True" foundation cap off the set. The DVD is packaged in the customary swingtray-keepcase/cardboard slipcover combo.-Bill Chambers

© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
76 minutes
MPAA
G
Aspect Ratio(s)
Standard 1.33:1
Languages
English DD 5.1 Disney Enhanced Home Theater Mix,
English Mono,
French DD 5.1,
Spanish DD 5.1
CC
Yes
Subtitles
None
2 DVD-9s
Region One
Disney

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Published: October 3, 2005