This past week, a friend and I made use of our vacation in the Rocky Mountains to stay indoors and watch all the Disney Cinderellas ("Cinderellae?" my friend suggested) ever made.
We watched the dreary and joyless and insipid live-action Cinderella remake from 2015. Barf.
We watched the excruciating 1965 adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, in which the characters mouth the words and lyrics of the original—in an anachronistic medieval setting (how does a medieval peasant girl imagine herself on an "African safari," e.g.?)—seemingly without realizing that any of them were meant to be delivered with life or humor.
We watched the outstanding 1997 Brandy/Whitney Houston version of the musical—and then followed it up with a Disney-produced behind the scenes retrospective documentary about the film, which convinced us it must have been even better than we thought it was.
We even watched the first ten minutes of the 2002 direct-to-video animated sequel, Cinderella II—before turning it off when the boredom became too intense. (Though we saw enough to be able to recognize the deep-cut reference to "Prudence" in the final film in the Cinderella animated trilogy.)
Then we watched the sequel-to-the-sequel, Cinderella III: A Twist in Time—fully expecting to turn it off just as quickly—and found to our astonishment that it was utterly riveting and amazing. (Maybe it was just late at night on the final day of the trip. Maybe the film was benefitting from low expectations. But it suddenly seemed like one of the most touching and funny and compelling things ever.)
But above all of these—second-to-none—stands the original, 1950 animated Cinderella. Seventy-five years later—we concluded—it is still the best of all the film adaptations of the fairy tale (just as the original, non-Disney version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical—the one with Julie Andrews—is the best of all the interpretations of the musical version).
Of course, there are some who will dispute this conclusion. Apparently, some people online actually think the 2015 live-action adaptation of Cinderella is better than the 1950 animated version.
The critics behind one online ranking of all the live-action Disney adaptations call it an "undeniable improvement on the original" (emphasis added)—describing the 1950 version as a "narratively thin piece of wish-fulfillment."
Undeniable, you say? I "beg leave to deny both fact and inference"—to borrow a phrase from Hazlitt.
The problem appears to be that some people expect Cinderella to be a love story. They want the story of how Cinderella came to fall in love with her Prince.
And from that standpoint—the 1950 animated version is indeed rather skimpy. The Prince has about one line in it ("wait, I didn't even catch your name!"). He is indeed, as my friend put it, a mere "prop" in that movie. A Ken doll—still wrapped in the original plastic.
Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.
—as Anne Sexton once put it.
And if you came to Cinderella expecting "That story"—then the 1950 film will only give you about thirty-seconds' worth of screen time to satisfy you. The movie covers the period of Cinderella and the Prince's emplastification—their interment in the museum case—in the shortest of all possible story beats (dance—"I love you"—"wait, I didn't even catch your name"—glass slipper—wedding bells).
If Disney had thought to title their 1950 film Cinderella and Her Animal Friends, they wouldn't have caused so much confusion and disappointment in later viewers. Or Cinderella: Captain of Her Soul and Master of Her Fate. Because that's what the movie is actually about.
The Disney of 1950—unlike the Disney of 2015—actually understood their target audience. They understood that kids were not really interested in the love story. They were perfectly happy to see Cinderella and the Prince packed away in their museum case neatly within a couple seconds at the end. Kids just need the wedding bells to be a plot device—a conventionalized ending that wraps things up—a literal "happily ever after."
The love story in the film isn't really a love story, then—and doesn't have to be. It's just a symbol.
What it represents in the 1950 film is freedom. It just means that Cinderella—with the help of her loyal friends—has managed to escape captivity at the hands of her cruel stepmother. That's what the film is actually about.
The Prince really is just a plastic prop in all this; and that's fine. The movie's not about him. It's about the fact that Cinderella—a good person—is being held prisoner by small-minded jealousy—a stepmother who fears that Cinderella will upstage herself and her biological daughters—and so is constantly trying to humiliate, degrade, and thrust her down in various ways.
The best literary comparison would be to a story like Rudyard Kipling's "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" (a story that "has always seemed rather unaccountably to stand apart from the rest of Kipling's work by reason of its sympathy with the victims rather than with the inflictors of a severely repressive discipline"—as Edmund Wilson once aptly put it. Here—if you're looking for it—is Kipling at his least colonialist and fascist).
The story is based on Kipling's own miserable childhood at the hands of spiteful, mean, and envious foster parents—who were so unimaginative they could only attribute every show of intelligence or initiative on his and his sister's part to a desire to "show off"—and therefore constantly tried to suppress and stifle their independent wills (at least in the story's depiction).
The 1950 Cinderella is a person living that kind of childhood—under that kind of repression. And what really drives her stepmother mad—what leads her on to ever-worse extremes of cruelty and degradation—is that Cinderella's spirit cannot be broken in this manner.
She has "dignity"—as my friend observed; even in the midst of her humiliation. And no matter how horribly her stepmother treats her, she never loses that dignity—which only adds to her tormentor's fury. Woe to them that can kill the body but cannot kill the spirit.
She is good and caring—but she also stands up for herself. She is empathetic, but also just and "authoritative"—my friend noted. She has a clear sense of what's fair and of what people (and animals) are owed—
Which is why she has so many friends and helpers who come to her aid in her hour of need. She was there for them—and so they are there for her. Whereas the selfish and cruel never have friends to help them when fortune is at its lowest ebb.
She cannot be completely deprived of her joy—even when others exert all their time and effort to taking it from her. Even when she is forced to scrub every inch of the front hall's floor—she escapes this reality through fantasy and dissociation. She imagines herself split into soap bubbles that harmonize with her song as she toils.
She is forced to live in a cold tower-attic, surrounded by mice—while her stepsisters sleep in grand boudoirs downstairs. But even this does not break her. She keeps herself entertained. She befriends the mice. She makes them little clothes. She finds little projects to do that bring her and others joy. She "builds a Heaven in Hell's despite," as Blake would put it.
She is imaginative—but also realistic. She is not so saccharine or insipid as to deprive herself of the occasional slyness or archness—the subtle raising of the eyebrows and hint of sarcasm when she observes to her mouse friends that they may have to interrupt her horrid stepsisters' *ahem* "music lesson."
Basically—she's my hero. Like Byron's "Prometheus," she is unconquerable in adversity. Even as the eagles of jealousy and calumny are pecking away at her liver—she looks forward steadily—ready to defend herself and others—ready to stand up for what it right and true, spite of the futile wrath of Jove.
She is good; she is just; she is caring—even when she had every reason not to be. And that is her greatest triumph over the wicked of the world. That is what the small-minded people who expect others to succumb under circumstances can never understand. That is her victory of which they can never rob her, and which sends them mad and raving because they cannot even understand it—
How can she be as she is? they ask. How have we not yet succeeded in breaking and destroying her? How have we not yet made her as wretched as we are—in spite of all our efforts? That is a mystery the small-minded and mean and envious of the world will never be able to solve.
How Cinderella came to be Cinderella is more than I can explain—and the very unaccountability of her dignity and courage under constant degradation is an inextricable part of her heroism.
I have met people who
grew up in a single room with their parents
and four brothers and sisters, and studied at night
with their fingers in their ears at the kitchen table,
and grew up to be beautiful and self-possessed as duchesses—
and innerly gentle and hard-working as Nausicaa
—as the poet Gottfried Benn once put it (Hofmann trans.).
How was such a thing possible? He could only shrug:
I have often asked myself and never found an answer
whence kindness and gentleness come,
I don’t know it to this day, and now must go myself.
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