NFR Project: 'Cinderella' (1950)

 

NFR Project: “Cinderella”

Dir: Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi

Scr: William Peet, Ted Sears, Homer Brightman, Kenneth Anderson, Erdman Penner, Winston Hibler, Harry Reeves, Joe Rinaldi

Ed: Donald Halliday

Premiere: March 4, 1950

76 min.

As you may know from reading me, I hate Disney films. This is all due to me being traumatized at a young age by the likes of Bambi and Pinocchio (and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty and on and on . . . ). Their nightmare-inducing fare was not for me.

That being said, Cinderella is one of their least offensive movies, primarily because nothing horribly villainous happens to the protagonist. We are given a straight-up transcription, by and large, of the original fairy tale. Cinderella is the poor put-upon young lady who’s dominated by her wicked stepmother (not too scary) and her mean old stepsisters.

She has a fairy godmother who grants her wish to go to the ball, and her clothes are magically transformed. She and her handsome prince fall in love – but then she must flee by midnight, when the spell is broken. Only one glass slipper remains.

The prince then sends out a comic-opera duke to fit all the maidens in the kingdom with the slipper, in order to find his beloved. Cinderella, almost thwarted, reveals that she possesses the other slipper. And they live happily ever after.

Unfortunately, there is much comic byplay here with the birds and the mice, who are Cinderella’s allies. This helps to move the plot forward, but it is not actually funny, so the effort on them seems wasted. The songs are OK. Lovers of voice actors will note that Verna Felton, Candy Candido, and June Foray lend their skills to the production.

There is a kind of plastic-y sheen to a Disney film that makes me resist it. It is polished, airtight, precocious, condescending, a perfectly machined mechanism to provide family entertainment. It is, at its base, soulless and manipulative. The studio made tons of money from it, and it remains a significant component of Disney’s intellectual property.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: All About Eve.