(Maybe I’m reading into it, but the random cameo by Rob Brydon culminating with him, on the floor looking up at the prince, saying he’s finally found a good angle to paint the young man felt like an inexplicable yet mildly humorous bit of metacommentary on Branagh’s abiding passion for Dutch angles.) The lengthy sequence wherein Cinderella gets ready for, attends, and exits the ball has its charms, and comes closest to feeling like one of the party sequences from his past works, such as Much Ado About Nothing. That said, the film is steeped in theatricality, all the more so with Branagh behind the camera. Moreover, if you're going to make an unabashed revival that never tries to tweak the formula, why not go whole hog?
#Mousterpiece so dear to my heart movie#
And their upcoming Beauty and the Beast remake will essentially be Disney’s The Producers: a movie based on a Broadway musical based on a movie.
So here’s the question: why not make this a musical? Disney’s not scared of the genre, at least now that Frozen reaffirmed that not every movie needs to be marketed just to boys for it to be successful. But it’s not from the 1950 film.) Once the live-action Cinderella started talking to the mice-Jaq is now, if I heard right, Jaqueline, but Gus-Gus is still Gus-Gus-I wondered if we’d hear about a dream being a wish your heart makes, or “So This Is Love,” but alas. So.there’s a song, and it’s not unfamiliar to the world of Disney. (Even more baffling: the sole song is an old English rhyme called “Lavender Blue,” which Disney fans may know as a Best Original Song Oscar nominee for So Dear to My Heart. The operative word in that last sentence, though, is “says.” There is, save one key melody, no singing in this movie, which baffles me to no end. But Cinderella still lives in her attic, still talks to mice, still goes to the ball in a pumpkin, and still has a fairy godmother who says “Bibbidi bobbidi boo.” Director Kenneth Branagh and screenwriter Chris Weitz may have given the prince (now named Kit and played by Robb Stark of Winterfell, looking eerily like a young Michael Fassbender) more to do, and fleshed out what constitutes the animated film’s opening narration into a whole first act. Unlike the live-action retreads Alice in Wonderland and Maleficent, there is no revisionism here, nor any returning to some kind of fantasy world: if you know the story of the fair maiden forced to be a servant to her nasty stepmother and stepsisters-specifically the Disney version-then there will be no surprises for you within this film. There is, as you might expect, nothing remotely close to that moment in the 2015 remake, which is so heavily inspired by the 1950 film that it doesn’t often prove its worth as anything other than one of those well-known and beloved “brand deposits” Bob Iger so dearly loves.
The smash-cut to Lady Tremaine’s aghast face is about as close as you get in Disney animation to encouraging the audience to collectively pump their fists in victory. All seems lost to him, until Cinderella calmly produces the other one, the one she didn’t lose while running home after the ball, to his delight and Lady Tremaine’s horror. We all know the story, all the way to Cinderella revealing herself to be the mystery woman with whom the prince danced at the ball and fell in love.īut the way in which this truth is finally made clear is something special: the villainous Lady Tremaine “accidentally” nudges the Grand Duke, thus breaking the glass slipper he has been desperately trying to match to a foot, right before Cinderella gets to try it on. Though it’s not my favorite Disney animated film, nor would it approach my top 10, the 1950 Cinderella features one of the great moments in all of cinema, a truly cathartic and triumphant capper to a story of cruel domestic abuse.
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