Disney traditionalists are sure to find comfort in Kenneth Branagh’s live-action Cinderella as it glides on to home video this week, because unlike the majority of recent efforts to revive the studio’s flagship fairytales, this new spin on the glass-slippered classic makes few concessions to contemporary life. Indeed, the film plays out almost exactly as Walt himself might have envisioned, eschewing the metatextual postmodernism of last year’s Sleeping Beauty reboot Maleficent and the general batshittery of Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland.
Still, tradition has a short memory, so while the most influential version of the Cinderella story is probably the 1697 text by Charles Perrault, this new telling owes more to Disney’s own 1950 animated adaptation. Handily, this allows the studio to credit the story both to Perrault and “Disney’s Cinderella Properties”, granting the corporation a generous degree of ownership over a tale whose earliest variant predates Christ. To be fair, Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo didn’t write itself.
A few cursory nods to the shifting social attitudes of the last 65 years do set this new Cinderella apart from its animated ancestor. Lone black actor Nonso Anozie takes on a pivotal – if shallow – supporting role, while Ella herself is imbued with marginally more agency than was granted her two-dimensional predecessor. For the most part, though, the need for franchise continuity wins out, however outmoded the tropes of that franchise may now seem.
Ella’s absurdly thin waist is scantly more anatomically plausible when placed on an actual human body, while her quest for a form of liberation defined by marriage to a wealthy, powerful stranger feels retrograde even by Disney standards. Even the mocking nickname bestowed upon Ella by her callous stepsisters proves harder to explain in 2015, now that the word “cinder” has taken permanent leave from the vocabularies of all but the most erudite of six-year-olds.
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