Disney's Cinderella...

[shadowkat]

Is a very oddly told tale. And an incredibly beautiful piece of animation - considering no computers and all the cells were individually drawn, a feat.

But it is told mainly through the points of view of mice, birds, and the Prince's father. Cinderella and her Prince are sort of on the periphery. In fact 60% of the film is the mice trying to avoid the evil Stepmother's nasty fat cat Lucifer. The animals don't really talk though, well except for the mice.

The romance is dreamlike...told through lullaby like songs. But the main focus is on the comedic characters of the Prince's father, the King who wants grandchildren and his aide de camp, and the
Cinderella's pet mice who will do anything to help her.

It's so odd.

A clip:

An aside on Aladdin...Jonathan Freeman's voice is bit similar to Jeremy Irons in the Lion King...and Irons apparently has made a career of playing slinky voiced villains.

Comments

[angearia.livejournal.com]

End Result: you too can become a princess, i.e. break free from social stratification, if you have a fairy godmother and super-smart mice on your side.

There's class privilege and there's magic privilege. If you have neither, you're stuck.

LOL

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

Oh poor shadowkat67! You should not have to do so many disclaimers, but what kills me is that even after doing all the disclaimers you are still having to discuss the 'message' of Cinderella in the comments! I sympathize!

First of all this film is a classic, it is a treasure. The music is good, the art is great, and no one should miss out on seeing this. I love this film (but I was really young and really scared when the Stepmother drank the potion and turned into the old Crone!).

Second it is based on an old tradition fairy tale that everyone should be familiar with. You can hardly even discuss a lot of literary tropes if you are ignorant of most Fairy tales.

Third if someone is THAT politically correct that they cannot accept something which is from a different era (so I guess they are throwing out all the literary and film classics?) then they should use these things as teaching moments for their own kids. Of course it wouldn't work because the kids will see where the fun and beauty is, and know that Mom is really a Debbie downer.

[rahirah]

It's kind of interesting to compare Cinderella to Sleeping Beauty - in that one, there's even less focus on the romantic leads, and the real protagonists are the three fairies.