Cinderella (1950)

The tunes are mostly less than classic: “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes”; “So This is Love” The one standout, of course, is “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” (though I prefer the fairy godmother’s song from the Rodgers & Hammerstein versions, with its “Fol-de-rol and fiddle dee dee”).

The cute Disney animal sidekicks, always present, here for the first time overstep their bounds into the main plot. The cat Lucifer (voiced by June Foray and looking like an evil forerunner of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland), Cinderella’s mouse friends Jaq and Gus (both voiced by James MacDonald, who knew from mouse voices, being the voice of Mickey himself), and the old dog Bruno (MacDonald again) are used to pad out the story with “Tom and Jerry”–style cat-and-mouse hijinks before ultimately being given key roles in an action-packed climactic scene in which Cinderella’s mice friends must get the key up the stairs and rescue her from her tower. (The mice do play one key role in the story that reflects Perrault’s text: Enchanted by Cinderella’s fairy godmother, they become the horses drawing her pumpkin-carriage.)

Cinderella herself (Ilene Woods), alas, is blandly generic, and her interactions with Prince Charming (William Phipps) lack the spark of, say, Sleeping Beauty’s meet cute in the woods. Some reviews, looking for something to praise in the animation, have pointed to a few more interesting visual moments like the soap bubble reflections, but Disney had already done this sort of thing, and done it better, in the likes of Dumbo and Fantasia.

Which is not to say that Cinderella is visually uninteresting. The character design and animation may be unremarkable, but what is most worthy of note is the background art. Immense, cavernous spaces fill the film, from the opulent Baroque ballroom of the royal palace, with its tall, narrow doors reaching to an impossibly remote ceiling, to the vertiginous stone tower with its rough wooden staircase leading to Cinderella’s bedroom/cell. These fairy-tale spaces leave a lasting impression on the imagination, evoking as they do the timeless world of Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Anderson.

Though not Disney’s finest hour, Cinderella is an honorable rendition of the fairy tale and a worthwhile family classic. It’s also worth noting that this version provides one notable variation on the classic fairy tale that couldn’t have existed prior to Perrault’s retelling, which introduced the detail that Cinderella’s magical slippers were of glass. (Some scholars have hypothesized that this detail was originally based on a misreading, and that the “glass” [verre] slippers were originally fur [vair], but it could also be that Perrault simply liked the idea of glass slippers. Certainly glass, besides being a more exotic material, suggests a more exacting point of reference in a shoe that could be worn by only one foot in the kingdom.)

In any case, once it’s established that the slippers are of glass, this raises the obvious possibility of the slipper breaking. Of course there is only one logical response to this eventuality — and Cinderella provides it, offering a satisfying twist on the Cinderella story and a clever denouement to the film.