Dear Cinders...

‘You haven’t seen Cinderella?’ My colleague almost choked on her decaffeinated tea. ‘I’ll bring it in’.

And so she did, along with Sleeping Beauty. I smuggled the DVDs into my bag, under a copy of a T.C. Boyle novel and my sandwich box. When home, I took my pizza out of the oven, poured myself some fizzy and broke out the duvet.


I sat down to the strains of the familiar saccharine strings that open every Disney film before 1960, questioning why I chose this over going to see the latest Almodovar movie. The fantastical story, the bright colours, the ‘hilariously’ named mannish stepsisters (Anastasia and…Drizella?). In fact, it could almost be an Almodovar movie.

But within minutes, I had succumbed to The Disney Effect. Who cares that the vast majority of the film has got very little to do with either the Grimm Brothers’ original tale, or the sanitised version I grew up with? There’s a distinct lack of toe hacking butter knives, for starters. I certainly didn’t give a spit when I was presented with the distinctly Tom and Jerry-alike moggy, mouse and hound hinjinx that dominate the first half of the movie.

I booed—to myself, silently (I do live in a shared flat, after all) – when the evil stepmother (thinking herself so resplendent in her castle which was truly crumbling as much as her aged face) orders Cinders to go on a cleaning frenzy after becoming the victim of a step sister’s rage. I cheered when Cinderella’s animal friends fashion her a simple, elegant dress. And cheered even more, when the Fairy Godmother turns up and her magics her up a new one.

It’s a typical Disney movie; singing animals, songs with nonsensical words (bippety boppity boo?), a central female character with an unfeasibly cheery disposition, an evil crone and, of course, a happy ending. Think Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland and, to some extent, Mary Poppins, and you’re there. And I was singing along.

Although the subplot involving the ageing, nervous prince is a little irritating (although it does make narrative sense, providing thematic parallels with the main story arc), the fact that the glass slipper fitting story point makes very little sense, and, despite being Germanic in origin, parades the American Dream as wantonly as a plot can in a fairy tale, Cinderella is truly a delightful confection of a movie. Now, altogether now, ‘bippety boppidy boo!’