![]() To dance and be admired, to suddenly find grace in the presence of another person. The scene, centered on these two shiny and heartbreakingly attractive people, is giddy and swooning, romantic in the way a child might imagine romance. As the Prince takes Cinderella spinning around the dance floor, all the other guests at the ball looking on in jealousy and awe, Cinderella is genuinely magical. The true stunner of a sequence, really, is one that hardly uses any special effects at all. I think it has enough visual pop to satisfy youngsters, but it blessedly doesn’t feel intrusive or used as a means to distract from a wan story. Really, the only major effects scene is the big transformation, when a pumpkin swells to carriage size and mice become horses, lizards footmen. She looks ravishing in all her deep jewel-green looks, a true cruel beauty.īranagh is careful not to drown out the film’s aesthetics with too much CGI. Only Blanchett’s costumes don’t quite fit the mold-from the waist up, she looks more 1940s than anything else, her hair in nets and her silk blouses bringing to mind Ingrid Bergman. Cinderella’s big makeover dress is a riot of blue, almost garish, but worn well by James and lit perfectly by Haris Zambarloukos’s lush cinematography. The royal men are tasked with wearing high-waisted pants that, in the crotch area, too often threaten to give children a lesson about the male anatomy, but otherwise Sandy Powell’s costumes are spot on. ![]() The film follows the animated movie’s lead and places the costumes somewhere in the 19th or 18th century it’s a mix of eras and styles, the ladies in hats and high collars, the gents in boots and military jackets. Where the film does show off is in its luxe designs. Those without a sweet tooth might be turned off by this saccharine-ish movie, but I was won over, seduced by its warmth and good looks, its quaint, modest proportions. Weitz’s script is heavy on easy moral lessons-Cinderella, whose Goodness is never quite cloying, repeats her mother’s mantra, “Have courage and be kind,” over and over again-but it’s also plenty spry and sparkling, airy and pretty as spun sugar. But something about Branagh’s British reserve, his devotion to Shakespeare’s formal and relatively spare storytelling structure, has rendered his Cinderella familiar but perfectly fanciful, an old tale told well. I’d fully expected to find Branagh’s film tedious and uninspired, or, worse still, overwhelmed by a hideous deluge of computer effects, like Disney’s Maleficent, or Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. It’s just Cinderella, straightforward and squarely aimed at the little girls and boys in your life who have Frozen fever.Īnd you know what? It works. But now that we’re feeling bullish on princesses again, this new Cinderella comes with very few surprises. Ever After, in an age of Scream tweaks on horror and teen-movie meta-awareness, fit right in, a spirited, against-the-grain movie for its era. So, perhaps in response to that dwindling, Barrymore’s Cinderella, “Danielle” she was called in the French-inflected film, was defiantly anti-princess, a reimagining of a fairy-tale cipher as a feminist (well, sorta feminist, anyway) icon. The previous year, Fox Animation Studios had tried to horn in on the game with Anastasia, a lovely and memorable attempt, but not a terribly successful one. Disney’s Mulan had debuted the month before and would be the last of the Mouse House’s princesses for 11 years. ![]() When that movie opened in 1998, the state of the princess was in crisis. That’s a major shift from our last big Cinderella story, Ever After, Andy Tennant’s charming, lite-revisionist tale starring Drew Barrymore. The film, directed by Kenneth Branagh and written by Twilight: New Moon director Chris Weitz, follows a blond, tiny-waisted (and I mean tiny) Cinderella as she makes her way to her prince in the most expected and linear of fashions. So the studio has given us a new Cinderella, a live-action take on the old story that’s firmly traditional and palatable. Now that Anna and Elsa, the Frozen sisters, have come along and taken over the world, interest in all things royal and Disneyfied is at a renewed peak.
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