Honors:
Walt Disney Pictures return to full-length feature animation for the first time in eight years reminding audiences and critics of the charming enchantment of the studio’s enduring earlier films. In the same ilk as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella delivers a princess fairytale where love, kindness, and a little bit of magic overcome the spite, jealousies, and evils of the world. Presented in stunning Technicolor animation associated to Disney’s renowned features, the vibrancy of the visuals are matched with the allure of its plot and characters manifesting the finest skills of the animated arts since Bambi (1942). Following in the footsteps of the original Disney princess Snow White, it is all too fitting that a second “princess film” would launch the studio into it second, much grander, age.
Cinderella is the animated classic fairytale about the young lady cruelly mistreated by her stepmother who, with a little friendly magic, achieves her dream to attend a royal ball and fall in love. Having lost both her parents at a young age, Cinderella is left in the care of her cruel stepmother, Lady Tremaine, who shows obvious favoritism to her own daughters by assigning Cinderella menial tasks within her own home. Though beautiful and charming she is persecuted by her stepmother and step sisters when a royal ball is declared inviting all maidens of the land for the prince to find himself a suitor, keeping Cinderella from attending the event. With the aid of her Fairy Godmother, as well as her little animal friends, Cinderella is blessed with an enchanted evening where she becomes the literal belle of the ball, falling in love with Prince Charming before the spell wears off mat the strike of midnight. To avoid embarrassment as the spell disappears Cinderella flees the ball, leaving only a shimmering slipper as the lone reminder of her to the prince, who will use it to find his missing love. As the story goes, the royals look for the foot that fits the slipper, while Tremaine boards away Cinderella. When all hope seems lost with the glass slipper being shattered Cinderella emerges along with the matching slipper, revealing her identity. Of course, it all ends with Cinderella marrying the prince and they live happily ever after.
With this picture Walt Disney returns to a style of feature length animation that reminds audiences of his successful first picture, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. With an elegantly beautiful and appealing princess heroine we also get a slew of small talking animals that serve as the comedic supporting cast as the dwarves were in the 1937 classic. Brightly stylistic in a fairytale picture book model Cinderella brings out the very best of the animation artistry the Disney studio had been underutilizing for most the prior decade and manifests it with the studio’s finest work since the earliest part of World War II. Despite a lack of visual depth seen in Pinocchio(1940) and the artistic depth of the medium seen in Fantasia (1940) one could the film as a step back. However, Cinderella was a massive leap forward compared to the package features released in the latter half of the 1940s. With its beautiful layout, expressive use of shadows for an animated feature, and a return to charming full-fledged characters Cinderella was not as much of an achievement as it was a celebration of Disney’s return to pre-war form, hitting all the marks critics and audiences have long yearned for.Walt Disney’s connection to Cinderella goes back to the early 1920s at at his Laugh-O-Gram Studios in Kansas City, before the small cartoon studio went bankrupt and he moved to California and turned his career around with Mickey Mouse. In one of his final shorts at Laugh-O-Gram he produced a crude Cinderella inspire short with a flapper looking damsel as the ill-treated heroine. Once established in Hollywood Disney imagined Cinderella as a possible Silly Symphony, but ideas quickly outgrew the possibility of a seven-minute short. Briefly considered as the first full length animated feature, the Cinderella concept floated into early pre-production in 1938 before being put on the back burner with WWII cutting off European markets and crippling all feature ideas for the studio. It was not until after the war that Cinderella was brushed off again and began development in 1946. Package features kept Disney afloat through the later 1940s, but the studio remained in debt and Walt knew he needed to focus on a full-length production again to grab larger attention and larger box office appeal. Cinderella along with Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan were all in development at the same time, but it was the similarities to Snow White that made this feature the one most focused on the studio’s return to full-length narratives.
Walt was very insistent on the success of Cinderella, but due to the changing views he had with his studio through the 1940s, a new focus on producing his first fully live action picture with Treasure Island(1950), and other creative ideas the studio’s creative driving force was spread much thinner than the days of Snow White. Many of Disney’s longest tenured artists would be trusted with carrying the animated torch of production while Walt interjected with his quality control that proved timeless in nature. Artist Mary Blair provided the guiding look of the picture with her classic fairytale picture book style. Ub Iwerks, Walt’s old collaborator who helped developed Mickey Mouse and the multiplane camera, proved the special animated effects. Like in Snow White live action models were used to help with development of the human characters while the usual Disney style continued to shine with the animal characters. It looked as if it was all-on-board with the animation staff when it came to production.
In pursuit for the right voice for Cinderella over 309 women industry wide auditioned for the voice role. It was when Walt was reviewing recorded demos by his tin pan alley hired song writers who produced the classics songs as “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” and the Academy Award nominated “Bibbidi-Bobbidi- Boo” that he heard the voice he wanted. 20-year-old small time radio singer Ilene Woods recorded the demos as a favor to her friends that wrote the music so that Walt could get an idea of the tunes they were writing. It was a favor that landed her the biggest job in her life as she was cast as Cinderella by Walt Disney himself. Fellow cast members Eleanor Audley and Verna Felton too were widely used voice actors with a good deal of work in radio. Audley would be both the voice and visual model for Lady Tremaine, and would later return to Disney for more work as the villainess in Sleeping Beauty (1959). Fenton would be the sweet, comforting voice of the Fairy Godmother after the character artist shifted from an elegant angel like being to a more grandmotherly figure for the role, embodying the unconditional loving figure that was very appealing.
Premiering in Boston in February 1950 Cinderella was an immediate success. Critics praise the film for the studio’s return to form and near perfection. Finicky critics would highlight how the human characters were less appealing than the animal characters, but audiences loved them all. The gambling Disney took a chance and it paid off with great profits, establishing a new finical direction for the studio. With the help of Cinderella’s success, the Disney Studio began a revolutionary decade that saw the Disney brand become a cultural institution. Three Academy Awards nominations, Best Sound, Best Music, and Best Song manifested Disney’s achievement back into critical feature films.
With Cinderella Walt Disney founded his own in-house music company, allowing him to profit further on the selling of records and sheet music beyond just the box office returns. Cinderella’s soundtrack quickly became a number one seller, further padding the pocket books of Disney’s studio as it looked to expand more animated features, live action movies, and documentaries with future, yet unforeseen, projects in television and amusement parks in the years to come.
Cinderella, like many of the Disney classics would be re-released in theaters several times through the decades, feeding off nostalgia of past audiences who would introduce the film to new generations. This practice carried on into home video release in the late 20thcentury with the creation of the “Disney Vault,” an idea by generating their own supply and demand by release the feature periodically in hope to stir up an appeal.
Rather quickly Cinderella was considered in all-time Disney classic, eventually becoming part of the famed Disney princess stable. Its artistry would earn it the ninth best American animated feature on AFI’s 2008 top 10 list. Continued adoration saw the feature elected to the National Film Registry in 2018. After a trying late 1940s Walt Disney was back and the 1950s proved to be a massive decade for the studio and its figurehead as Disney and his impact on American culture would balloon in animation and beyond with Cinderellawas just the first step.
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