Cinderella
Dec. 22nd, 2019 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhen I was a very small child, preschool age, Cinderella was one of my favorite movies. Not the dancing with the prince at the ball part - we rarely got that far - but the mice doing battle with Lucifer the cat to win trimmings for their friend Cinderella’s ball dress.
In fact, I think we usually stopped before Cinderella’s stepsisters vindictively rip her dress up. So sad to see the mice’s handiwork destroyed like that, after they worked so hard to make a beautiful dress for their friend! But maybe that bothers me more now that I’m older; at the time, I think I just liked the visuals of the battle with the cat, the sash rolling up and unrolling, the way that Jacques loads the beads onto Gus-Gus’s tail after the strand breaks.
And of course there’s also the wonderful earlier sequence where Gus-Gus has gathered too many corn kernels (does his name derive from the phrase “greedy Gus”?), and tries to carry them balanced under his chin, and they keep popping out… and Lucifer nearly nabs him as he rushes to gather them back up. Aaaaagh, I loved that part. I liked Jacques too, but Gus-Gus was my favorite.
At that age, I always identified with the youngest character - or in Gus-Gus’s case, the character who seemed youngest to me, because he was so bumbling.
Anyway! Obviously, this time around I watched the whole way through. The animation is simply gorgeous: there’s a particularly beautiful shot of the castle, a sort of Cinderella-eye-view as she approaches in her pumpkin-coach, which reminds me so much of some of the images of Mary Blair’s concept art that I’ve seen, just in the way that it’s shaded. (There’s a new picture book, Mary Blair’s Unique Flare, which I processed at the library the other day, and it was so hard not to be able to check it out and take it out with me that very moment.)
I also enjoyed Cinderella herself, and the way that she’s built this sort of alternate life for herself with the animal friends who actually appreciate her, which helps to keep her stepfamily from getting her down too much. She acts meek in front of her stepfamily (although not quite meek enough to fool her stepmother, who clearly knows she isn’t broken), but then she’s talking to Jacques or to her dog and she gives just this little eye-roll and… you know that she knows the score.
And her stepmother is so evil. Just the actual worst. That moment when she’s all “I always keep my promises,” as if she’s actually going to let Cinderella go to the ball, and then basically sics her daughters on Cinderella by drawing their attention to the parts of her outfit that the mice took from the stepsisters' wardrobes (after the stepsisters had discarded those pieces!)... Just to get Cinderella’s hopes up so her ultimate inability to go to the ball is more devastating, I suppose.
The prince is basically a non-entity, in terms of personality, but actually… I’m okay with it. It’s Cinderella’s story, and he’s clearly an okay dude who will be way nicer to her than her stepfamily, and that’s what I really care about.
In fact, I think we usually stopped before Cinderella’s stepsisters vindictively rip her dress up. So sad to see the mice’s handiwork destroyed like that, after they worked so hard to make a beautiful dress for their friend! But maybe that bothers me more now that I’m older; at the time, I think I just liked the visuals of the battle with the cat, the sash rolling up and unrolling, the way that Jacques loads the beads onto Gus-Gus’s tail after the strand breaks.
And of course there’s also the wonderful earlier sequence where Gus-Gus has gathered too many corn kernels (does his name derive from the phrase “greedy Gus”?), and tries to carry them balanced under his chin, and they keep popping out… and Lucifer nearly nabs him as he rushes to gather them back up. Aaaaagh, I loved that part. I liked Jacques too, but Gus-Gus was my favorite.
At that age, I always identified with the youngest character - or in Gus-Gus’s case, the character who seemed youngest to me, because he was so bumbling.
Anyway! Obviously, this time around I watched the whole way through. The animation is simply gorgeous: there’s a particularly beautiful shot of the castle, a sort of Cinderella-eye-view as she approaches in her pumpkin-coach, which reminds me so much of some of the images of Mary Blair’s concept art that I’ve seen, just in the way that it’s shaded. (There’s a new picture book, Mary Blair’s Unique Flare, which I processed at the library the other day, and it was so hard not to be able to check it out and take it out with me that very moment.)
I also enjoyed Cinderella herself, and the way that she’s built this sort of alternate life for herself with the animal friends who actually appreciate her, which helps to keep her stepfamily from getting her down too much. She acts meek in front of her stepfamily (although not quite meek enough to fool her stepmother, who clearly knows she isn’t broken), but then she’s talking to Jacques or to her dog and she gives just this little eye-roll and… you know that she knows the score.
And her stepmother is so evil. Just the actual worst. That moment when she’s all “I always keep my promises,” as if she’s actually going to let Cinderella go to the ball, and then basically sics her daughters on Cinderella by drawing their attention to the parts of her outfit that the mice took from the stepsisters' wardrobes (after the stepsisters had discarded those pieces!)... Just to get Cinderella’s hopes up so her ultimate inability to go to the ball is more devastating, I suppose.
The prince is basically a non-entity, in terms of personality, but actually… I’m okay with it. It’s Cinderella’s story, and he’s clearly an okay dude who will be way nicer to her than her stepfamily, and that’s what I really care about.
