Although the fairy tale of Cinderella has its origins in many folk tales from around the world, it was the version of Charles Perrault's Cendrillon that is best known. No other retelling of Cendrillon is more recognizable than the 1950s animated Disney movie Cinderella.
This year, Disney revisits the classic tale with a live-action retelling. Cinderella's signature blue ball gown, the glass slippers, the bubbly magical fairy godmother, and the evil stepmother who locks up Cinderella in her room to prevent her from trying on the glass slipper. They are all recreated in this new spin on the old tale, but did it manage to breathe new life into the story that everyone knows so well?
Disney had already previously tried to retell some of their classic cartoons with live action feature films. Tim Burton added his signature style to Alice in Wonderland, set years after young Alice's trip down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass. With Maleficent, the story of Sleeping Beauty is told from the point of view of the evil fairy who casts a vengeful curse on baby Aurora, with an in-trend feminist twist.
Both movies were met with mixed reviews on opposite ends of the spectrum. It seems that Cinderella is no different.
With the early announcement that Cate Blanchett was signed on to play the role of Lady Tremaine, the stepmother, we were quite excited to see perhaps a new version of Cinderella from her point of view.
However, this live action movie tells the Cinderella tale pretty straightforward. As Richard Corliss of Time described it, the movie is "less a remake of the 1950 movie than a sensible correction."
Gone are the singing mice, although Cinderella does speak to them from time to time. No big song and dance numbers either, but it would have been fun to see Helena Bonham Carter sing "Bibbity-Bobbity-Boo" as the fairy godmother.
Instead, the Cinderella of 2015 has gorgeous costumes designed by Academy Award winner Sandy Powell and a story brought to life by director Kenneth Branagh, who broke from the trend of giving the story a gritty feel or twists in the narrative point of view, and gave us a Cinderella that gets her prince and lives happily ever after just like in Cendrillon.
Anthony Lane of The New Yorker saw the merit of Branagh's treatment of Chris Weitz's screenplay.
"At a time when that deconstructive urge is the norm, and in an area of fiction - the fairy tale - that has been trampled by critical theory, Branagh has delivered a construction project so solid, so naive, and so rigorously stripped of irony that it borders on the heroic," Lane wrote.
Perhaps because of this decision to keep to the foundations of Cinderella, which makes it such a timeless fairytale, the movie is undeniably gorgeous but lacking anything new for women and young girls to take home in this modern age.
As Nicolas Barber for the BBC noted: "The film's actual message is that you should keep smiling and put up with whatever abuse you're handed, because eventually a ditzy fairy and a hunky prince will sort everything out."
An old-fashioned tale with hardly anything to offer in terms of girl power.
Nevertheless, Blanchett as Lady T is the saving grace of the film. Her portrayal of the evil stepmother is the perfect contrast to the porcelain perfect goody-two-shoes that is Lily James' Cinderella.
Although the movie does not delve too much into her backstory, Blanchett is still able to give her villainess more dimension, even making us feel for her as a mother. She recognizes all the grace and charm that Cinderella has - and spites her for it because they are characteristics that her own nitwit daughters lack.
