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.
0 kommentar(er)
