Cinderella Barbenheimer – The Princess Doll as WMD

There's a reason "Cinder" is in the name.

It seems odd that as a young boy I would have been excited to see Cinderella, except for one thing – I implicitly trusted Disney. The company's obvious intent to become something kids give automatic love to had evidently worked, in large part because my parents also both approved of it, which was the real miracle. My father, like many Boomers, thought Disney was the only good kind of animation, and my mother, who hated large swaths of corporate entertainment fror being too sexist/violent/insincere, somehow still had a sentimental spot in her heart for Walt's world. Nonetheless, princesses and love stories were not things I inherently gravitated towards.

Even today, they're not entirely priorities as story points for me, so I wondered how I would look on the movie now – one I haven't watched beginning-to-end since the time I saw it in the theater as a child. (In my day, only rich parents bought VCRs – and my parents didn't have a TV by choice until after they divorced. In the end that was probably beneficial to me – both the not having one as a young kid, and the having one for consolation after they became depressed, angry divorcees.)

Imagine my surprise, watching Cinderella with no expectations, to find that it's not really about Cinderella at all. Nor the wicked stepmother. When you actually break down the story – or rather, when I do – what emerges is that the house mice are the protagonists, and their struggles against the evil cat Lucifer the primary conflict. Cinderella is their weapon, and in dolling her up to make her beautiful, they're creating an even more potent one against the cat and his defenders. They're turning their living dress-up doll into a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Maybe I just have Barbie and Oppenheimer in the mind anyway, but it really seems to fit the moment.

Bibbidi Bobbidi Boom!

It's also much clearer to me why I loved the movie as a boy. I liked anything with animals, or creatures, or monsters and aliens, and didn't care so much for stories of people doing people stuff. I could not understand why my peers liked westerns, because what was so interesting about people wearing hats? Mice and birds with hats, though? Sold. In the almost incomprehensible babbling of the mice, one sees the roots of today's Minions, and in the cat and mouse antics, a continuation of archetypal slapstick that was already popular at the time in Tom and Jerry cartoons. (The DTV sequels, among their many sins, make the mice completely understandable, something the Minions know better than to ever attempt.)

The choice to add all the animal antics is a no-brainer once one realizes how very basic the story of Cinderella is – Disney previously made it as a silent short. I don't think the intent was ever to make the mice the actual protagonists, but that is what they are. In the words of a pompous former costar of mine, they propel the story forward. The defeat of Lucifer is the true climax, and all the real story jeopardy theirs. Cinderella herself is a means to an end, albeit one who gets very well rewarded.

Another point in adding the animals was to give the animators more creative freedom. Human characters were mostly developed from tracing over live-action footage, and the animators not allowed to create new angles on them besides the ones that were filmed. No such tricks were used on the critters; real mice do not obey directors, as Walt himself must surely have known well.

It's actually pretty hilarious how matter-of-factly the Fairy Godmother is presented, as if everyone expected her and immediately knows who she is, like everyone gets one at a certain stage of life. It is one of many instances of fairytale logic, and the sort of thing Kenneth Branagh's live-action remake had to better establish because there's less forgiveness in both modern movies and live-action generally. We also forgive it in large part because she has the only really memorable song in the movie, and one with almost entirely nonsensical lyrics to boot.

The new 4K from Disney has done an impeccable cleanup job, rendering every image as beautiful as new. Those folks who complain about a lack of grain may not feel it looks enough like a film from yesteryear, as opposed to cels that could have been filmed yesterday. That's an open debate, but I think that for the target audience of kids who watch these things over and over, clarity is probably preferred. I certainly prefer it. Most impressive are the sparkles and stars when the Godmother arrives – they don't even look like hand-drawn animation, but perhaps pristine laser etchings, or even actual stars somehow super-imposed by magic. It's a remarkable effect. Details made necessarily smaller on a home screen also stand out in every detail, like the carriage rushing home in the shadow of the mighty castle – a castle, which, by the way, does not look like any of the Disney park castles that supposedly it inspired.

The cleanup is really the only thing new about the 4K – the Blu-ray disc contains all the archival bonus features from the 2005 DVD, and many from the 2012 Blu-ray, including a Ginnifer Goodwin-hosted segment on Disney World's Fantasyland makeover that year. There was already so much good stuff, from the original short to making-of featurettes, a storyboarded opening, promotional radio appearances by voice actress Ilene Woods and a TV appearance by rotoscope actress Helene Stanley, and much more, that there isn't a lot to add. In what seems to be a new feature aimed at kids, youngsters without the patience for documentaries can have two of the stars of Sydney to the Max yell factoids at them while jumping on a bed. Skippable if you're not a parent.

Aside from the 4K cleaned print, the Blu-ray offers two alternate ways to watch. “Disney Vision” fills in the black framing bars with stylistic wallpapers that change with each scene, and a “Walt's Words” version reduces the movie to picture-in-picture, while the rest of the frame shows production art, stills, scripts, and more, and voice-actors reenact the story sessions between Disney and his team. While they mostly just tell you what you're seeing, one comes away with a sense of how Walt understood just how far to push certain things, when to play for laughs and when not to, what the audience would and wouldn't accept without explanation, and how to make a good villain. It's hard to think of anything else that could be added – the extras here skew more towards older cinephiles, but at least a handful should be fun for children too.

I'm not sure Cinderella tops my personal favorites list, but it's certainly very well constructed, and even the stiffness and blandness of Cinderella and the Prince makes more sense once you understand the mice are the real protagonists. Walt (via his voice-actor on the alternate audio) never admits that, and I'm sure it's a bit of a happy accident, but to my mind, it's plain as day after all this time, and explains why little boy me was so into it. Cinderella herself may have once come off as a bore...but now she's literally the bomb, y'all!