Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

This kicked off Disney’s endeavor to turn all their animated films into live-action abominations that completely miss the point of the original stories. Okay so Cinderella was pretty good and gave us a lot of hope for the future live-action treatments which might have added to the disappointment we gradually experienced as each successive live action adaptation grew more and more cringy. I’m looking at you Aladdin! Don’t make me come over there!

But this one was almost beat for beat a retelling of the original story. Anything fleshed out more strongly exemplified the original character arcs and story points or added depth to (let’s face it) a somewhat shallow and simplistic plot. Yes, we want a fairy tale but we don’t really want stupid protagonists who fall in love at first sight and immediately get married. That’s the lesson Disney’s Frozen was just trying to teach us.

My youngest daughter ate this movie up. She just loved it from start to finish and this is a girl who has 0 tolerance of any live-action anything, even real life most of the time. If this can captivate a seven year old with her mindset despite most of this being a story of abuse and neglect, I’m impressed.

There was one tiny aspect I would have liked to have seen and in explaining I’ll give you the luxury of a mild spoiler alert:

SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!

Despite all the cruelty from Lady Tremaine, Cinderella was kind and diligent no matter what. Even still, I saw it as no breach of her character when Cinderella very factually told Lady Tremaine how it was as she dropped her like a bad habit to go live in the palace with the prince. However…

I would have liked to see Cinderella extend that unwavering kindness and humility even while all the chips were on her side and the right to say “ha-ha I win! Sucks to be you!” is hers. I would like to see Cinderella extend an invitation to Lady Tremaine and her daughters to join them to live in the palace. The result would be one of two things. Either Lady Tremaine would be grateful and teach her daughters some humility as well, or more likely, we would see that Lady Tremaine’s true downfall was her own pride and jealousy as she refuses such a mercy. Perhaps that’s a bit too on the nose and frankly we can see where Tremaine’s nastiness gets her anyway. I just like the idea of Cinderella being utterly blameless and supreme in her kindness. Perhaps that would be too far into the realm of fairytale for our downtrodden modern world to accept but it’s something I want to strive for in the real world nevertheless and I am always dismayed when I fail at it.