Cinderella (film)
From The Unofficial DisneyWiki
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Cinderella is the twelfth animated feature in the Disney animated features canon. It was released to theaters on February 15, 1950 by Walt Disney Pictures, RKO Radio Pictures and Buena Vista Distribution. The film tells the story, adapted from the fairy tale by Charles Perrault, of a young girl who, with the help of her Fairy Godmother, escapes life as servant to her abusive stepmother and stepsisters to marry Prince Charming. Much of the story is told from the perspective of the mice who befriend Cinderella and who are chased by the malevolent house cat, Lucifer.
The film was produced by Walt Disney and directed by Clyde Geronomi, Hamilton Luske and Wilfred Jackson. The songs were by Mack David, Jerry Livingston, and Al Hoffman, and included A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes (the opening and closing song of the film), Sing Sweet Nightingale, Cinderella and Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, which became the most successful song in the film, becoming a hit single four times, with notable versions by Perry Como and the Fontane Sisters.
Disney's last financial success had been Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi had not succeeded at the box office (the less expensive Dumbo was the only one of these films to make enough money to cover its cost), in part because of the events of World War II. Disney was forced to release inexpensive package films such as The Three Caballeros and Fun and Fancy Free, and produced propaganda for the war effort in order for the studio to survive the 1940s. Roy Disney told his brother Walt that the two of them could retire comfortably, and that this might be the desirable option, but Disney instead began production on Cinderella, his first full-length feature in eight years, and the first success for the studio since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (even eclipsing Snow White's success). For this reason, it is often considered by critics to be the film that saved Disney Animation.
In order to save money, the entire film (save for the cartoon-like sequences with the mice and Lucifer, animated by Ward Kimball) was shot in live-action. As a result, Cinderella's human characters move in a more realistic way than in previous Disney films. Frank Thomas (who animated the stepmother) commented that Cinderella was the most planned-out film ever made at the studio. Critics attribute the film's success to the story's tension (carried by the film's villain/victim relationship), Disney's return to the classic fairy tale (which had not occurred since the studio's last success, Snow White, but was continued by a financial failure in Sleeping Beauty), and the added emphasis on surface glamour (owing to the art of inspirational sketch artist Mary Blair).
On October 4, 2005, Cinderella was released on Disney DVD and Blu-ray Disc as the sixth installment of Disney's Platinum Edition series. It sold 2.5 million copies in its first week, earning over $64 million in sales.
[edit] List of Main Characters
[edit] Trivia
- Future talk show host Mike Douglas was the singing voice of the unnamed Prince in this film.
- The sequence in which Cinderella's rags turn into a magnificent ball gown, animated by Marc Davis, was Walt Disney's favourite piece of animation ever to come out of the studio.
- In the CBS television special AFI’s 10 Top 10, the movie was the ninth best animated feature of all time.
[edit] External links
- Cinderella at the Internet Movie Database
- Cinderella at the Big Cartoon DataBase
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