 Starring: Ilene Woods, Eleanor Audley, Verna Felton, Rhoda Williams
Director: Clyde Geronomi
Year Of Release: 1950
Plot: After the death of her father, Cinderella’s evil stepmother and ugly stepsisters put her to work as a servant. With only the mice for company, she’s used to being badly treated. However when a message comes from the palace that all women in the land are invited to a ball, she suddenly has hope, which her step-family is keen to dash. If only she had a fairy godmother who could use magic to get her to the ball. |
Cinderella was an immensely important movie for Disney. The studio hadn’t had a full-on hit since Snow White and had particularly struggled during the war. Many believe that if the film hadn’t succeeded, it might have been the end of the studio, or at the very least the last Disney animated movie. Luckily for Walt it was a huge hit, not only at the cinema but also in merchandising and song rights. It secured the future of the studio and made enough money that it laid the foundations for Walt to be able to build Disneyland and get into live action filmmaking.
It’s also, more than any other movie, where the idea of the classic Disney Princess comes from. Of course, back then they didn’t have the aggressively marketed Disney Princess line, which tries to get every little girl to buy expensive toys, DVDs and fancy dress clothes, but it was very much designed to appeal to the fantasy of becoming a princess and escaping an ordinary life.
When I first heard arguments about the Disney Princesses, saying they were bad role models for young girls and presented a prehistoric view of what a woman should be, it seemed facile to me. After all, the likes of Cinderella are just fantasies, aren’t they? Sweet little wish-fulfilment stories that no one would ever take seriously? However after rewatching Cinderella, I’m really starting to have my doubts.
If you actually look at the film, it really does present a bad view of a woman’s role in the world (to modern eyes at least). The problem is in the difference between the message of animated movies in the old days and today. Modern family flicks are nearly all about learning to be true to yourself. They all feature a character who’s insecure and has to go on a journey to discover that it’s alright to be themselves, because they’re great but they just don’t realise it. However in old Disney, it's all about becoming someone else.
The idea of transformation fascinated Walt Disney, and it permeated through many of his films, whether it’s Pinocchio wanting to be a real boy or Cinderella becoming a princess. That would be fine if they were all like Pinocchio, where he actually has to fight and learn to achieve his dream, but in Cinderella – and with most female characters in old Disney movies – it all just magically comes out of nowhere. She doesn’t need to learn or do anything, as what more could a woman want than to meet a prince and fall in love, and the only way to do that is to be passive and pretty?
It really is presented in a reductive way. The prince is barely in the story. Despite the fact he’s always referred to as Prince Charming, he’s never actually named in the film. He barely speaks and has no personality (in fact until Cinderella turns up, it almost seems like the prince is gay and his father is so deep in denial that he sets up the ball out of desperation). His only quality is that he’s a Prince, and therefore the ultimate in what a woman wants. For all we know he could be an asshole who likes to beat women for fun, but that doesn’t matter because he’s young and royal.
Cinderella is meek, mild and subservient, and it’s this that’s presented as what makes her the hero of the story (part of her appeal to the Prince is that she’s so passive that she doesn’t even ask who he is). If you watch the film, Cinderella actually does very little except housework. She’s almost like a passive observer of her own story, who’s merely effected by other people, whether it’s her step-family stopping her going to the ball, or the fairy godmother who randomly appears out of nowhere and puts things back on track. It’s the idea of a woman whose role in life is to always do as she's told, and to wait for a man – and to literally just wait – as the perfect woman doesn’t go out and find her own happiness (because a forceful personality and attitude would make her less attractive). She just waits for happiness to magically turn up in the shape of a man.
It’s a hideous view of womanhood. In fact it’s very noticeable that the modern Disney Princesses are deliberately made far more active and involved in their own stories, and the likes of Enchanted have played with the old-fashioned fairy-tale princess stereotype, because they do seem to realise there’s something a bit fishy about the likes of Cinderella. However from the old days you have Snow White, whose main characteristics are once again being meek, mild and subservient, as well as dumb enough to swallow a poison apple, so that she literally doesn’t have to do anything to find true love but wait in a glass coffin until a necrophiliac prince decides he needs a snog.
Or there’s Sleeping Beauty, a character whose entire job in the film is to prick her finger on a spinning wheel – she pretty much does nothing else – so she can once more wait for her prince to come and save the day. In fact I’m not entirely sure what it was about the writers of fairy tales that they seemed to think the best way to find love was to fall into a coma. It’s a man’s fantasy of the woman as pure object, but in movies like Cinderella it’s presented as what the woman should want too.
It’s not just the passiveness of Cinderella that’s rather jarring either. It’s also attitudes that pervade the film, which might have been common at the time but aren’t exactly great to be telling to young kids now, such as that it’s women’s work to sew and mend things, and that the next best thing in life to marrying a prince is having a frilly dress. It’s also noticeable that the problem between Cinderella and her step-family isn’t that the future princess’ life is all about being forced to do housework 24/7, it’s that her stepmother and sisters aren’t doing any, and this has made them spoiled and selfish.
I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t watch these films, as they are very entertaining and most children aren’t going to suddenly think women are second class citizens from watching Cinderella, but I am starting to think that the whole idea of selling Disney Princesses to kids as childhood role models isn’t such a good plan. While the modern additions, such as Ariel and Jasmine, are more active characters involved in their own lives, the whole thing is still based on pretty dresses and waiting for your prince to come. Every girl wants to be a princess, and essentially there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’d be nice if there was more emphasis on the idea that if you want to be a princess – or anything else in life – you’ve got to go out and make it happen, rather than just being fey and sweet and utterly passive.
It’s also noticeable that in other areas Disney has almost fallen over itself to explain away old-fashioned attitudes in its films, particularly in regards to race. The company has apologised for the crows in Dumbo, and Song Of The South has proved so contentious that it hasn’t been available for decades. However there’s been virtually nothing that talked about the attitudes to women in early Disney movies. To be fair they did just reflect the ideas of a time before sexual equality, where society viewed women as the passive half of humanity, whose job was to be pretty and sweet and able to keep a good home, with their entire happiness supposed to stem from finding and then pleasing a man.
Of course nowadays that attitude seems positively medieval, but it’s presented to children through films like Cinderella with absolutely no comment. I don’t think the Disney Princesses are evil, but I do have to say Cinderella is a rubbish role model. In fact she’s a drip who needs to learn to actually do something, rather than waiting for the impossible to magically happen. Perhaps in the past, women did just hang around being as meek and subservient as possible (although I reckon that even back then it was more a man’s idealised view of women than the reality), but nowadays it just seems like a man’s fantasy presented as what women should want.
TIM ISAAC
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