Disney’s telling of the Perrault story is short, tidy and often lovely, and its villain is one of the studio’s best. Its heroine and her prince are the thinnest things in it, and the mice have to carry the middle third.
Walt Disney’s Cinderella takes the Charles Perrault story and does almost nothing clever with it. The girl is good, the stepmother is bad, the shoe fits. What the three directors, Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske and Wilfred Jackson, add is a small cast of animals, a cat with real menace, and a running time of 74 minutes in which not a great deal is wasted. It is a good film, and it is good mostly at the edges, where the people are not.
The centre is the trouble, and it was the trouble in 1950 too. Cinderella, voiced by Ilene Woods, is patient, tidy and pleasant, sings beautifully, and wants almost nothing except a night off. Woods gives her a low, sensible warmth that is more likeable than the drawing, which is a doll with good posture. The Prince barely speaks. Mike Douglas supplies his singing voice for one duet, and that is the whole of his personality. When the film asks us to care whether these two find each other, we found we were checking on the mice instead.
The mice, happily, are excellent. Jaq is thin and quick and in charge; Gus is round, new, and cannot carry more than two grains of corn without dropping one. Jimmy MacDonald voices both in a speeded-up chatter you have to lean into, and the animators give them a whole physical comedy of climbing, hauling and hiding. Their enemy is Lucifer the cat, who is drawn with a face that can smile, and who is the first Disney animal we can remember who plans. Every scene with the cat and the mice has a shape: a goal, an obstacle, a near miss. It is the tightest storytelling in the film.
Then there is Lady Tremaine. Eleanor Audley plays her with a voice that never rises, and the design gives her a long grey face and eyes that catch the light like a cat’s. She never lays a hand on Cinderella. She simply finds one more task, or turns a small permission into a small trap, and Audley makes every “of course” sound like a door closing. The stepsisters, Drizella (Rhoda Williams) and Anastasia (Lucille Bliss), are drawn as grotesques and voiced to match, all elbows and shrieking, and their music lesson is the funniest scene in the film that does not involve a mouse.
We should own one reaction. There is a scene, roughly halfway, involving a dress and the stepsisters, which we will not describe, and which upset us far more than we expected a film with a U certificate to manage. It works because the film has spent its first half showing how long and how many small hands it took to make the thing, so that when it is undone in seconds we felt the cost. That is the storytellers’ patience paying off, and the story is credited to eight of them, among them Bill Peet, Ken Anderson and Ted Sears.
Verna Felton’s Fairy Godmother arrives late, bustling and forgetful, with a wand she cannot find, and the transformation she sets off is the loveliest stretch of animation here. The dress builds itself out of light. Earlier, Cinderella sings to her reflection in a row of soap bubbles, each carrying a slightly different copy of her, and it is the kind of small visual idea the film could have used more of. The score by Oliver Wallace and Paul Smith is handsome and stays out of the way; the songs are simple and stick, “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” most of all. Donald Halliday cuts it tight, and scenes end when they have finished.
Against the studio’s own standard it sits below Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Pinocchio (1940), which had grander frights and stranger imaginations. It is also steadier than either at the level of the individual scene, and it never sags. The colour is bright and occasionally too sweet. The King and the Grand Duke, both voiced by Luis van Rooten, are a good double act of bluster and nerves.
Show it to a child and watch the child watch the cat. Watch it yourself for Audley, whose stepmother has not dated a day, and admit that you cannot remember the Prince’s face by the time the credits end. Nobody can.
