The Fairy Tale Project | Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998)

Who's in it?: Drew Barrymore (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Wedding Singer, Charlie's Angels, Whip It), Anjelica Huston (Lonesome Dove, The Addams Family, John Wick: Chapter 3), Dougray Scott (Mission: Impossible II, but not X-Men), Patrick Godfrey (A Room with a View), Melanie Lynskey (Over the Garden Wall, Castle Rock), Timothy West (I know him from an adaptation of Bleak House, but he also played the same character as Patrick Godfrey in a TV version of A Room with a View), Jeroen Krabbé (The Living Daylights, The Fugitive), and Toby Jones (Captain America: The First Avenger, The Hunger Games).

What's it about?: The "real" events that inspired the Cinderella legend.

How is it?: First of all, I love Drew Barrymore. I'm a big fan. And Angelica Huston is amazing as the stepmother who had the potential to become a good person if only she'd spent more time with Cinderella (called Danielle here) and her father (Krabbé). Huston's character clearly cares about her new husband, but loses him too quickly and the blended family never blends.

The entire cast is great and I love the weird addition of Leonardo da Vinci (Godfrey) to the story as a sort of romantic adviser to the prince (Scott). I mean, I disagree entirely with da Vinci's assertion that there is only one potential soul mate for each person, but he's such a charming, well-intentioned character and his ultimate advice is exactly what we want the prince to hear. And he makes boat shoes for walking on water.

I also like that Danielle's sisters aren't a homogeneous unit, but have their own personalities and that their mother has a favorite between them. It's not Lynskey's character and the result is that she gets a nice arc that most Cinderella stepsisters don't.

The deconstructive take is a fun experiment that succeeds. There's no fairy godmother, but Danielle has plenty of support to become her own fairy helper (including wings) and get herself to the ball. And it's cool that the whole thing is told in flashback by a descendant of Danielle to the Brothers Grimm, making this sort of an unofficial sequel to Terry Gilliam's movie about them.

The only think I don't like is that Ever After uses a standard romantic comedy plot to structure Danielle and the Prince's relationship around. It does this very well, but it's still annoying that their relationship is built on a lie she tells and that his discovering it leads to a tragic separation, followed by a dramatic apology and reunion. Again, the movie is really effective at pulling that off, but the predictability of it bruises an otherwise great adaptation.

Rating: Four out of five actually sooty Cinderellas.

The Fairy Tale Project | The Wonderful World of Disney: "Cinderella" (1997)

Who's in it?: Brandy Norwood (I Still Know What You Did Last Summer), Whitney Houston (The Bodyguard, The Preacher's Wife), Paolo Montalban (Mortal Kombat: Conquest), Bernadette Peters (The Jerk, Annie, Faerie Tale Theatre), Jason Alexander (Seinfeld, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Orville), Whoopi Goldberg (The Color Purple, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Star Trek: The Next Generation), and Victor Garber (Alias, Justice, Eli Stone, The Orville).

What's it about?: An updated version of the Rogers and Hammerstein televised musical.

How is it?: The Disney version makes some huge improvements over the original 1957 broadcast. First, it racially diversifies the cast in cool ways. It has King Victor Garber married to Queen Whoopi Goldberg in order to beget Prince Paolo Montalban and it just doesn't care how that works out genetically. It's a fairy tale. Likewise, stepmother Bernadette Peters' biological daughters are of different races. There are ways to explain that logically if you want to, but the story accepts it as normal. I like that a lot.

The production also fixes some of my issues with the way Cinderella herself was presented in the '57 version. Julie Andrews' character was especially powerless and I hated her song about how her only refuge is to retreat into "my own little corner in my own little chair." Turns out, Andrews and director Ralph Nelson affected my opinion about that more than I realized by having Cinderella sing the song mostly from her little chair. She felt very small and defeated. Brandy on the other hand (under the direction of Robert Iscove) is energetic and animated. She sings about being trapped, but she's bouncing all over the kitchen as she does it. She's not exactly subverting the lyrics, but she does demonstrate that she hasn't entirely given in yet, unlike Andrews.

Disney's version similarly overhauls the scene where Cinderella and her fairy godmother sing about the usefulness of wishing. In '57, Cinderella comes up with the outlandish ideas of hoping that a pumpkin turns into a carriage, etc., and then defends her dream to her apparently skeptical godmother. In '97, the godmother (Houston) plants the idea in Cinderella's head and nudges her towards the solutions she's looking for. The godmother is very much trying to get Cinderella to make decisions and take actions by herself.

That's similar to how Shelley Duvall's version of the story went, too. Houston's character insists that Cinderella is perfectly capable of winning the Prince over and escaping her horrible home life by herself (and those two goals aren't even necessarily connected); the godmother just gives her a supportive push.

As a production, the '97 version is top notch. The sets are great, the choreography around the songs is dynamic, and the whole cast is colorful and fun. I haven't mentioned Jason Alexander's role yet, but he's the royal... I don't know, steward? Party planner? Sidekick? He was a Grand Duke in the classic animated version. The guy in charge of planning the ball and eventually tracking down the owner of the glass slipper with the prince. Alexander is great as the stuffy, but sarcastic servant who deftly manages all the royal whims and protects the prince from the stepmother and her daughters at the ball.

Rating: Four out of five Bernadette Frickin' Peters

The Fairy Tale Project | Faerie Tale Theatre (1982)

In the '80s, Shelley Duvall produced an awesome series of fairy tale adaptations for Showtime. It was shot on video and the sets weren't always lavish, so the look doesn't necessarily hold up as top tier, but Faerie Tale Theatre had top talent working on it, in front of the camera as well as behind.

The sets were often designed to imitate the work of famous illustrators, so "The Frog Prince" looks like Maxfield Parrish's work, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" is inspired by Norman Rockwell, "Hansel and Gretel" has an Arthur Rackham vibe, and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" is based on NC Wyeth. I understand that the "Beauty and the Beast" episode was designed to mimic Jean Cocteau's excellent 1946 adaptation of the tale.

Duvall also got great directors to work on the episodes. Eric Idle directed "The Frog Prince," Roger Vadim did "Beauty and the Beast," Nicholas Meyer did "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," Tim Burton did "Aladdin," and Francis Ford Coppola did "Rip Van Winkle."

And the actors are a Who's Who of '80s (and beyond) celebrities like Robin Williams, Teri Garr, Hervé Villechaize, Jeff Bridges, Mick Jagger, Mako, Edward James Olmos, Anjelica Huston, Mary Steenburgen, Malcolm McDowell, Ricky Schroder, Joan Collins, John Lithgow, Pee Wee Herman, Carrie Fisher, Susan Sarandon, Christopher Lee, Jeff Goldblum... As impressive as that list is, it's maybe a third of the top-name people who appeared in these stories.

I watched three episodes for this project and I bet you can guess which ones they were.

Elizabeth McGovern (She's Having a Baby, Downton Abbey) plays Snow White and she's certainly beautiful, but her performance isn't as inspired as the true stars of the show: Vanessa Redgrave (The first Mission: Impossible movie) as the Evil Queen and Vincent Price (oh, you know) as her Magic Mirror. Price is charming and droll as he rolls his eyes at the Queen's vanity, but Redgrave is next-level amazing with the way she prances and primps in front of the mirror. I'm pretty sure Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs learned everything he knows about preening from Redgrave's Queen. She's marvelous and tragic as a woman who deep down understands that Snow White has replaced her, but is fighting it with every ounce of will that she has.

Other cast members in this one are Tony Cox (Spaceballs, Bad Santa) as one of the dwarfs, and Rex Smith as the Prince. Smith's coolest other role has to be Daredevil in the Trial of the Incredible Hulk TV movie from 1989, but he also appeared opposite Linda Ronstadt in the '83 movie adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance. He puts those singing skills to good use in Faerie Tale Theatre.

"Cinderella" has Jennifer Beals (Flashdance, The Bride) in the title role, Jean Stapleton (All in the Family) as her fairy godmother, and Matthew Broderick (Ferris Bueller's Day Off) as the Prince. A highlight of this one is how much time it spends building a relationship between Cinderella and the Prince. It shows a lot of the ball and Beals and Broderick do a nice job convincing me that they're falling in love. That's especially good since the theme of the FTT version is that Cinderella is perfectly capable of winning the Prince over by herself. The Fairy Godmother just gets her in the door.

There's also a fun bit between the stepsisters and the prince at the ball, since one of them is played by Edie McClurg. She was also Ed Rooney's secretary in Ferris Bueller the following year, so we get to see Grace hit on Ferris. Another actor worth mentioning is James Noble as the King. If you're familiar with the sitcom Benson, Noble is basically still playing Governor Gatling in this.

"Sleeping Beauty" was easily my favorite of the three episodes, mostly because it has Bernadette Peters as the princess and Christopher Reeve as the prince. It also keeps Perrault's Don't Rush Into Love as a theme and presents it in a really fun way. Most of the story is told in flashback by a woodsman to the prince and his squire (Ron Rifkin from Alias), but we also get flashbacks to the prince's past. We see both the prince and the princess trying to find potential spouses, but failing because their parents throw them at awful people, who are also hilariously played by Peters and Reeve. Other actors in this one include Rene Auberjonois (Benson, Deep Space Nine) and Sally Kellerman (MASH, Back to School) as Peters' parents, Beverly D'Angelo (National Lampoon's Vacation) as the evil fairy who curses the princess, and Carol Kane (The Muppet Movie, Taxi) as the good fairy who modifies the curse.

The Fairy Tale Project | Fractured Fairy Tales (1959)

In the '50s, the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show had a segment called Fractured Fairy Tales, which were humorous adaptations of the classic stories. I wasn't around at the time, but Rocky and Bullwinkle were still in heavy syndication when I was a kid. And Fractured Fairy Tales was always one of my favorite parts of any episode.

I didn't want to watch all of them for this project, but I thought I might watch at least the three stories that I've read up to this point. I was surprised to find the silly, little spoofs actually insightful.

Like in the Grimm Brothers' version, "Snow White" focuses on the Queen and her obsession with holding onto the value her culture assigns her as a woman. When her magic (coin-operated) mirror sends her to the dwarfs' house to find Snow White, the princess isn't there, but the dwarfs have just opened a gym that they're happy to sell the Queen a lifetime membership to. When that doesn't return her to Fairest In The Land status, she goes back to the dwarfs again. This happens several times. Snow White is never there and the dwarfs have some new scheme to help the Queen find her value: dance lessons, health food, charm school. At the end it's revealed that the whole thing is a scam with one of the dwarfs working inside the mirror to drum up business and capitalize on the Queen's insecurities.

FFT's "Cinderella" is about appearances and materialism. Cinderella is actually pretty lazy and just wants an easy way to get the lifestyle she craves. (Her sisters are barely in it, but they're hardworking scullery maids, so Cinderella is solely responsible for her attitude.) The fairy godmother shows up to grant Cinderella her wishes, but there's a catch. Cinderella has to sell a huge supply of kitchen utensils by midnight or she'll lose her fabulous prizes. Meanwhile, the prince is going bankrupt and has to pay off his creditors by midnight or he'll lose the castle. When Cinderella shows up to sell the prince some pots and pans, he's fooled by her appearance and thinks she's rich. So while she's trying to get him to buy utensils, he's trying to get her to marry him, both getting increasingly desperate as 12:00 approaches. Both Perrault and the Grimm's versions are about more than marrying a rich prince, but Cinderella certainly uses appearances to obtain her escape from her stepfamily. There's a lot more to her than just looks, but the other characters in the story don't see that. FFT's commentary on appearances is a valid focus.

Finally, "Sleeping Beauty" also gets a materialistic makeover. It rushes through the early part of the story to get to the prince's arrival. We're told that he's supposed to kiss Sleeping Beauty (borrowed from Disney, possibly, since this episode didn't air until the early '60s), but the prince decides at the last moment that an awakened princess is after all just a princes. A sleeping princess is a novelty, so he turns the castle into a tourist attraction. That's darkly fascinating when I consider that the Grimms' version of the story is about pausing the princess' maturation process. In FFT, the prince keeps it paused even longer than it needs to be, simply for financial gain. And it occurs to me that modern Disney sort of does the same thing with the young teenage girls that it turns into stars.

The Fairy Tale Project | Cinderella (1957)

Who's in it?: Julie Andrews (Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music), Ilka Chase (the original Ocean's 11), Kaye Ballard (The Hollywood Squares, Match Game), Alice Ghostley (Bewitched, Grease), and Jon Cypher (The Food of the Gods, Masters of the Universe)

What's it about?: Rodgers and Hammerstein adapt the fairy tale for live television.

How is it?: It gets off to a weak start, but picks up as it goes. The opening number has the whole kingdom singing "The Prince Is Giving a Ball," a silly, meaningless, little song that sounds more like Gilbert and Sullivan than Rodgers and Hammerstein. And then there's the characterization of Cinderella herself, who's played by Julie Andrews, but it's R&H who are the problem.

I'm prepared for and even looking forward to adaptations where Cinderella's only "action" is her kindness. There's power in being good to your enemies, but this Cinderella doesn't even have that. Her signature song is "In My Own Little Corner" where she sings about how her only refuge is to retreat into her imagination:

I’m as mild and as meek as a mouse
When I hear a command I obey
But I know of a spot in my house
Where no one can stand in my way

In my own little corner
In my own little chair
I can be whatever I want to be

I cut Disney's version slack in spite of "A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes," because it's undercut by the rest of the film where Cinderella does take as much subtle action as her situation allows. Rogers and Hammerstein's character is only able to wish and dream and hope.

Her fairy godmother (charmingly played by Edie Adams, who also played Sid Caesar's wife in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World) is an actual godmother who's keeping her fairy background secret. So she has a previous relationship with Cinderella and comes over quite a bit. Which means that Cinderella hasn't suddenly won the attention of the fairy realm or finally earned something for herself. The godmother is super pleasant, but she comes across as just sort of being on the job (though looking after Cinderella seems to be a job she enjoys).

It's irksome when she and Cinderella share the song "Impossible: It's Possible" about the unfeasibility of Cinderella's wishes. In this version, it's Cinderella who spots the pumpkin and decides it would be really nifty if it changed into a carriage with some mice-horses to pull it. It's a crazy, dumb fantasy, yet Cinderella believes that if she can just hope hard enough, that maybe it'll come true. Her godmother tries to discourage her, so the song goes:

Such fol-der-ol and fid-dle-dy dee of course, is impossible!
But the world is full of zanies and fools
Who don't believe in sensible rules
And won't believe what sensible people say.
And because these daft and dewey-eyed dopes keep building up impossible hopes,
Impossible things are happening every day.

Setting aside that "fol-der-ol and fid-dle-dy dee" feels very ripped off from "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo," I don't like the comparison between actual magic and the everyday miracle of working to achieve something against enormous odds. Wishing that a pumpkin would turn into a carriage is not the same thing as overcoming adversity in whatever small way you can. And it makes Cinderella seem naive and rather useless when she confuses the two.

Even so, these opening scenes aren't all frustrating. Cinderella's stepmother (Ilka Chase) and stepsisters (Kaye Ballard and Alice Ghostley) are really funny. Especially the sisters. Ballard was a staple on '70s game shows Hollywood Squares and Match Game, so she's been making me laugh pretty much my whole life. And I'm fond of Ghostely from her role as the Stephens' housekeeper / nanny Esmerelda on Bewitched. Ballard's character is named Portia after the character from "The Merchant of Venice" and her mother insists that she be as intelligent as her namesake. She hilariously is not and Ballard gives her a great, hee-hawing, snorting laugh to underline it. Likewise, Ghostely's character is a gloomy woman named Joy. I enjoyed them both a lot.

And then, once we get to the ball, the rest of the play catches up and takes a lovely turn. I didn't expect much out of Cinderella and the Prince's (Cypher) romance, but they share a song called "Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?" that's engagingly profound. The Prince wisely doubts the love-at-first-sight emotions he's experiencing and tries to make some sense of them. Cinderella understands and reciprocates. They don't come to any easy answers, but through the song they ask each other, "Do I love you because you're beautiful or are you beautiful because I love you?" That's surprisingly insightful and touching and it got me on board with them as a couple. Not in a Happily Ever After sense, but I decided that they were at least asking the right questions to make their romance work.

Another cool song takes place the morning after the ball when the stepsisters debrief with Cinderella about their evening. The song is called "A Lovely Night." Cinderella, still pretending not to have been at the ball, describes what she imagines it would've been like to attend. The sisters pretend that Cinderella's fantasy is exactly what they experienced, even though they each only got a minute or two with the Prince and generally had a frustrating time. So Cinderella's singing about her evening and pretending it didn't happen, while the sisters are singing about it and pretending it did. I love the irony in that.

And of course Julie Andrews is amazing. The rest of the cast is great too. The Prince's parents get their own scenes, revealing that the ball is all the Queen's idea because she's worried about her son and feels he may be lonely. The King and Prince aren't that excited about the ball, but are going through with it to please the Queen. Despite their royalty, they feel like a real family that truly cares about each other.

Rating: 3 out of 5 funny stepsisters.

The Fairy Tale Project | Cinderella (1950)

Who's in it?: Some cartoon people; a bunch of mice.

What's it about?: An animated, musical adaptation of Charles Perrault's version of "Cinderella."

How is it?: I love the mice and the stepmother is deliciously wicked, but I've often had trouble connecting with Cinderella herself and the apparent message of the film (offered in the closing lines of its signature song): "If you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true." That's ludicrous.

Having recently re-read Charles Perrault's fairy tale though, I think the song "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" undermines the actual message of the movie, which is borrowed from Perrault and legitimately profound. It's not mere faith or wishing that makes Cinderella's dreams come true; it's the kindness that she insists on putting into the world, whether it's to helpless animals or her foul, mean-spirited, persecuting step-family. She's lovely to them all.

But even though it takes that moral and other elements from Perrault, Disney's Cinderella does borrow from the Brothers Grimm in some interesting ways. Her kindness to animals leads to their helping her out in all sorts of ways, including pitching in with her chores, which is something that Cinderella's birds do in Grimm. The Disney animals also provide a dress for Cinderella to wear to the ball; another Grimm Brothers reference, though it ultimately doesn't last (in a truly harrowing, heartbreaking scene) and Perrault's fairy godmother has to step in.

It's the involvement of the fairy godmother and the prince in Cinderella's salvation that gives her a reputation for being helpless. But she deserves better than that. It's her kindness not only to animals, but especially to her enemies, that earns her the attention of the fairy realm and her adoption by a (god)mother who actually does care for her. It's a subtle kind of agency, but Cinderella is more active in her own salvation than she gets credit for. The prince doesn't rescue her either; he's just the prize that she gets rescued to.

Rating: Four out of five pumpkin carriages.

The Fairy Tale Project | "Cinderella" by The Brothers Grimm

Illustration by Arthur Rackham

While the Grimms weren't averse to modifying old folk tales to suit the tastes of their contemporary audience, they also weren't intentionally using those stories to train children, unlike Charles Perrault. So where Perrault's Cinderella is a gracious and inspirationally kind character, the Grimms' version has a more combative relationship with her persecutors.

Perrault's stepsisters are vain and selfish, but they aren't particularly vicious toward Cinderella. They're uncaring without going out of their way to be mean. That's not the case in the Grimm version, where the stepmother especially lives to make Cinderella's life harder. She purposely dumps beans in the fireplace ashes, for instance, and makes Cinderella pick them out. When Cinderella begs to go to the ball, the stepmother sets impossible tasks as conditions for her permission, then reneges when Cinderella completes them. Because of this, we're allowed to feel okay about the violent end that the stepsisters come to in Grimm. They chop off parts of their feet to try to fit into the decisive slipper and then at Cinderella's wedding, birds peck out their eyes. These are the same birds that have aided Cinderella through the whole story, so at worst, she's complicit in the maiming. At best, she doesn't exhibit the forgiveness that Perrault's heroine does.

The birds are important to the Grimms' story and they're something that Cinderella herself seems to control on some level. There's no fairy godmother in Grimm; that's all Perrault who wanted to reward Cinderella's kindness by giving her a kind parent to replace her deceased mother. The Grimms sort of do that too, but in a darker way, as you'd imagine. In Grimm, Cinderella's mother is more directly active through her own grave site.

The Grimms' version borrows an element from Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve's 1740 fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast. (I don't know that Barbot de Villeneuve was their direct inspiration, but the similarity is clear.) In Beauty and the Beast, Belle's father takes a trip and asks his daughters what he can bring back for them. Belle's vain sisters demand clothing and jewels, but Belle humbly requests a single rose (and only when her dad insists that she ask for something). Of course, it's how he gets that rose that creates all the trouble for the family.

Cinderella's dad does the same thing and the stepsisters ask for the same clothes and jewelry. Cinderella copies Belle by asking for a plant, but it's a weird one. She wants a branch from the first tree to brush against her father's hat on the trip. He complies and Cinderella takes the branch to the backyard and plants it in her mother's grave where it grows into a tree. White birds nest in the tree and grant Cinderella wishes. They help with the impossible tasks created by the stepmother and they also provide Cinderella with the three, increasingly elaborate dresses she wears on consecutive nights to the prince's ball.

None of this is ever explained, but there's clearly magic at work. The difference between Perrault and Grimm is that the Grimms' Cinderella doesn't wait for another character, the fairy godmother, to come and help her out. This Cinderella is active. And possibly a witch.

Again, there's no explanation given for any of this in the story, but Cinderella is so specific about what she wants and how she goes about getting it. The only thing that makes sense to me is that she's planning it. She asks for the branch, plants it in her mother's grave, and then uses the tree - possibly with the aid of her dead mother's spirit - to rescue herself and take revenge on her stepsisters. Super cool and spooky. I'm betting there's not a film version that takes that approach.

Thanks to the Disney film, which took most of its inspiration from Perrault (even giving him a credit in the opening titles), Cinderella is often accused of being a lame, reactionary character. But that's not at all true in the Grimm version. The point of their tale isn't a moral lesson about gracious perseverance. It's a dark story of revenge inspired by the journey that children take as they grow and are ultimately separated from their parents. Cinderella's childhood was defined by doting, praising parents, but that died with her birth mother. She holds onto the spirit of those times though to help her through the more critical, demanding mother that she has to deal with as a teenager or young adult.

The Fairy Tale Project | "Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper" by Charles Perrault

Illustration by Marie "Rie" Cramer (1887–1977)

Charles Perrault was a 17th Century French author who, like the Grimm Brothers a hundred years later, documented oral fairy tales for a reading audience. Perrault's primary audience was children though and he included morals at the end of each tale so that young people would know exactly the lesson he intended them to learn from the stories.

With "Cinderella," Perrault wanted kids to understand the value of what he called, "grace." He mentions it a couple of time in the moral. He says that physical beauty is cool and all, but "grace is priceless and wins any race." And then later, "Grace is a gift that the fairies confer: Ask anyone at all; it's what we prefer."

What he's talking about is character. Yes, Cinderella is a beautiful woman and when she's dressed in the right clothes she gets all the attention at the ball. But Perrault argues that it's her kindness and humility that actually win the day for her. Her father is still alive in Perrault's version, but he's "completely under the thumb of his wife" and apparently oblivious to the way his daughter is being treated. Cinderella doesn't complain though and she's gracious in the way she treats her mean step-sisters, helping them get ready for the ball. Once she marries the prince, she forgives them and even procures noble husbands for them as well. This version of the story is all about patiently persevering through suffering. It's a valuable moral, though I question the assurance that everything will turn out okay in the end. Real-life circumstances don't always work out the way they do for Cinderella. But I do believe that patience and perseverance are their own rewards.

My fairy tale project is focused on the Brothers Grimm, but I wanted to compare Perrault's Cinderella to theirs, because they pull a whole different message from the tale. In fact, their Cinderella isn't patient or gracious at all.