Why are children's fairy tales so potent that they are retold over and over, and major studios can shore up their balance sheets by remaking works from decades earlier?
CINDERELLA
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Lily James, Richard Madden, Helena Bonham Carter, Sophie McShera, Holliday Grainger, Ben Chaplin, Nonso Anozic, Stellan Skarsgard, Derek Jacobi, Hayley Atwell, Rob Brydon
Rating: (G)
Three stars (out of five)
Well the oral tradition of fairy tales gives you a distilled skeleton of a story that is open to embellishment or can be pared down, depending on the requirements of each passing generation.
Disney, with its animations, placed a cultural headlock on our sense of what these stories should be.
But now that the studio has decided to do live-action versions it is finding that getting the audience to forget the animated version is not so easy. Cinderella (Rialto and Reading cinemas) is getting stick for essentially not being a frame-by-frame re-creation.
Normally I would be shrugging my shoulders over this expectation except that there are so many nods and winks to the animated original, you have to wonder why they bothered retelling the story of the girl with the glass slippers.
Well it might have something to do with all the little girls out there begging their parents to take them to see a pretty blonde with a small waist and a bouffy blue dress ride in a glass carriage and dance the night away with a handsome prince.
What parent could say no, especially when word gets out that there is a short before the main feature with all the characters from Frozen singing their animated lungs out.
- Christine Powley
