Cinderella is constructed as a fable that’s evergreen-familiar but slightly modernised and much more English in tone than the animated original, writes John Patterson.
I wonder what old dead Walt Disney might have made of Kenneth Branagh’s live-action remake of his classic animated 1950 version of Cinderella. Back then, it was still widely supposed that every girl’s dream was to marry a handsome prince and live happily ever after in a Tyrolean castle attended upon by mice and dressed each morning by bluebirds. These days, I thought, maybe not so much.
But I was wrong, judging by the massed ranks of ecstatically expectant pre-adolescent girls at the multiplex recently. (I confess I felt a lot like John Waters in the 1980s, when he attended – for research purposes, and alone – a Saturday-morning screening of The Care Bears Movie during the notorious McMartin preschool devil-worship and child-abuse trial.) Judging by the rapturous remarks I overheard in the crowd on the way out, the preteen girl demographic is still the best-served in Hollywood. Would that we adults were so lucky.
For full report by John Patterson with official trailer, see Mail & Guardian
