Cinderella Live Blog

Initial thoughts: the opening song is very sad and kind of creepy. It sounds like funeral music quite honestly.

The stepmother and the daughters look mean and bad from the beginning. However, they aren't ugly or disgusting looking. They're frowning and have really big hair. Cinderella appears as happy and prettier than them.

If the birds love Cinderella and come when she sings, she must have a beautiful soul!

"If you tell a wish, it won't come true." Disney's implicit teaching of children.

Cinderella is hopeful. "One thing they can't order me to do is stop dreaming." This is probably the most important message of Cinderella. No matter how oppressed you get, never stop dreaming. Interesting enough, I feel this applies very largely to the black community.

"No matter how your heart is dreaming, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true." This is my new favorite quote. It will definitely be what gets me through my years at Duke.

I think it's interesting that even the cat is stuck-up and mean. He wears the same frown that the stepsisters and stepmother had at the very beginning of the movie. The concept that hate is a learned concept shows heavily here; they even taught the cat that he was better than Cinderella.

Cinderella's good soul shines through because she tells Bruno, the dog, that it's bad for him to dream about catching Lucifer, the cat. She even looks to find the good in Lucifer-- even though she can't.

I think the best thing Disney did in Cinderella was produce a character that was admirable and lovable. Not only is she beautiful, but her soul is too. She is kind to the animals and feeds them. She is hopeful and happy even when she reserves every right to be bitter. We love Cinderella because she loves the world.

I am sorry, but if I was Cinderella, I would be spiking that morning tea. No way they would be ringing bells at me like that and screaming at me. How does she manage to still smile and say good morning to them? They're in no way superior to her.

Interesting how Cinderella carries a probably like 30 pound bag of laundry on her head like that wouldn't snap her neck.

Okay, I take back what I said. The stepsisters are actually really ugly as adults. As children, they looked cuter. This might be a reflection of their increase in wealth that made them feel even more entitled. However, they're not the most hated characters because they lack intelligence as well as power to actually inflect in pain in Cinderella's life. They're simply tattle tales. The stepmother, however, is more attractive than the stepsisters but she is calm with her infliction of evil on Cinderella.

"Love is just a girl meeting a boy under the right conditions. So, we'll arrange it for him." -The King
The funny part about this scene is that the girl figurine is actually pictured after Cinderella-- clever foreshadowing Disney. Too bad eight year olds have no idea what that even means.

Again, the best part about the stepsisters is that they're awful at everything. They're not smart, pretty, and they can't sing. Basically, you don't even care about how mean they are because their lives are bad anyways.

I love that the mice call her Cinderelly.

uh oh. "Leave the sewing to the women. You go do some trimming." There go those gender roles Disney. I'm a young woman who has no idea how to sew, but then again I'm much younger than the Cinderella movie.

I hate the stepmother. I can appreciate the stepsisters acting outrageous and being jealous, but the calmness the stepmother has when she's being absolutely horrid and evil is sickening. Rage is less terrifying than serenity.

I find it interesting that the song of the fairy godmother is bippity boppity boo instead of alacadabra. I guess Disney couldn't buy that phrase?

Disney's appearance conventions don't work in Cinderella. The fairy godmother is plump, but she's a part of the good team and so is the mice Gus. The stepsisters and stepmother have attractive body figures, and the stepmother is even attractive minus her grey hair.

The irony of the entire ball is that Cinderella doesn't even know that she was with the prince when I'm sure Disney worked really hard to make him a beautiful prince charming. When she leaves from the ball, her carriage is sparkling and white, but the contrast of the palace's horses are dark and shadowy. Normally that would imply evil, but those men aren't evil; they're just trying to make real love happen.

Cinderella becomes entirely engrossed in herself when she thinks about seeing the man she's in love with. Disney's representation of women as being incapable of thought when thinking of love is a very poor one. It's scary that the representation of women stepping on each other and using evil methods in order to obtain the admirable man is quite accurate though. As a child, I never realized the problem with that but after living through majority of my teenage years, I'm much more accustomed to the idea.

I can't believe she just made him break the slipper! She was willing to cause the king's wrath just to keep Cinderella from being able to marry the prince. But of course Disney slides in with the happy-ever-after.

Overall, Cinderella is a calmer Disney movie. There's evil, of course, but it's human evil. The evil presented in this movie is the kind that lives inside all of us. There's jealousy, anger, selfishness, and greed. The stepmother and stepsisters embody those characteristics. Cinderella, however, embodies the ideas of hope, beauty, kindness, and compassion. In the end, Cinderella is seen for all her beauty and the "good soul" wins. The only problematic message of this Disney movie-- if thinking in terms of Giroux-- is that Cinderella is saved by the prince. Her life becomes whole and good when she marries him. It's not exactly ideal to tell young girls that a man is the answer to their problems-- maybe in the olden days, but not in the 21st century.