My Take on Cinderella

Just to start off, I never realized how crappy of an animation Cinderella is. The opening scene looked so old I was taken aback. The features on the characters aren’t particularly defined well. For example, whenever you see Cinderella’s feet, she doesn’t actually have toes. Just a foot. Also the movement of the characters’ mouths is far from perfect and hardly matches the words they’re saying sometimes.

Just like so many other Disney movies there is gender discrimination ever so present in Cinderella. For starters it is made pretty clear that women are meant to be in the house cleaning, cooking, and doing other housewife tasks. Cinderella is actually made into a servant, which emphasizes how some men actually treat women even to this day. By far the most egregious form of gender prejudice is the women’s idea of happiness. Every woman has one goal and one goal only find a man to marry. Women aren’t encouraged to get jobs or follow their dreams; they are wired to find the man who will take care of them. Moreover, in Cinderella’s case, the only way that it seems possible for her to escape her terrible life is for a man to come and save the day. Cinderella couldn’t just leave the house to be an independent woman because that would be ludicrous.

In my opinion, the worst lesson that this movie teaches is that beauty is only on the outside. When the prince sees Cinderella, he falls in love immediately. For all he knows, Cinderella is just as evil as her stepmother, but he is only concerned about her looks. This teaches the young audience that watches this movie that they don’t need be kind or sweet like Cinderella, all that matters is that they’re as pretty as Cinderella.

In all fairness, the Disney version of Cinderella is based off of Perrault’s version from 1697. As you might imagine, women were treated far worse in the seventeenth century than they are today. Further, the Disney version was made in 1950. There was still an excessive amount of gender discrimination in the 50’s that certainly played a roll in the movie’s prejudices.

Enough of me being so critical. What do I like about Cinderella? Despite how it might seem based on what I’ve said so far I do still enjoy the movie. Some of my favorite characters are the mice and the birds. I absolutely love the scene where Jaq and Gus have to steal the key and deliver it all the way upstairs. It also shows how amazing Cinderella is. In a way she is a great role model. She is tortured, enslaved, and abused by her stepmother and stepsisters, but not for a single second does she take that anger out on anyone or lose her caring nature. I know that if I was in her position, I would definitely be grumpy and rude towards people with all that bottled up anger.

Finally, the best part of the movie is seeing the look on that stupid stepmother’s face when Cinderella pulls out the second shoe. Every time I see that I want to jump into the movie and scream “YOU LOSE,” right at her smirking face.