Cinderella (Walt Disney Productions, RKO, 1949, released 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a movie I’ve heard a great deal about but had never actually seen: Cinderella, the 1950 (at least that’s the release date and the one given on imdb.com, though the copyright notice on the credits says 1949) adaptation by Walt Disney that marked his return to fully animated fairy-tale films following the 1941 strike against him by a number of his top animators. Disney ultimately outlasted the union but the strike broke up the talented team that had made Disney’s first five features – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Bambi, Fantasia and Dumbo – and it took a long time for the Disney enterprise to recover from their loss. During the 1940’s Disney’s fortunes were saved, ironically given his Right-wing anti-government politics, by World War II, and specifically by the contracts he got from the U.S. government to produce training and propaganda movies. He also benefited from the same deal he and his distributing studio, RKO, had with the U.S. government to produce films set in and about Latin America. Orson Welles started but never finished a documentary called It’s All True but the far more commercially minded Disney not only made the film the government had contracted for, Saludos, Amigos (1942), but did another one, The Three Caballeros (1945). These films, along with later compilation movies like Make Mine Music (1946) and Melody Time (1948), were the backbone of Disney’s feature production during the decade – and they were mostly pretty bland, despite some spectacular visuals like the final sequence of The Three Caballeros or the Benny Goodman Quartet’s “After You’ve Gone” from Make Mine Music (which could have been the basis for a jazz version of Fantasia – ah, what might have been!).

In 1949 Disney decided to return to his feature-film roots and make another full-scale animated feature based on a legendary fairy tale, Charles Perrault’s Cinderella – only he was suffering cash-flow problems and had to cut corners in ways he hadn’t with Snow White 12 years earlier. The two-part PBS documentary on Disney went into depth on the production of Cinderella and in particular why it didn’t have the artisanal finish of Snow White and the other productions of Disney’s pre-strike period. He was still an independent producer releasing through another studio, and RKO was in its death throes thanks to its acquisition by Howard Hughes in 1948. Hughes’ mercurial policies drove RKO’s remaining independent producers, Disney and Sam Goldwyn, out of the company in 1952 – Disney formed his own distribution company, Buena Vista, that year – and his cash-flow problems didn’t end until, ironically enough, he did something just about everyone in his circle, including his wife, had advised against. He built Disneyland, and Disney’s pioneering theme park became such an incredible cash cow Disney never had to worry about financing again. Meanwhile, in the late 1940’s his animators were churning out the cels for Cinderella and Disney’s finances were still so tight he had to get them into the animation cameras ann onto the screen as soon as possible.

The result was a film that’s highly entertaining but only rarely truly creative, and (as was pointed out in the PBS documentary) one of the most obvious examples of cost-cutting is the virtual absence of shadows. In the 1930’s Disney had insisted that his animated characters cast shadows even though that made the process of creating them more complicated – his animators had to draw in not only the characters’ bodies but their shadows – because of the heightened sense of realism the shadows gave them. (Disney’s mania for realism was so strong one exasperated animator working on Bambi turned to him one day and said, “Why don’t you just go out and take pictures of real deer?” Six years later, Disney would start a series of nature documentaries in which he would do just that.) The few scenes in Cinderella in which the characters do cast shadows – usually to create a particularly Gothic effect – leap out from the rest of the movie and into the astonishing craftsmanship of the earlier Disney classics. Other than that, the most entertaining parts of Cinderella – and, it’s pretty clear, the ones that turned Disney on the most – are the scenes involving Cinderella’s animal familiars, the five mice, the evil cat Lucifer and the big dog that saves Cinderella by unlocking the door so she can go to the Prince’s ball. The mice essentially take the place of the dwarfs in Snow White and not only provide the comic relief but really dominate the screen – and Disney’s sound people created an effect for them, singing the film’s songs in artificially sped up voices overlaid on top of each other – eight years before Ross Bagdasarian, a.k.a. “David Seville,” used the same effect to create the voices of Alvin and the Chipmunks. When one of the mice is caught in an elaborate trap from which a shadow-casting Cinderella rescues him (one of the most visually effective scenes in the film) and the mouse is worried whether he’ll fit in with the other mice in Cinderella’s household, I joked, “Don’t worry! You’re in a Walt Disney movie, and he made his whole fortune from a mouse!”

The scenes in Cinderella that tell Perrault’s actual story seem less interesting – probably because Disney himself was less engaged by them. Cinderella herself is a well-designed character – though her hair keeps getting darker as the film progresses (she starts as a blonde, then her hair goes auburn and turns brown in the last scenes) – and she’s introduced in a surprisingly racy scene (at least by Disney cartoon standards) in which she turns her naked back to the camera as she’s getting out of a shower (and of course the shower head is an anthropomorphized Disney creation). The Prince is the usual stick-figure leading man of productions like this – including live-action films; such movies almost never make the leading man seem genuinely interesting and it’s only because of his wealth, social position and generalized physical attractiveness that the heroine is attracted to him. One bit of trivia is that while Prince Charming’s dialogue was voiced by William Phipps, his singing voice was contributed by the very young Mike Douglas, who’d been one of the last male big-band singers and briefly tried for a vocal career (he had one hit, the novelty song “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts”) before ending up as a daytime talk-show host. Not that we get to hear him sing much – just in a duet with Cinderella (voiced by Ilene Woods, a less operatic and more “pop” voice than Snow White’s voice actor/singer, Adriana Caselotti) called “So This Is Love.”

The film’s musical score, like the movie itself, is serviceable but nowhere near the level of inspiration of the songs in Snow White or Pinocchio; the big ballad that introduces Cinderella is “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” an O.K. song but hardly on the level of “Some Day My Prince Will Come” (and it’s never attracted the attention of great jazz musicians the way “Some Day My Prince Will Come” did from Miles Davis and John Coltrane). The 1950 Cinderella is a nicely entertaining movie made under circumstances that made sure it couldn’t be more than that; according to the PBS documentary, Disney himself was dissatisfied with it and all too conscious of all the corners he’d had to cut that had kept it from being the masterpiece Snow White was. It helped lead to his overall disillusionment with the film industry in the early 1950’s, which in turn led to the construction of Disneyland and his fascinating comment that he got more artistic satisfaction from building the theme park than he had from making films, because once a film was finished and released it couldn’t be changed after that, while “with the park, if anything doesn’t work, I can just go in and set it right.” It’s an interesting philosophy that anticipated the modern era of computers, in which everything is constantly being “upgraded” and older technologies replaced with new ones whether the users want them to change or not – and one Disney story I’m fond of telling as an example of how he was always foreseeing the future (one case in point: while other film producers were shunning television, Disney saw it as a gigantic opportunity) was how his brother Roy, who ran the financial end of the company from New York, complained to him, “Walt, why did you spend the extra money to make the Davy Crockett TV shows in color? TV isn’t in color.” Walt just smiled at Roy and said, “It will be.”