Cinderella III: A Twist in Time: The Good, The Bad, and the Creepy

Since my most popular post has been my review of the Disney Fairies series, I thought I'd jump in and review the latest Disney Princess movie, which I recently purchased for one of the Ragkid's birthdays. The thumbnail review is: The "Story" is better than the original, but not as good as the Disney Fairies stories, the Songs are unmemorable, and I was kind of creeped out by one of the story's implications. Overall, a Qualified "Good, but not Great". And really, what more can you expect from a Direct-To-Video movie?

Also, a note. I never saw Cinderella II, so I may be missing something important from that movie -- but I doubt it.

P'Shat

It is Cinderella and the Prince's One Year Anniversary. Anastasia is spying on them, and realizes that the events of a year ago were caused by the Fairy Godmother's magic. Anastasia steals the magic wand, and gives it to the evil stepmother, who turns the Fairy Godmother to stone, moves time back a year, and "bippety boppety boo"s the shoe so that it fits Anastasia's foot before Cinderella escapes from her locked room. (The Tagline of the Movie is "What if the slipper didn't fit?", which isn't really accurate. It's not that the slipper didn't fit. It's that Cinderella never got to try the slipper on.)

The Prince knows immediately that Anastasia isn't his true love, so the evil stepmother bippety boppety boo's his memory so that he recalls dancing with Anastasia instead of Cinderella. The wedding is planned for that night.

In the meantime, Cinderella decides to take matters into her own hands. Impersonating the Royal Mousecatcher (along with Gus and Jacques), she sneaks into the castle to win her Prince back. Meanwhile, Anastasia is having second thoughts because she wants to marry for love, but the King is so nice to her, that her doubts are assuaged.

Eventually, Cinderella steals back the magic wand, but is captured and banished before she can undo the magic, and the mice convince the Prince that he is under a magic spell, and that he is "really" in love with Cinderella, even though he remembers falling in love with Anastasia. The Prince rescues Cinderella before she can ship out.

Her plan falling apart, the wicked stepmother makes a last ditch attempt to save her plan by casting another spell on Anastasia so that she looks like Cinderella, and sending Cinderella away in a locked pumpkin carriage driven by the now-human cat Lucifer. Cinderella escapes, Anastasia refuses to marry the again-fooled Prince, and the Prince saves both Cinderella and Anastasia, who the wicked stepmother tries to turn into toads.

The wedding can them go off as planned.

Drash

The Good: A solid story for a movie that's only about 70 minutes long. Lots of plot twists, and jokes for people of all ages. My three year old got scared when the Fairy Godmother was turned to stone, but when I reassured her that she's be fine by the end, she was okay for the rest of the movie. Cinderella is much more self-directed. Not able to take the "footwear path" to happiness, she takes matters into her own hands and fights against her wicked relatives to win her man. She defeats Lucifer and without any help, and has some other individual successes that were not driven by magical or male assistance or magical guidance. Also good is that the Prince is given a personality, so that he appears to be someone worth marrying, rather than just a handsome outfit who dances well. When they "re-marry" at the end, we are happier for them, because they both really worked for this time.

The Bad: While Cinderella is more self-directed, her direction is still solely to win the hand of a man she met for a couple of hours the night before. Also, while Cinderella is much more pro-active, and fights some of her own battles, she is also "rescued" twice by the Prince -- once when she is banished, and again when the wicked stepmother tries to turn her into a frog. Anastasia and Cinderella stand together, and have some individual successes, but they would have failed in the end had not the Prince stepped in repeatedly to help.

In one the "Disney Fairies" books we read recently, a wingless fairy is falling, and another tries to catch her. When she fails, a sparrow man tries to help, but the two are not strong enough together. When they fail, another fairy adds her muscle, and the three of them together save the falling fairy from disaster.

In the "Disney Princesses" stories, the women may be self-sufficient to a point, but the Prince is always the last line of defense. Sometimes the sisters do it for the themselves, and sometimes an extra man is needed. There is never a situation where are you are missing for success is an extra female. While I have no objections to the man sometimes coming in to save the day, there is no balance. Moving from "Woman always saved by Man" to "Woman sometimes saved my Man and sometimes saves Herself" is a step in the right direction, but it is not even and symmetrical.

The Creepy: So, this starts out as one of the sweeter parts of the movie. The Prince is having second thoughts about his betrothal to Anastasia because there is no "magic" when they touch, and Anastasia is a particularly bad dancer. She is crestfallen, but the King takes her aside and talks to her, saying how his Queen, before she died, was also a terrible dancer, and that love isn't based on superficial qualities like dance ability. In addition, the picture of the Queen, over the King's throne, looks surprisingly like Anastasia.

So, based on this and other similar scenes, both daughters took the implication that there was, in fact, a budding romance growing between Anastasia and the King! The thought of the erstwhile evil-stepsister becoming Cinderella's new formerly-evil step-mother-in-law just skeeves me out in a Faye-Dunaway-in-Chinatown kind of way. ("She's my sister and my daughter!")

Surprising Source of Woman-Friendly Kid's Fiction

If your house is anything like the Ragtime house, there is the eternal struggle between "Reading is a good thing!" and "That thing you have chosen to read is mindless drivel and the literary equivalent of crack cocaine."

For bedtime stories for the Ragkids (3 young girls), I am always on the lookout for mind-nurturning literature. The girls, on the other hand, are on the lookout for yet another iteration of "The Magic Fairy Princess Saves the Unicorn and Is Kissed By the Prince." Blech.

Happy Day, then, to find a Kids Book Series that BOTH fits into the Magic Fairy Princess etc . genre, and yet, doesn't suck.

So, are you ready for it?

Disney Fairies.

Yep. I saw the titles ("The Trouble with Tink", "The Great Berry Battle", etc.) and the Disney Fairy animation, and I thought this would be no different from "Pixie Tricks" (vapid), Fairy Realm (dull), The Unicorn's Secret (unreadable), or The Rainbow Fairies (insipid). And yet, well, let's just get to it . . .

1. Female Centered Naming Conventions. The creatures that live in The Home Tree are called "Fairies" -- They are made up of two kinds, the males (called "Sparrow Men") and the females (called "Fairies"). Note that the Generic term is identical to the Female term.

2. Gender Division. There is no explicit statement of the breakdown of genders, but among the characters who show up in a representative book, they are about 75-80% Fairies, and 20-25% Sparrow Men. There is also a Queen. The world is Female-Centered without being either all-female or male-repressive. The Sparrow Men are there and apparently equals. They're just not really that important to the flow of the story.

3. Cool Jobs. Every Fairy has a special talent. Tinkerbell, star of the first book ("The Trouble With Tink") is a pots-and-pans-talent fairy. She loves to spend all day sitting alone in her workshop with her hammer, repairing pots and pans for the other Fairies. And it hits me. Brilliant! She's a Tinker! What the heck else should she be with a name like Tinkerbell! Once you work from the assumption that people should have jobs and not just flit around sprinkling fairy dust all day, of COURSE she's a tinker!

Other fairies have a wide variety of talents, that span the range of both traditionally male and female jobs. The "Waste Metal Recovery Fairy" was my personal favorite. The Sparrow Men get some good jobs, too, like Crown Construction, but just enough to show that the males aren't being subjugated here.

4. Interesting Tasks. Vidia, who is a loner and generally anti-social, is accused of stealing the Queen's crown when it goes missing. Even though she's generally unliked by the other fairies, she gets to be the protagonists of her own book, and goes though an elaborate series of problem solving tasks along with her assistant (also female) in order uncover the truth of the missing crown. Beck, as an Animal-Talent Fairy, assumes the job of arbitrator between the warring hummingbirds and chipmunks. The tasks never involved "Getting The Boy". The closest it comes is when Tink loses her Tinkering hammer and doesn't want to go get her spare that she left at Peter Pan's house when they were dating. Bringing a friend for moral support, she gets the hammer, and realizes that she will now have the courage to face Peter again without fear, and that she no longer has any romantic interest in him.

5. The Cute Factor. The illustrations are definitely classic Disney, and are thus very cutesy. The characters, though, never focus on appearances, get catty, primp, or whatever. They just go do their jobs.

The Ragkids, of course, don't see any difference between Disney Fairies and any other more-or-less insipid "Disney Princesses" creation. This is one series, though, that I am happy to recommend.