POSTED March 13 2015
Is Cinderella Superman for girls — or for everyone?
Disney’s Cinderella, 2015 and Cindy, 1950
When my daughter and I danced in the door from a preview of Kenneth Branagh’s enchanting Cinderella, Husband commented that, “Cinderella is Superman for girls.” Challenged him with with, “I don’t think that a story told and retold for millennia is girls-only.”
This is what I wrote about it at Yahoo! Movies.
Your thoughts? My favorite Cinderella-inspired movie is Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight. Yours?
Bettelheim’s quote is great — so far as it goes. “Success” may DERIVE from inner qualities, but it is still DEFINED in Cinderella by getting the man/prince. For Clark Kent (and his audience), male success means becoming a super-hero, acting on the world). As for Cinderella drawing a male audience, good luck. Both girls and boys will read fiction with a male protagonist, but girls are pretty much alone at reading fiction in which the main protagonist is female.
But I haven’t seen the new Cinderella, maybe I’m too cynical. Perhaps Branaugh has Ella use her new position to launch an ambitious, if informal, public agenda — sort of an homage to Princess Diana?