--- description: Don't be fooled by Ella's new look, this fairy tale is full of disappointing stereotypes title: Why Disney's New 'Cinderella' Is the Anti-'Frozen' image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf3919a85747425e7/698783888e06019f9345ac56/cinderella1.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Living](/tag/time-section-living/) ## Living Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # Why Disney's New _Cinderella_ Is the Anti-_Frozen_ ## Video: Behind the Scenes of 'Frozen' [Watch (HLS stream): Behind the Scenes of 'Frozen'](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/6r4nuWBx.m3u8) (9:58)  _Published 2013-12-30. Behind the Scenes of 'Frozen'_ by [Jaclyn Friedman](/author/jaclyn-friedman/) ## Jaclyn Friedman Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Mar 13, 2015 3:27 PM CUT  Lily James as Cinderella in Disney's 2015 live-action feature inspired by the classic fairy tale, Cinderella Lily James as Cinderella in Disney's 2015 live-action feature inspired by the classic fairy tale, CinderellaDisney by [Jaclyn Friedman](/author/jaclyn-friedman/) ## Jaclyn Friedman Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Mar 13, 2015 3:27 PM CUT Ever since the cast was announced, I’ve been wishing hard on Disney’s new live-action adaptation of _Cinderella_. This was, after all, a product of the new Disney, whose last princess-based effort resulted in the girl-power juggernaut we know and love as _Frozen_. And now Cate Blanchett, Helena Bonham Carter and even _Agent Carter’s_ “[butt-kicking bombshell](http://www.ew.com/article/2015/01/02/agent-carter-abc-set-spoilers "undefined")” Hayley Atwell were on board. Surely this band of power women would have signed on only to a more modern _Cinderella_, one that finds a way to luxuriate in the lush beauty of the tale while also giving it a much-needed jolt of female agency. How I wish I didn’t have to deliver bad news. I was a bullied girl who grew up on Disney’s classic animated version, dreaming that a fairy godmother might also reveal me as the radiant woman I knew I could be. I fervently wanted this reboot to be big enough to marry my childhood dreams with my adult belief that women aren’t ennobled by suffering or diminished by ambition. But I guess I forgot to wish upon a star. The new _Cinderella_ is as retro as they come. The film certainly is lavish. Everything is more beautiful than you thought it could be, from the hyper-real fairy-tale farmhouse to the ornately gilded pumpkin coach to the massive ball scenes at the palace to (of course!) the dresses. Oh, the dresses! Every frame is lovingly, sumptuously composed, and the performances live up to their setting. Aesthetically, Cinderella is an unqualified triumph. If only the film’s heart were as good as its heroine’s. This _Cinderella_ shares less DNA with _Frozen_ and more with _Snow White_’s Evil Queen. On the surface it’s the fairest of the fair. But underneath it’s rotten. You can tell that someone, somewhere had good intentions. There are multiple people of color in this film, and they’re not just playing servants. Lady Tremaine, Cinderella’s stepmother, is given a backstory clearly meant to humanize her — a beloved dead husband and a real fear that she and her girls will be left to starve without a man to provide for them. But what the film suffers from is a profound failure of nerve. Sure, the people of color are there, but the only two who speak at all are tertiary characters at best. It’s 2015\. Does the Prince really have to be white for the story to work? Does Cinderella? As for Tremaine’s motivations, for a moment they gave me hope that the story would go in a Jane Austen direction, exploring the limited and sometimes desperate life choices facing women who are forced to depend on marriage for income and class status. Instead it’s just a way to demonstrate how ambitious Tremaine has become, and how that unseemly ambition is the driver of her evil treatment of our heroine, who in contrast has no ambitions and is therefore purely good. More submissive than Anastasia Steele, Cinderella responds to every insult and oppression forced on her by suffering it prettily and with a song in her heart. That’s no exaggeration: even when locked in the attic by her stepmother, literally held prisoner in her own home, she doesn’t try to escape or even yell to the king’s men just below her in the yard. Instead she just floats about dreamily and sings. If it weren’t for some preternaturally clever mice, she’d still probably still be up there. What’s truly galling is that we know Disney can do better. In recent years it’s reimagined classic fairy tales in groundbreaking (and lucrative) outings like _Brave_, _Maleficent_ and, of course, _Frozen_. And it’s not like it didn’t intend to update the story. Kenneth Branagh, who directed this mess, is featured [in a video on Disney’s site](http://video.disney.com/watch/legacy-featurette-cinderella-50b60d49df9bc9f6e4e00199 "undefined") bragging, “There’s no damsels in distress here. Cinderella’s not a pushover. She sticks up for herself.” I couldn’t possibly say what he means by that, because all the viewer sees is her parroting her mother’s dying words — “have courage and be kind” — while accepting without protest every abuse Tremaine and her daughters conceive of. Agent Carter would be very disappointed. And _Agent Carter_ is part of the point. Atwell’s other recent project is but one of a whole constellation of television series currently featuring complex, fully formed female leads, including _Orange Is the New Black_, _Jane the Virgin_, _Empire_, _The Good Wife_, _The Mindy Project_, everything Shonda Rhimes touches, and the just-released _Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt_, to name just a few. One glance at a TV (or streaming) schedule is all it takes to see how infinite the possibilities can be when it comes to women onscreen. But somehow the film-studio bosses keep losing the memo. In 2014, [only 12% of top-grossing films featured women in lead roles](http://variety.com/2015/film/news/women-lead-roles-in-movies-study-hunger-games-gone-girl-1201429016/ "undefined"). Only slightly more than half of all films released since 2010 [have even passed the Bechdel test](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-dollar-and-cents-case-against-hollywoods-exclusion-of-women/ "undefined"), a pathetically low bar requiring only that a film feature two women who talk with each other at some point about something other than a man. This erasure of women isn’t even mercenary: films that do pass the Bechdel test are [repeatedly shown to produce more profit for studios](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-dollar-and-cents-case-against-hollywoods-exclusion-of-women/ "undefined") than films that don’t. And many of the films that do manage to feature a woman suffer from a profound lack of imagination about who women can be. If I wanted to go see a film from last weekend’s top 10 earners with anything resembling a female lead, I would be choosing between watching a [dim-witted blond protégé](http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2015/03/02/390162376/of-con-men-and-dames-how-margot-robbie-gets-robbed-in-focus "undefined"), a [retired British lady on an adventure](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the%5Fsecond%5Fbest%5Fexotic%5Fmarigold%5Fhotel/ "undefined"), [a naive virgin seduced by an abusive billionaire](http://health.usnews.com/health-news/health-wellness/articles/2013/08/12/whats-wrong-with-50-shades-of-grey-and-what-you-should-know-about-bdsm "undefined"), [a literal monster](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the%5Flazarus%5Feffect/ "undefined") or an “[ugly fat friend](http://bitchmagazine.org/post/we-can-already-declare-the-duff-to-be-the-worst-movie-of-2015 "undefined").” Meanwhile the male leads in those 10 films are [a soldier, a scientist](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chappie/ "undefined"), [a con man](http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2015/03/02/390162376/of-con-men-and-dames-how-margot-robbie-gets-robbed-in-focus "undefined"), [a middle-aged superspy](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kingsman%5Fthe%5Fsecret%5Fservice/ "undefined"), [an abusive billionaire](http://health.usnews.com/health-news/health-wellness/articles/2013/08/12/whats-wrong-with-50-shades-of-grey-and-what-you-should-know-about-bdsm "undefined"), [a sports coach](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mcfarland%5Fusa/ "undefined"), [a businessman](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/unfinished%5Fbusiness%5F2015/ "undefined") and [a sentient sea sponge](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the%5Fspongebob%5Fmovie%5Fsponge%5Fout%5Fof%5Fwater/ "undefined"). The theater in which I saw _Cinderella_ was filled with dreamers much younger than I am. No doubt some of them, as I did when I was their age, identified powerfully with that abused young woman, just waiting for someone to see that she could be so much more than her circumstances. Too bad they’ve been let down yet again by movie execs who can’t seem to see past the end of their wands. ### See Cinderella Through the Years  Silent film star Mary Pickford in Cinderella, 1914 Paramount  Ilene Woods as the voice of Disney's iconic Cinderella, 1950 Disney  Julie Andrews in a TV special of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella, 1957 Everett  Lesley Ann Warren in another TV special of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella, 1965 Everett  Brandy Norwood in yet another TV version of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella, 1997 ABC  Drew Barrymore in Ever After: A Cinderella Story, based loosely on the fairy tale, 1998 20th Century Fox  Anne Hathaway in Ella Enchanted, inspired by the fairy tale, 2004 Buena Vista  Amy Sedaris (second from left) as Cinderella in Shrek the Third, 2007 DreamWorks  Jessy Schram as Cinderella in ABC's Once Upon a Time, 2011 Sergei Bachlakov—ABC/Getty Images  Anna Kendrick as Cinderella in Into the Woods, 2014 Peter Mountain—Disney  Lily James as our modern Cinderella, 2015 Jonathan Olley—Disney ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3742164/cinderella-disney-ella-frozen/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3742164/cinderella-disney-ella-frozen/"},"headline":"Why Disney's New Cinderella Is the Anti-Frozen","datePublished":"2015-03-13T15:27:45.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:42:38.559Z","description":"Don't be fooled by Ella's new look, this fairy tale is full of disappointing stereotypes","url":"https://time.com/3742164/cinderella-disney-ella-frozen/","keywords":["Living","Opinion topic","Frozen","Disney","Cinderella"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf3919a85747425e7/698783888e06019f9345ac56/cinderella1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jaclyn Friedman","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/jaclyn-friedman/"}],"articleSection":"","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf3919a85747425e7/698783888e06019f9345ac56/cinderella1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"CINDERELLA","caption":"CINDERELLA","creditText":"Disney","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-living/","name":"Living"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3742164/cinderella-disney-ella-frozen/","name":"Why Disney's New Cinderella Is the Anti-Frozen"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Behind the Scenes of 'Frozen'","description":"Behind the Scenes of 'Frozen'","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/6r4nuWBx/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2013-12-30T19:29:31.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/6r4nuWBx.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/3742164/cinderella-disney-ella-frozen/","duration":"PT9M58S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/3742164/cinderella-disney-ella-frozen/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```