#12 Cinderella

The Silver Age of Disney began in 1950 with the release of Cinderella, in many ways a spiritual successor to Disney's previous fairy-tale adaptation, Snow White. Despite the similarities between the two, Cinderella clearly shows how Disney had evolved since the release of their first film: the plot is more cohesive, and Cinderella herself is a far more interesting and compelling character than Snow White.

The art style is best described as grand-scale, with the royal palace settings painted enormously, dwarfing the human occupants with their elegance. Even the domestic scenes of the mansion, when shown from the perspective of the mice, capture the necessary sense of scale. The mice themselves, meanwhile, largely steal the show, injecting some humor with their antics. The supporting cast is strong in general, with the bombastic King and his battered Duke being far more amusingly expressive than the more photorealistic Cinderella and Prince. The villains, meanwhile, fall a bit short; while Lady Tremaine manages to exude an air of restrained menace, the stepsisters and the cat Lucifer are all more irritating than threatening, managing to repulse every other character in the film other than themselves.

While the plot definitely follows a narrative structure better than some of the Golden Age films, it embodies many of the tropes Disney's fairy-tale stories have come to be criticized for. Once again, "love at first sight" is in full effect, with Cinderella and the Prince falling in love literally only by looking at each other, before even knowing each other's name. The entire plot of getting the Prince a wife, meanwhile, is put into motion by the King's determination to have grandchildren and frustration with his son for not getting married sooner. Thus, we have a relationship that arises due to factors completely apart from the control of either of the participants, with neither of them really initiating anything and the relationship having no real tangible basis. In short, it's the prototypical (or perhaps stereotypical) Disney princess narrative that Brave and Frozen would deconstruct 50 years later.

Despite its flaws, Cinderella is still an artistic achievement for Disney. Managing to reestablish Disney as a purveyor of animated features after the package film era while illustrating its evolution since the Golden Age, Cinderella once again redefined Disney for a new period of its history.