Cinderella - Disney Live-Action Feature

Features, Shorts, Live-Action and Direct-To-Video
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Re: Cinderella - Disney Live-Action Feature

Post by Dacey » March 27th, 2015, 7:04 pm

Site review is now up (better late than never!)

http://animatedviews.com/2015/cinderella/
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Re: Cinderella - Disney Live-Action Feature

Post by Ben » March 28th, 2015, 6:24 am

Neato...read this last night and it's made me more curious to go and see it now, which we may do Tuesday. :)

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Re: Cinderella - Disney Live-Action Feature

Post by Dacey » March 29th, 2015, 5:53 pm

One thing that I forgot to mention but meant to was that if you want to hear Bibbidi-Bobbiti-Boo, you have to wait until the very end of the credits. Then you'll briefly get to hear Helena Bonham Carter sing it.
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Re: Cinderella - Disney Live-Action Feature

Post by Ben » March 29th, 2015, 6:34 pm

No worries...I always hold on until the last of the logos has played out...! ;)

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Re: Cinderella - Disney Live-Action Feature

Post by Ben » March 31st, 2015, 8:09 pm

Well..

For all the talk of this "bringing life" to the 1949/50 animated film, I found Cinderella to be quite lifeless. It was all lovely and sweet and gorgeous to look at, but it was as if everyone were just going through the motions. Lily James kept reminding me of Andrew Garfield, Cate Blanchett was hardly used to any potential, and ths story just played out the original with very few minor adjustments.

HBC was a highlight, but even here she seemed restrained, while a couple of songs really wouldn't have gone amiss: in the credits we have James singing A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes and HBC doing her Bibbidy-Bobbity-Boo (more than just "brief" as it was most of the song) and the film could have done with these at least in certain points. I found the use of Lavender Blue to be strange (it being a traditional song but made famous in the 1948 Disney film So Dear To My Heart) over another, better choice, and the music when Cinders and Prince Kit are dancing was closer to Once Upon A Dream than anything.

I felt it struggled for any real drama either...nothing much really actually happened. The mice were there, just about, but Lucifer? An intro and a gag at the end and that was it. For something that was so closely patterned on the original Disney film I felt they should have just gone the whole hog. Even just using Bibbidy-Bobbity-Boo in the transformation sequence and A Dream Is A Wish Youra Heart Makes during the ball (yes, I know that should be So This Is Love, but in the interests of keeping it a bit more upbeat...) would have lifted things a little.

Otherwise the music was quite bland and didn't match the visuals. The film itself didn't quite sink to just being bland, but there's not really anything much to it than just being a remake of the original film with minor tinkering and a lack of songs, and the ending isn't a patch on Cinders' revealing of the other slipper she has...the changes here just slowed things down and didn't really have much of a comeuppance for the stepmother, stepsisters or Duke, who all would seem to have ended up doing pretty well for themselves...

As for Frozen Fever...ugh. I was very much looking forward to this, but heaven help us if this is where Frozen 2 is going. Trying to do it all through a single extended song was a mistake...it felt like they were making something up as they went along, and musically you could hear it was slung together pretty quick. Idina Menzel didn't even sound like herself and the 70s orchestration sounded pretty cheesy. Also, after establishing that Olaf needs his own snow flurry to exist without melting, how did hundreds of other, smaller snowmen ("snow-snots", given how they were formed) not melt into multiple puddles immediately?

Sorry, but Frozen Fever felt thrown together as a poorly conceived knee-jerk reaction, while Cinderella itself was a perfectly fine, non-offending new version that didn't really add anything "new".

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Re: Cinderella - Disney Live-Action Feature

Post by Dusterian » April 11th, 2015, 12:38 am

Oh, I see EricJ, and I love the Shelly Duvall Faerie Tale Theatre one too! But what did you mean by pre-Renaissance? Pre-Disney-animation-Renaissance versions of Cinderella?

I liked your review Dacy!

Sorry you felt that way about it, Ben. I think this film was almost a masterpiece! Just needed perhaps a deeper, more fleshed out love story for Cinderella and the Prince. But they still had love.
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Re: Cinderella - Disney Live-Action Feature

Post by EricJ » April 11th, 2015, 3:05 am

Dusterian wrote:Oh, I see EricJ, and I love the Shelly Duvall Faerie Tale Theatre one too! But what did you mean by pre-Renaissance? Pre-Disney-animation-Renaissance versions of Cinderella?
(No, meant the 80's Shelley Duvall episodes that weren't corrupted by 90's Disney, and gave us the "real" source-faithful LA versions of Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Snow Queen, and a Beauty&Beast that was more inspired by Cocteau. Always helps to have those around as reference material. :D )

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Re: Cinderella - Disney Live-Action Feature

Post by Dusterian » April 12th, 2015, 11:44 pm

Oh. Ok. Well the original Snow Queen was a villain and the Faerie Tale Theatre one made her sort of help Kai.
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Re: Cinderella - Disney Live-Action Feature

Post by Jpcase » June 4th, 2015, 9:15 am

Finally got around to seeing this, and I've got to say, as someone who hasn't exactly been enthusiastic about Disney these past several years, Cinderella managed to earn my respect. Ben - I think my feelings on this film may be the exact opposite of yours, haha.

I mentioned in a previous thread that I've always wanted to see traditional, live-action interpretations of classic Disney stories. However, that doesn't mean I've wanted to see remakes. The entire concept of remaking a movie is something that's just never sat well with me. I mean, no one would be so silly as to repaint the Mona Lisa and frame it in a museum or rewrite To Kill a Mockingbird! And I feel like, for the most part, it should be the same with movies. There are going to be occasional exceptions to that, for sure, but if I want to see a version of Cinderella where the Fairy godmother sings "Bibbidy-Bobbity-Boo" then I'll just pop in a DVD of the animated movie. I don't feel any need to see it done by live actors (outside of perhaps a stage play).

I didn't love this new film, and that's primarily because it was too much of a remake for my tastes. When I saw that Lucifer and the mice were in it, I was disheartened, and whenever the mice behaved anthropomorphically, I could barely suppress a groan. The overall tone wasn't quite what I would have wanted it to be. Had the film not been done by Disney, it probably would have been closer to what I've been looking for. But all the same, I can't deny that this is a very well made film.

I won't go into a full review, as pretty much everything has already been said (and I doubt that very many people are even reading this, as it's been nearly two months since the last comment). But I do find it kind of ironic that this, much closer to a true remake of the animated film than Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland or Maleficent, is my favorite of the three, and Alice probably my least favorite. It's encouraging to see that these films have been getting better each time, but I still can't say that I'm particularly happy about them being done.

Frozen Fever was...eh. I just have too much apathy for that franchise to even care. All I could think about was how much more I wanted to like Frozen.

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Re: Cinderella - Disney Live-Action Feature

Post by Dan » August 27th, 2015, 10:46 pm

Ahead of the blu ray release, figured I post this great video the New York Times posted several months ago from their "Anatomy of a Scene" series where Kenneth Branagh provides commentary and insight to the scene where Ella and Kit first meet.


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