Cinderella

An exercise in industrial-strength padding. I guess that’s what you get when you make a feature film out of a ten-minute story. The worst part is the baby talking mice; think an hour's worth of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Yeesh. The whole thing is insipid, with little in the way of real cleverness or creativity. There's a fine line that needs to be walked with a story like this: because everyone already knows the story, including the ending, you need to find new angles to present something worth looking at...but you can't go too far with your creativity, because then you're not telling the real story as has been known for centuries. This one fails to go either way. This film is, in many ways, the quintessence of what people don't like about Disney: cloying, silly, comedic but humorless, old-fashioned without real old-time charm. Others may be more forgiving, but I say read the Grimms' version--it's far more entertaining.