Disney-ified: 'Cinderella'

For all of you Disney fans out there. You know that all Disney movies have taken dark stories/books and then they simplified these stories/books to a more child-friendly viewpoint. We will take a step back from the childhood and dip into the depths of despair with the Grimm Brothers. The Brother Grimm's are responsible for stories such as Cinderella, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and many more. Prepare yourself to be mentally disturbed by some of these tales.

Cinderella:

In the movie, Cinderella was given a room/attic to sleep in. So her life was not completely terrible because she did have somewhere to sleep. In the original, she slept on the floor with the cinders hence the name Cinderella. In the live action version, it is explained how Cinderella's mother died, but in the cartoon, they don't talk about it much. In the original, the Grimm Brother's write:

"A rich man's wife became sick, and when she felt that her end was drawing near, she called her only daughter to her bedside and said, "Dear child, remain pious and good, and then our dear God will always protect you, and I will look down on you from heaven and be near you." With this, she closed her eyes and died." (Source: Cinderella)

Notice how there is the lacking of sincerity and feeling in this sentence of her mother passing away. It then describes her visiting her mother's grave and crying, which is understandable as to why Disney pulled out that part in the cartoon.

In the live-action, Cinderella asks for a twig when her father goes away. The twig in the story was for her dead mother's grave and she kept it alive by crying on the twig at her mother's tombstone. The tears then grew a beautiful tree from her tears. Neither live action nor cartoon had this element.

"Cinderella went to this tree three times every day, and beneath it, she wept and prayed. A white bird came to the tree every time, and whenever she expressed a wish, the bird would throw down to her what she had wished for."

The wishing bird was not expressed in any of the Disney films. Possibly for being too long of a movie if it was added in. However, the birds in the movie were her friends and I believe that this was what Disney was going for because children like the idea of having animals as friends.

There was no fairy godmother in the original tale, but Disney likes the magic elements of having one and it also gave Cinderella an adult to look up to, rather than birds that gave her wishes.

In the original, it is also a festival in which the prince wants to marry a princess and not a one night ball. Every night Cinderella finds new ways of escaping from the prince. One night she was in the pigeon coop, the next night she was in a pear tree, but every night she was found by the fireplace, asleep.

The shoe is a key element in both the story and the movie. However, in the movie, it is not such a gory event that happens. In the story, the mother gets one of her stepdaughters to cut off her heels from her foot because, "once you're a princess you won't have to walk as much, you will have fancy carriages." This is pretty much the sum of the tone in the original story. The first daughter does so and is taken back to the castle. Then the prince right away notices it is not the girl he danced with at the ball. Then the second stepsister does the same.

Then, once Cinderella is discovered by the Prince they get married. The brutality of the original story is emblematic of the final scenes; during the ceremony, two birds peck out the eyes of the sisters because of their lies, and cruelty towards Cinderella.