Directed by: Clyde Geronimi & Wilfred Jackson
Written by: Ken Anderson (I) & Homer Brightman
Music by: Jerry Livingston, Mack David & Al Hoffman

Released on: February 15, 1950
Running Time: 74 minutes

Box-Office: $41 million in the U.S. (plus $21.305m during its 1981 re-issue), $315 million worldwide (adjusted to current dollars)
 
 

CAST

Cinderella... Ilene Woods
Lady Tremaine... Eleanor Audley
Fairy Godmother... Verna Felton
Drizella... Rhoda Williams

  Eleanor Audley (1905-1991), the voice of the Wicked Stepmother in Cinderella, is also the voice of Madam Leota in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland and Disneyworld, and Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty.

  Verna Felton (1890-1966), the voice of the Fairy Godmother, started and finished her career at Disney as an elephant -no pun intended!-: first in Dumbo (1941), then in The Jungle Book (1967).  Funny to notice she was also the evil Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland (1951), Aunt Sarah in Lady and the Tramp (1955) and Flora in Sleeping Beauty (1959).

  Rhoda Williams, a radio veteran who was the voice of Drizella the stepsister, also provided the live-action modeling for that character.  Lesser known is that she was the voice of the mother and the daughter, as well as the model for both, in the Carousel of Progress attraction for the 1964 World's Fair -and later Disneyland.
 
 

INTERESTING FACTS

  In 1946, three classics had been in development for several years -Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella. Walt Disney did not feel comfortable with either Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland, finding the characters too cold.  Cinderella, on the other hand, possessed the qualities of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which is why he chose to go ahead with this project.

  Lucifer, the spoiled housecat, presented a problem to animators. None of the character renderings pleased Walt Disney. Then one day, as he was visiting Kimball's steam train at his San Gabriel home, he saw the Kimball's housecat, a round, furry calico, and he exclaimed "Hey -there's your model for Lucifer!".

  In Charles Perrault's 300-year-old French fable Cinderella was adapted from, the heroine lost a fur slipper, not a glass one!

  This animated feature was shot entirely in live action before the animation began!

  Several storyboard sequences did not make the final cut, including "The Music Lesson", the complete "Cinderella Work Song" and "Dancing on a Cloud".

  An impressive number of songs were written but not used in the final version of Cinderella, including "Cinderella", "I'm In The middle of a Muddle", "I Lost My Heart at the Ball", "The Mouse Song", "Sing a Little, Dream a Little", "Dancing on a Cloud", "The Dress My Mother Wore",  and "The Face That I See In The Night".

  Storyman Bill Peet recalled in the late '90s that "another crisis was Cinderella. We were down to the point where we needed another Snow White, another success. Walt loved to tell me this story. Walt and Roy had been arguing for weeks. Roy told him that they couldn't afford to gamble everything they had on one film. If they would sell out now, they could live comfortably for the rest of their lives. Roy wanted to pick up the marbles and go home. Walt insisted they do just one more, and he chose Cinderella. Without that there would have been no Disneyland, no Epcot Center and no Disney Studio today."

  In both Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), the main character's friends surprise her with a new dress, calling out "Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! Happy birthday!"

  Cinderella marked the beginning of Disney's 2nd Golden Age, that would end in 1967 with Walt's death.  The 3rd Golden Age started in 1989 with The Little Mermaid.

  The movie was Oscar-nominated for Best Score, Best Song ("Bibbidy-Bobbidi-Boo") and Best Sound.

  Cinderella was the top grossing film of 1950 in the U.S., as it took in $41,087,000 that year.

  Since 1950, Cinderella has been released to theaters six times and has been seen by 75 million people, grossing more than $315 million (adjusted to current dollars).
 
 

THE ORIGINS OF THE CINDERELLA TALE

There are more than 3,000 versions of the Cinderella myth. Almost every world culture has one -she's known as "Yeh Shen" in China, "The Burnt Face Girl" to the Mik'maq tribe, "Tattercoats" in England, and "Marouckla" to the Slavs. While the story can't claim a sole author, it does have a few notable interpreters.

Charles Perrault was a minor literary figure in 18th Century France. In 1697 he published Contes de la Mère l'Oie (Tales of Mother Goose), which refashioned several well-known folktales such as "The Sleeping Beauty," "Little Red Riding Hood," and "Cinderella."

Perrault cleaned up the popular peasant version of the Cinderella tale for a more refined, upscale audience. In the original, the glass slipper was filled with blood from the severed toes and bunions of the wicked stepsisters [read more below], and the king eventually sentenced the step-mother and daughters to dance themselves to death, wearing rot hot iron boots (a popular form of torture in the Middle Ages).  Originally, Cinderella had on shoes made of fur, but this was changed to glass even before Charles Perrault wrote his version of the story by a simple happy mistake: the french words for "glass" ("verre") and "fur" ("vair") are very similar.

Mother Goose was translated into English in 1729, and the Brothers Grimm produced their famous German version in 1812.

There is no fairy godmother in the Grimms': Cinderella's real mother also dies here, and Cinderella plants a tree on her grave. The mother's spirit inhabits this tree, and fulfills the function of the fairy godmother by providing the garments for the ball.  The mother's spirit is arguably also contained in two white pigeons that assist Cinderella with her chores, a fact picked up in the Disney movie with the helpful mice (mentioned in Perrault as the horses for the coach) and birds that assemble her dress and otherwise cheer up her dreary existence.

When it comes time for the ball in the Grimms' version, there is not one, not two, but three full nights of dancing. Each time, Cinderella gets her dress and shoes by appealing to her mother's tree, returning them back after each night to change to her ash- covered clothing. Significantly, there is no midnight deadline for her return -- if you read the Grimms carefully, you see that Cinderella chooses to go home around midnight. This is the same logic we saw in Perrault; she is leading this prince on, because she wants him to fall in love with her and discover her at home, where he will be forced to accept her as she really is.

The prince, suitably worked up just as she wanted him, decides to get crafty. He orders the staircase to be covered with pitch, so that she should become stuck in it if she flees once more at midnight. On the third night, she does flee, and her golden slipper becomes entangled and she is forced to leave it behind. He then canvasses the countryside searching for the one who fits the shoe -- a detail that Disney leaves out in favor of the Perrault version.

And so the prince arrives at Cinderella's house, where the sisters try in vain to get the slipper to fit. Here the story veers radically away from Perrault's retelling, for the Grimms insert some violence here to punish the wicked sisters. The stepmother, in her zeal to secure the rich and powerful prince as a son, instructs her daughters to cut off parts of their feet to get the slipper to fit. Thus, the prince rides off with one who has a bloody heel, returns when the pigeons warn him, and then rides off with the other minus her big toe, until the birds again warn him.