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Walt Disney’s Cinderella, retold by Cynthia Rylant
Everybody knows the story of Cinderella. Poor maiden neglected and abused by evil stepmother and stepsisters, gets help from a magical fairy and goes to the grand ball, meets the prince, falls in love, her carriage turns into a pumpkin at midnight, etc., etc.
Those of you, parents and grandparents, may remember being enchanted as youngsters by Disney’s animated “Cinderella” - all right, boys maybe not so much.
Heard it all before? Probably not as told by Cynthia Rylant, and probably not with the exquisite renderings of artist Mary Blair.
Even the cover suggests something a little different is afoot. A tiny dot of an eye and puff of blush on a maiden’s face suggest a hurried, harried state as curtains billow in her wake.
Visually enchanting
The art comes from Mary Blair, who painted the original pictures for Walt Disney’s animated film. Blair (1911-1978) was one of Disney’s leading conceptual artists. She helped define the look of Cinderella and other Disney classics during her three-decade career with Disney. Not just tossed-off storyboard renderings, the artwork serves as inspiration for Rylant’s elegant story. This is a story about Love, with a capital “L.”
Cinderella yearned for love. But she was orphaned and knew only misery. “She lived in a dark house, with people who did not love her,” Rylant writes.
“Cinderella’s house and Cinderella’s life were ruled by a cold, hard woman with a face of stone and a heart sick with envy.” You see the woman with a severe bun that seems to stretch her face too taut. Cinderella’s mother died first, then her father remarried, then he died, leaving her with the others - her stepmother and stepsisters.
“Love meant nothing, and if Love ever did come to them, it is unlikely they would even have known what it was.” And there is a picture of a bedraggled Cinderella, her delicate eyes cast downward as she plods through her daily drudgery of mops and scrub brushes.
The Prince needs a bride
Meanwhile, the king, getting old and looking slightly silly waving his sword about the palace, has declared that his son the prince must find a bride.
“The king had a fine son, a son with integrity and courage and loyalty and honor,” Rylant writes. Have you ever read of a character with “integrity” in a children’s story before? The word seems a tad modern and sophisticated. But it suits him. And, it turns out, the word is rooted to much earlier centuries English.
The prince would seek a bride to be his new queen. There would be a grand ball to find a worthy maiden. And so the game was afoot.
With black longing in their hearts
“Cinderella’s stepmother and stepsisters received this news with black longing in their hearts.” Black longing! It’s no wonder stepparents have such bad press. Rylant must have lingered over that phrasing for some time. Such a perfect combination. Such condemnation in so few words.
Cinderella, of course, was left out of all the grand plans. She knew of them and she wanted to go to the ball. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be. “Her heart told her that Love was waiting there. Cinderella stared at the sad, shabby, sooty girl in the mirror, and her heart broke from what she dreamed of and couldn’t have.”
She ran outside and wept.
“Tears have a wondrous magic about them. They often change everything. And for Cinderella, on this night, tears created a miracle.”
Although Rylant described the fairy godmother as “kind and gentle,” she possesses a vaguely menacing smirk in the painting. But there was no menace, just an admonition to return home before midnight. And off she flew, with a chariot made out of a pumpkin and four horses transformed from mice.
In silence, Love found them
The prince found her in the ballroom.
The moment they touched, the young prince knew she was the one for him. “Cinderella and the young prince danced into a private world all their own. They did not even speak. In silence, Love found them.” There are moonlit skies and sparkling dance floors and grand ballroom swags swaying in soft evening breezes. How could Love not blossom?
Then the clock struck 12. Cinderella ran, leaving one of her glass slippers behind. There’s that girl in the frantic dash we saw on the cover again, with the tiny eye and the alarmed eyebrow, and now we know what the hurry is (if we didn’t before).
“The prince, surprised and hurt, tried to stop her, but she ran so fast and people were standing in the way. The girl was gone; the only thing left of her a smooth glass slipper.”
Happy ending, with a twist
We know the story doesn’t end here, however. A fairy tale has to have a happy ending, right? And there is, but with a slight twist.
The palace sent a duke to comb the kingdom in search of a maiden whose delicate foot would fit in the slipper. Cinderella never got to try that slipper on, the one she had left behind in haste at the palace, for it slipped out of the duke’s hand before she could try it on. It shattered.
Luckily, she had a spare. She was returned to the palace and greeted by the prince. And as the story goes, they lived happily ever after.
The story of Cinderella is well known, but in Rylant’s capable hands, it has a feel of maturity about it, that this is something more than a child’s fairy tale. Maybe it’s Love, with a capital “L.”
– Dave Wilson
Walt Disney’s Cinderella, Retold by Cynthia Rylant.
Pictures by Mary Blair. Disney Press. $16.99.
ISBN 978-1-4231-0421-6. 64 pages.
