Kenneth Branagh didn't crash "Cinderella"

In this "Job 1" scenario, an artist who loves classics left this classic story intact

During our recent road trip to Kansas and Colorado, we — #duh — listened to quite a few audiobooks and podcasts. One highlight was the great Kenneth Branagh performing “The Magician’s Nephew” by C.S. Lewis, which is my favorite (as an old guy) novel in The Chronicles of Narnia series.

I give Branagh’s talking bulldog voice five stars. Ah, but what about Aslan?

That was great, too. Because of the digital chatter about a certain Netflix Narnia casting controversy (see “Can Meryl Streep provide Aslan's deep voice?”), I enjoyed listening to Branagh.

Shortly after getting home, I tried to start a hashtag on X — #KennethBranagh4Aslan — but I couldn’t get the attention of anyone important.

This proved, once again, that my online clout is next to zero. What is the secret to starting a #hashtag virus in social media? Please offer tips in the comments pages.

Anyway, while doing some grandfather work related to shopping, I ran into the Marina McBain YouTube channel. She has been doing lots of content, as of late, on the neverending remakes story (See what I did there?) in the Disney cinematic universe, as well as DreamWorks, etc.

Anyway, I enjoyed her take on the 2015 “Cinderella” from Disney. McBain’s short opinion feature is at the top of this post: “Why Cinderella Was the Only Good Disney Live Action!” Yes, the journalism nag in me removed one of her exclamation points.

Anyway, this fairy tale remake was directed by Kenneth Branagh — an interesting choice, to say the least.

McBain loved it, for an interesting reason. It appears that Branagh decided to expand the story a bit, but not in ways that added “MODERN AUDIENCE” content.

In other words, in this remake Cinderella doesn’t morph into an oppressed, strong Girl Boss who leads a semi-socialist rebellion to seize control of the local kingdom. Instead, Branagh and his team added depth to Cinderella’s character by adding — get this — additional evidence of character.

The key: Her dying mother challenges her, no matter what happens in the future, to “have courage and be kind.” That’s the theme of the whole movie.

Oh, and there is a rather natural and positive first meeting between Cinderella and the prince in which she doesn’t, for logical reasons, realize that he is the prince. Their attraction is real and, wait for it, intelligent. And, of course, Cinderella is radiant.

According to my librarian wife, who has more than a little experience with children’s literature, it appears that the screenwriter and Branagh’s researchers developed this new “old” material by digging into the hundreds of traditional variations on this fairy tale. (Along those lines, keep your eyes open for this graphic novel in the hopefully near future.)

McBain believes that Branagh and Co. “updated” this story by making it deeper and more traditional — thus adding to its appeal in ways that would not offend those who love the original fairy tale and the 1950 Disney classic. This rather odd Disney team managed, first of all, to “do no harm.” Then Branagh and Co. made intelligent and even beautiful choices.

You can see where this is going, right? We are looking at another one of those “Job 1” Hollywood equations that I have been writing about, as of late.

First, see this post: “What is Job 1, when you run a pop super-franchise?” The context is the billions of dollars in red ink that Hollywood executives have created with their “modernized” versions of beloved entertainment franchises, such as classic Disney, Star Wars, Pixar, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Star Trek, J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Harry Potter, the Marvel cinematic universe, Doctor Who, etc. Will Netflix Narnia join this list? To see another variation, check out this recent update: “Yes, Hollywood re-marketed your dragon.”

Here is the Job 1 thesis material, once again:

… I’m talking about money, as well as matters of quality or even “art” of some kind. Consider this a sequel to posts such as “Age of the crashing Hollywood empires” and “Disney Wars: $Billions at stake.”

Now, the big questions:

Is Job 1 to please the core fans that made your product a profitable franchise in the first place? Is it to be faithful to the source material for the franchise, whether we’re talking about classic books, comics, foundation films or whatever? Should managers be faithful to the “canon” of a franchise, to its core principles and worldview? Can they build on it while being faithful to the past?

Or is Job 1 finding a way to EXPAND the franchise into a new generation, reaching the “modern audiences” that allegedly represent the future? After all, the folks in the 18-40 demographic of a decade or more ago are not the anxious young ticket buyers of today. Should you take your franchise into new forms of technology (think streamed series instead of films)? And once you have moved past your classic stories, who will write new material that matches the quality of the classics?

Branagh chose the first option. He chose wisely.

McBain was not the only critic who noticed this counter-cultural Cinderella.

Writing for The New Yorker, critic Anthony Lane noted that:

For the next hundred minutes or more, we get the story straight, with no strings or second thoughts attached. Cinderella (Lily James) is the child of a loving mother (Hayley Atwell) and an equally doting father (Ben Chaplin). They dwell in a meadow-girt house — a small and cloudless kingdom of their own — inside a larger kingdom that is smilingly ruled by an elderly monarch (Derek Jacobi), soon to be succeeded by his merry yet thoughtful son, Kit (Richard Madden). Cinderella’s mother dies, very gently, and her place is taken by a stepmother (Cate Blanchett) and her querulous daughters (Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera). Cinderella’s father dies, on a journey, leaving her to be bullied and put to work. …

What are we to make of this? It is a Disney production, written by Chris Weitz and directed by Kenneth Branagh, and it’s all in live action, brocaded with special effects, and deeply in debt to the animated version of 1950. Indeed, there is barely a frame of Branagh’s film that would cause Uncle Walt to finger his mustache with disquiet. The effect is to erase any memory not just of DreamWorks’ “Shrek” franchise, where Pinocchio gags were tossed around like toys, but also of Disney’s own “Enchanted,” which held up the figures of legend, like the prince and the sugar-sweet maiden, as if in quotation marks. At a time when that deconstructive urge is the norm, and in an area of fiction — the fairy tale — that has been trampled by critical theory, Branagh has delivered a construction project so solid, so naïve, and so rigorously stripped of irony that it borders on the heroic. You could call it “Apocalypse Never.”

My friend Steven D. Greydanus, a permanent Catholic deacon who posts at Decent Films, offered a nuanced review topped with this headline: “Kenneth Branagh’s subversively non-subversive fairy tale offers an antidote to lazy Hollywood revisionism.”

Amen. His review opens with a tsunami of logical questions, ending with this transition:

Can the protagonists of a major Hollywood family film still hope to be born into happy families and enjoy close relationships with loving parents — relationships unshadowed by misunderstanding and oppressive parental expectations, if not by tragedy and misfortune?

Is it conceivable that a heroine might meet a young man who is neither a scoundrel, misfit, buffoon nor uncouth loner: a young man whose sensitivity, courtesy and poise matches her own? Can we gain some insight into the psychology and motivations of an iconic villainess without transmogrifying her into a misunderstood heroine?

Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella is such a gallant anachronism, such a grandly unreconstructed throwback, that it offers, without ever raising its voice, a ringing cross-examination of our whole era of dark, gritty fairy-tale revisionism. These stories have been around for centuries, the film seems to say. Are you sure they will be improved by making the heroines oppressed by society or their parents, making the male love interests the moral or cultural inferiors of the heroines, adding battle scenes and so forth?

I’ll be honest: I wouldn’t mind seeing some revisionism in Cinderella’s story. I would like the heroine to be a more active agent in her own story. The film, though, brushes this aside: Never mind what you would do with it; this is the story. Isn’t this a good story, worth telling just as it is?

And you know what? It is.

Yes, Greydanus has questions — including why the new movie lacks even the fleeting references to faith and the church seen in the Disney classic. Why not have a fairy tale wedding in a cathedral?

But I thought this passage was crucial:

Branagh doesn’t paper over Ella’s heartbreak at losing her mother as a girl and her father as a young lady. These tragedies put into perspective the indignities she endures from her cruel stepfamily; she’s suffered worse.

Branagh has said he wanted to make Cinderella a movie in which “kindness was a superpower,” and, indeed, Ella’s goodness and inner strength allow her to accept her humiliations with equanimity, not because she’s weak, but because questions of status and privilege mean little to her.

Imagine that. Oh, and another miracle: This prince charming is both charming and humble.

I know what some of you are thinking: Why didn’t Disney take a similar approach to the tale of “Snow White” and her heroic revolutionaries?

Yes, why didn’t the lords and ladies of Disney chose to do that? What doctrines led them astray?