I would say she does stand up for herself, when there's promised to be a better outcome if she does. When her stepmother outright forbids her getting a dress (something even the animated one didn't do), she makes herself one (unlike the animated Cindy who didn't). When she hears the Prince is looking for the girl with the glass slipper, she decides to retrieve it and flee. The times when she demures is when she doesn't see any good coming out of it. When the stepmother moves her to the attic, she doesn't protest because she figures her father will be back and ultimately she does want to get along with someone she has to live with. I speak from experience that it's not easy at all to bow to unpleasant people; it's actually much harder than snapping back at them, but them believing you're not a threat can pay off in the long run. Sometimes you do have to stand your ground and shove back, but you have to weigh what the plausible outcome will be and if it will be worth.
As for the prince, he does have character, way more than the animated prince. He likes palling with friends, and is worried his eventual authority will come between them. He's torn between seeking the random lady he might never see again, and pleasing his father and the nation. Eventually he learns how to do both.
And Lily James's waist is naturally that small, so I'm not sure what the point of blaming that is.
My primary issue is that she never seems to realise she's being abused, even when insults are being hurled into her face. The house is huge - she could have suggested a room other than the attic, but didn't. If her sewing skills were good enough to make that dress, fixing it should have been very easy - this is where the breakdown feels misplaced to me. And then, the one time she should have accepted Tremaine's deal and then exposed her to the court, she chooses to stand up for herself at the worst possible moment and gets herself locked in a room without food or water (I don't think Tremaine was planning to feed her at that point.) She writes down the events of the ball in her diary and hides the slipper with it! And instead of waiting for Tremaine and co to be out of the house when she goes to retrieve it.... well, you know how it goes. She makes terrible judgements throughout the whole movie. She is not, by any means, a compelling character.
Some of the shallowness of the romance is the fairytale aspect, I grant you - but unfortunately, having more character than the animated prince is not a terribly difficult thing to achieve. He has very little conflict to speak of, and his subplot is very, very similar to the prince's subplot in Ever After. Including the whole meeting Cinderella before the ball side of things.
As a final point, I know she's slender, but she had to go on a liquid diet to fit into that corset. There's nothing natural about that.
Oh she is well aware of it, otherwise it wouldn't have been making her miserable. And fixing that dress would have been more than just sewing the tears back together; once she finished there wouldn't be nearly enough time to get to the ball and back before her stepfamily returned. She might have even figured Tremaine was out of the house when she went to retrieve her slipper; her stepmother wasn't in any of the other rooms and Cindy didn't expect she'd be up in the attic when she hardly ever went there.
This is mostly just picking at each others' details by this point, but the nice thing about remakes is that anyone can just pick the version they like best and not worry about the particulars of others. Each of them are still basically the same tale.
The liquid diet thing is a myth. What she said was that if she ate solid foods whilst actually wearing the corset it made her burp a lot, so she tended to drink soups on set. I looked into that one because I wouldn't feel comfortable buying a ticket for a film where it was openly acknowledged that they have those standards.
I think it's naive to think that Cinderella was being naive. (Admittedly I've already had my own turn in saying this in my review). She knew what they were doing to her, her 'problem' was that she wanted to help them. Her conflict with the stepmother towards the end of the film is about that, she outright says that she hoped that if she was nice and tolerant enough, her stepmother would come to understand what _she_ was doing and regret her wrong doings. Her naivety was in believing that she could defeat the stepmothers hatred with her own kindness.
When she finally leaves the stepmother its because she has finally realised that her stepmother is too full of hatred to be saved.
Also (as I mentioned in my review) I just find it weird that we dislike people who are too nice to help themselves. You're not criticising Cinderella for being unrealistic, it's all too easy to point to real life examples who stay in horrible situations and don't fight back against people who bully them.
The problem you're having with Cinderella, is that we really dislike people like that. It's a worse character flaw that she won't stand up for herself, than if she'd been selfish or vain or prone to anger...
I've actually thought of a really good example of this. Take Jane Austen, one of the least favourite of her characters is Fanny in Mansfield Park. Fanny's problem is that she's constantly putting other people's needs above her own and she doesn't push back when people bully her. She's basically Cinderella 2.0
The whole book is essentially about how people are wrong to underestimate Fanny and think less of her because of her character. But that's exactly what the people who read the book did.
Fanny's 'flaw' is so much less bad than say Emma's flaw or Elizabeth Bennet, but people hate Fanny for it.
For me, soups count as a liquid diet - and this was the first time looking at a woman in a corset made me feel nauseous. Regarding the dress, the damage was nowhere near as extensive as in the animated version, and I do believe it could have been fixed. Time seems to be relative in this universe - she sewed the dress in what seems to be a day, seems to be all right without food and water for the days it had to have taken for the search to go through the whole kingdom... I maintain she could have done it, particularly as she thought she was meeting someone who wasn't nobility, let alone the prince.
And Tom, I'm not criticising her for being naive - there's a fine line between being naive and being an idiot, and the moment she just sings and twirls around in the attic at the end firmly places her in the latter category. Compare it to the animated version, where she actively tries to get out. I do, however, agree with Fanny Price being like Cinderella - right down to the passivity, not having much of a character arc at all, and really being the subject of other people's decisions rather than her own will. However, Fanny was conditioned from childhood to be very timid and passive - as was the animated Cinderella. This one had a few months, at best - not nearly enough to be turned into a submissive doormat.
In any case, I refer you guys to Doug and Rob Walker's review (beware, it's long!), which goes into more detail about the things I mentioned and adds more points: http://channelawesome.com/sibling-rivalry-cinderella/
I thought the movie was terrible, and I stand by that. I'm not judging you for liking it - more power to you - but I didn't, and I make no apologies for that.
What I'm saying is, she didn't go on a liquid diet to fit into the dress. Her body is naturally that thin.
I don't think you need to be "broken in" to be a passive person either. She was always a passive person and there was nothing about her lifestyle with her parents that would change that.
I would argue that Fanny would have always been timid anyway too. It's not like we require loud boisterous protagonists to have been 'raised badly' or w/e.
As to some of your other smaller points, I'm pretty certain she was being given food and water in her attic. The mother wasn't trying to kill her, just keep her prisoner.
She also didn't sew the dress in the film. It was her mothers dress, she just took it out so that it would fit her. That's fine to manage in a day. On the other hand that's a whole order of difficulty different from trying to repair a dress that's actively been ripped up in a couple of hours.
1. I refer you to these images:
in the corset: 
out of the corset:
Thin, but not that thin. Also, she couldn't properly digest food in the dress: http://uk.eonline.com/news/631646/lily-james-went-on-a-liquid-diet-to-fit-into-the-cinderella-corsets-watch-now Again, not natural.
See also:
2. Nature vs. nurture - I stand on the nurture side of the debate. However, mental abuse from an early age goes a long way into moulding a person into timidity: http://www.hiddenhurt.co.uk/abuse_victim_characteristics.html
3. Dialogue in the scene:
Corrupt guy: "And the girl?"
Stepmother: "Do with her what you will. She's nothing to me."
She states crystal clear she doesn't care what happens to Cinderella and barely feeds her before - why should she do so now? This also implies life imprisonment at best, death at worst.
4. She's shown sewing a sleeve in the film. She can repair it quickly. The damage the stepmother and stepsisters inflict is:
1 sleeve slightly torn, which can easily be hidden under the ruffles of her collar 1 ribbon torn off, which can be left off the skirt slightly yanked, which doesn't seem to inflict much damage at all.
I'm not trained in sewing, nor do I have a sewing machine, but I could fix that myself in 20 minutes. Someone who can take in an entire dress to fit her can certainly do that much.
Like I said before, it's more than just fixing it. After doing so she's have to walk all the way to the castle on foot trying not to get her clothes dirty and that would take her at least an hour, and an hour walking back trying to sure she gets home before her stepfamily returns. She was expecting to ride with them in their cab and get there in minutes.
That would indeed be a problem - if she wasn't shown riding a horse without a saddle or reigns in a previous scene. At speed - that requires skill. Before you argue that the stepmother took all the horses, I say this: the horse is not particularly glamorous, Tremaine assumes damaging the dress is sufficient to keep her there, and you never see it happen.
Additionally, the ball lasts all night. She could run over to the village and borrow a horse from her friends - she does have those. Finally, pay close attention to her "servant" outfit throughout the movie. She never gets dirty, even after a full day of chores. Only her face has a bit of soot on it to prove a point.
The movie itself disproves the defence of it taking time to fix the dress and get there by showing her as somewhat skilled and not friendless.
I'm still not convinced you can sew a dress back together in time. To me at least, it looked like she spent some days working on her dress the first time round.
There's an alternative, thanks to the sleeve being torn at the seam - cut off the second one too, to have it symmetrical. Remove the detached ribbon, and presto! All done, within 10 minutes - and you can expertly reattach them later, when you have the time.
Alternatively, there's always safety pins for a quick fix.
I don't think safety pins have been invented then. Also they ripped the front of her dress too right? You couldn't just cut that bit out
To be fair, when we're talking about removing sleeves we're at the point where we realise that she doesn't actually need a dress :P
She's got clothes, she could have just thrown on her everyday dresses and it'd be fine =D That's the fridge logic problem with inviting everyone to the ball (although I noticed they seemed to keep all the poor people out of the wideshots :p)
In the game Cinders, it's still an exclusive ball, Cinderella's family is gentry just right on the edge and so you need to pass as gentry to get to the ball. Which isn't possible with a repaired dress or everyday clothes.
That was actually the thing that bothered me most about the film tbh, way more than all the rest, that the intro really makes it clearly that Cinderella was born into the elite class. But then the film tries to pretend she's poor and a commoner. She keeps a goose and they try to pass that off as being a farmer.
They were invented in 1849 - and you could always use regular pins.
Pre-rip: ——http://s4.postimg.org/7d0n4al8t/Capture2.png-----
Post-rip: —-http://s21.postimg.org/5wu5j5ynr/Capture.png---
I don't see any damage on the skirt. The skirt seems layered, though, so I'm pretty sure you could trim the top layer.
Regarding the class thing, her father is a merchant - a rich one, presumably, but not nobility by any means. It's why Tremaine requests a title as a reward for turning Cinderella in. It's also why they get "ruined" when he dies, and have to fire all the staff. So I'd say middle class, in today's terms.
On a side not, nobles did like to experience the whole "rustic" life since at least Marie Antoinette's time, and it was similarly idyllic as Ella's life in the film. And Cinders is an interesting take on the story, with really good art.
The thing that's really bad about Ella, to me, is that they try to give her a character while at the same time keeping her as a placeholder for viewers to insert themselves in to - and so they succeed at neither. Try describing her character without using "courageous" or "kind", what she looks like, or what her role in the story is. It's quite difficult.
(Cinders is really good, this film might be my favourite screen adaptation, but it pales in comparison to Cinders. Cinders gets to show you so many different angles)
I completely disagree with it being hard to describe Cinderella's personality though, I think Cinderella never had personality in most tellings, but they really brought it out here.
The fact that we both recognised her as Fanny is good sign. Cinderella from say, the cartoon, wasn't Fanny, she was just generically nice and bland.
Cinderella from this film is the kind of person who has no idea on how to fight back at someone. You say something bad to her and she doesn't even know how to process you being bad to them. She thinks she can nice people into being nice to her. Big animal fan, (genuinely having a mental break down animal wise). Her positive trait is that she doesn't let people change her, she might not have any idea how to deal with aggression, but she refuses to change into the sort of person who would.
Those are qualities that define people. And it's not an 'every person' thing, because most people would try and fight back and they'd get annoyed and angry that someone wasn't trying to fight back enough, that they weren't sewing their dress or running away or w/e
Her role in the story is this: Cinderella is born without cynicism, the world tries to beat her down and beat it out of her, she refuses and eventually encounters people who recognise her qualities and give it the reward she deserves.
Her stepmothers role in the story is both to push her and to represent what could have happened if Cinderella gave in. Her stepmother was once young and beautiful and kind, but when the world beat her down she adapted. She married for love once, but when things went wrong she gave in and married for convenience. She stopped believing in caring for anyone but her and her family and it ended with her driven from the country.
The prince is the 'everyman' he's the person who has a level of kindness that real people can't relate to (and like to believe they are like at least)
I’ll talk about the side characters first, because they were the better parts of the movie. The problem with Tremaine in the movie is that they make her too much of a Bond villain – villainous laugh and all. They gave her a good backstory, but then went too far, and made her a comedic buffoon. She’s not intimidating in any sense of the word.
If you haven’t yet, watch Ever After. Kit’s story is 100% identical to Henry’s: meeting Cinderella before the ball on horseback, an arranged marriage waiting in the wings, not wanting to be king, enthralled by the mysterious beauty… except it’s heavily expanded, making you feel like he actually matures and changes. Kit was pretty much Prince Charming from the start – it was the surroundings that needed to change to accommodate his personality, really. I think he was alright, but still disappointing.
Now, onto Ella.
Your point about her refusing to change is important – because she doesn’t change at all. Granted, Cinderella in the original fairy tale doesn’t change much either, but she’s isolated, usually kept ignorant and friendless, and swarmed with chores. Ella has friends in the village who question why she stays at the house which obviously isn’t a home for her anymore – and she answers like an abuse victim defending their abuser would. A normal person would develop – break under the abuse gradually, their personality would change over time… Ella stays as giddy and empty at the end as she is at the beginning. She has no arc, no conflict, no personality beyond what is stated in the fairy tale (kind and good to animals.) In a fairy tale told to a child, that might be enough, but in a feature film, they have 90 minutes to give you more.
I view the positives you showed as very sharp negatives. She doesn’t seem to be fully aware that she’s being abused, she just stands there and takes it with an empty smile. I’d accept her trying to think they just didn’t know better a few times, but after having been systematically abused for months, surely she would have had a breakdown sooner, or been less cheerful. From start to finish, I feel absolutely nothing for this non-character, because she doesn’t even seem to care about her own suffering, making it seem like she isn’t suffering at all – and that she hasn’t really “earned” anything.
Danielle in Ever After gets whipped. Giselle in Enchanted gets stranded in a world she doesn’t understand. Even Ella in Ella Enchanted has to obey commands without question. They were also born into worlds without cynicism, as you say – Danielle reads Moore’s Utopia, Giselle befriends singing animals, Ella’s family has a house fairy. Danielle is a rebellious spirit, Giselle tries to see goodness in everyone and make them happy, Ella is not easily impressed with Prince Char. They are all versions of Cinderella that did something new with the material, because you have to build upon the simple, short fairy tale to have something of substance. They aren’t necessarily complicated characters, but they have a character, and they make you care about them and their struggles. They all have the stepmother, the prince, and the stepsisters. They’re interesting. Their stories deserve to be told.
This Ella is neither interesting, nor do I sympathise with her at all. She brings nothing new to the Cinderella story except the reinforcement of the original moral of the story – that if you’re a good girl and take your abuse obediently, maybe, just maybe, a rich man might recognise your worth. With this main character, in this medium, the story falls flat, and I don’t think this movie has a reason to exist. It’s a pretty but meaningless cash-in, and I can only hope Beauty and the Beast and especially Mulan fare better.
(Cinders is awesome.)
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Beautiful, but bad.
That's the short summary of this movie.
The good:
The sets and costumes are gorgeous. The music is also not bad, which is always nice. And somehow, the CG mice manage to get past my natural level of cynicism.
Cate Blanchett is hilariously hammy as the stepmother. Richard Madden provides the viewer with the opportunity to engage in a wealth of Game of Thrones jokes - particularly as his Captain of the Guard hails from the same show.
The bad:
I'm tempted to oversimplify, but I think the best way to sum it up is: no one has any character. The Stepmother has the most of it in her monologue about why she married Ella's father, but even that is very limited. Despite increased screentime, the Prince has no character either. He falls for a pretty face in the span of five minutes, without much of an explanation. The stepsisters are completely hollow, as are all the other side characters. But the point where the film falls flat is its protagonist.
Ella is, and I say this with the utmost sadness, an idiot. When she should be worrying about starving to death in the attic, she spins around and hums to herself. When she should be running home, she stops to pointlessly talk to people. She tries to be all unconventional when she tells the Prince not to kill the deer he's hunting, because it's not right, but never displays any kind of backbone anywhere else - even though the servants who get dismissed clearly ask her why she stays at the house to be abused! She never stands up for herself, and thus her forgiveness of her stepmother feels completely hollow - you never expected her to say anything else, so you're not surprised at all. Or impressed. Compare this with the final scene in Ever After, which has much more of an impact - and is a film this one tried and failed to copy, in some aspects. Compare it to Enchanted, where Giselle is also a twirly Disney princess, but she learns to stand up for herself and for the people she loves instead of waiting for a prince to save her.
The twist in this seems to be that Cinderella has gone even further back in time than the 50s version, complete with her waspish waist (which is narrower than her head!), which would have made her very fashionable in around Victorian times. When her big sparkly ballgown has way more character than your protagonist, you need to rethink your screenplay, Disney or not.