As Wonderful As You Seem: Cinderella in the Modern World

To look at the recent film and television landscape, you might think we're in a new golden age for fairy tales. Into the Woods and Maleficent scored big at the box office, while Once Upon A Time continues to enchant viewers every Sunday evening (despite its exasperating habit of making every fairytale character somehow related to the others). And you can't take a step without some reminder of the unstoppable ice behemoth that is Frozen. All of these fairy tales, however, have one thing in common: they are all revisionist, mostly darker, takes on the fairy tale. To be sure, these stories are closer in many ways to the spirit of old European fairy tales, which are much darker than an audience weaned on Disney would suspect. But there has been one holdout, one fairy tale that, despite having not one but two recent updates, has remained unabashedly hopeful, gentle, and positive. The tale? Cinderella.