![]() While there’s nothing in Branagh’s film to frighten the magical horses (the BBFC description delightfully warns of “very mild scenes of emotional upset”), there’s plenty to like, and a little to love. Although fragments of McKenna’s reported “political marriage” theme remain in Weitz’s rewrite, Romanek jumped ship in early 2013 amid reports of disagreements about “a darker version than Disney were happy with”. It’s all a far cry from the project first announced back in 2010, when the financial success of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderlandprompted Disney to greenlight Aline Brosh McKenna’s Cinderella script to which Never Let Me Go director Mark Romanek was attached. If that sounds fantastically unexciting, a $132m worldwide opening proves that Branagh’s “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” instincts were entirely on the money. Resisting modern urban updates, Branagh thus returns us to the strange netherworld of European folklore and Disney Americana upon which the House of Mouse was built. Why, Cinders even talks to the tiny mice who are the only friends in her coal-scuttle existence I half expected her to burst into a chorus of A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes. This is an unashamedly old-fashioned world of pumpkin coaches, glass slippers and chimes-at-midnight transformations. While Maleficent and Into the Woods unpicked their fairytale roots, Chris Weitz’s screenplay is almost radically anti-revisionist in its refusal to rewrite familiar tropes. Most remarkably, Branagh took the straw of Marvel’s Thor comic strip and spun from it the gold of a surprisingly witty blockbuster ( Transformers meets Xanadu), a remarkable feat of movie magic.Īnd so to Cinderella, a live-action reboot of one of Disney’s most enduring animations (the credits cite their “Cinderella properties” alongside Perrault), notable for its straight-faced sentimentality and unfashionable absence of post- Enchanted irony. Meanwhile, the Hitchcock pastiche Dead Again went from being a copper-bottomed catastrophe to a Stateside hit after an 11th-hour sprinkling of fairy dust (in the form of reprocessed black-and-white flashbacks) turned it from pauper to princess. One of Branagh’s finest fantasy flicks, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, was as cruelly treated as any of Charles Perrault’s fabled heroines, while the marvellously Ken Russell-esque The Magic Flute signally failed to be showered with riches or made the belle of any box-office ball. T here’s always been a fairytale element to Kenneth Branagh’s directing career the question of whether or not he’ll go to the ball tends to hang over all his movies, right up until the clock strikes 12.
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