“When Lady Tremaine steals the Fairy Godmother’s wand and changes history, it’s up to Cinderella to restore the timeline and reclaim her prince.”
– Anonymous, IMDB.
The second sequel to the 1950 classic, Cinderella 3 is a direct continuation to the original film. Starring as Cinderella is Jennifer Hale, who also voices Commander Shepard in Mass Effect and Samus Aran in the Metroid Prime series. Cinderella 3 received a mostly positive response among the seven critics compiled at Rotten Tomatoes, who gave it a 71% rating.
Some thoughts from me (Potential spoilers below)…
Cinderella 3 is probably the best thing to come out of the Disney sequels of the early 2000s. How sad is it that it’s impressive that it’s genuinely entertaining? Cinderella 3 sort of feels like an attempt by someone to ‘fix’ the original movie. They make Cinderella a more active protagonist and they give more time to develop the side characters (Including the Prince).
They also poke at the whole “I’ll marry the girl who fits this slipper” deal… Which, didn’t actually need tweaking. Cinderella 3 has the Prince admit that the “I’ll marry the girl who fits this slipper” thing was a mistake, but if you watch the original film it’s shown that the slipper thing was not the Prince’s idea. After Cinderella flees the ball, the Grand Duke tells the King that the Prince intends to marry the girl who fits her slipper. The King (Desperate for grandchildren), decides to hold his son to his exact words. The Grand Duke even tells the King that the slipper could fit any number of women, and the King basically shrugs it off. So this bit of re-writing of history didn’t really have to happen. I think Disney was making the assumption that people wouldn’t remember that specific scene and they wanted to cover their bases in this sequel.
There’s two particular scenes in Cinderella 3 that stick out to me: One actually kinda cool sequence, and one really hilarious moment. If you end up watching this movie, try and pick out which is which.
I will say that Lady Tremaine feels a bit less scary in this one. It’s funny, but to me at least she seemed more threatening without magic powers. I think probably because giving her powers makes her feel more cartoonishly villainous, while her first incarnation, the emotionally abusive matriarch, was the kind of villainy that can easily happen in real life (Which I think makes it resonate a lot more).
Overall, this one is definitely worth a look, if only for those two scenes I hinted at above. So feel free to check this one out, and get a taste of one of the better Disney direct-to-video sequels.
Bad Princess Movies 
Leave a Reply