In the days since Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella hit cinemas, discussions of its merits have focused on one narrow area: Cinderella’s waist size. The film is a live action reboot not just of the fairy tale itself but Disney’s 1950 animated version, from the fairy godmother and glass slippers down to star Lily James’ teeny-weeny corseted midsection.

Its deeply regressive politics have been covered too, with some reviewers assessing it as even even more conservative than the animated original. It’s almost surprising that a movie like this could even be made in a post-Frozen world, as Tracey McVeigh wrote in the Guardian – a world where we increasingly expect women on-screen, especially in children’s entertainment, to act like human beings with preferences, flaws and inner lives.

But more specifically, it’s surprising that this film was made in a world with so many re-imagined Disney princesses. The internet is saturated with fan-made art, writing and other cultural products based on TV, movies and books, which mostly stay confined to their own little corners of the online world. Remixed princesses, on the other hand, are everywhere. With beards, as Avengers, in retro clothing, as different ethnicities.



The desire to reclaim Disney is strong. It makes sense when you consider that many people producing this kind of content grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the era in which Disney successfully rebooted its princess franchise. The increasing amount of attention paid to identity-political issues like race and sexuality in media, The Young People Internet’s insatiable appetite for 90s nostalgia, and the ease with which we can now share images combine to produce an ideal habitat for princesses with a twist.

The phenomenon of princess remixing has been going for so long that people have started to make fun of it: Clickhole produced a satirical set of princesses of colour re-rendered as white, and Buzzfeed replied with its own list of the damsels as pencils, staplers, rubber bands and other office supplies.

Which is to say: the old-fashioned values of the Disney princess franchise have been thoroughly taken apart from many, many angles, and the process has attracted a huge audience. There is even a set where the princesses are altered to have “realistic waistlines” rather than waspy hourglass figures, which makes the contrast with Branagh’s classic, unrealistic Cinderella silhouette even more pronounced.



Disney’s audience has spoken, and its demands have been comprehensively ignored. It’s an odd thing to witness in an age of omnipresent fan culture: a film that tries to exempt itself from the dialogue into which creators are now supposed to enter with the masses.

Naturally, the film’s female star, Lily James, has attracted most of this criticism. She’s called the controversy over her waist irrelevant, and she’s not wrong: the point should not be her body or decisions. If Branagh and the studio wanted Cinderella to have a tiny waist, that’s what she was going to have, regardless of who they selected to bring her to life.

Either nobody associated with the film cottoned on to the bad taste it was going to leave in people’s mouths, or their commitment to a redundantly faithful rehash was so ironclad that they didn’t care. The number of people who have made and shared Disney princess remixes is not small, and the motivation has always been a desire to challenge the retrograde values that Branagh has chosen to regurgitate.

Why alienate the group that has demonstrated a real and ongoing attachment to the princess characters? This is Hollywood spitting directly in the faces of Tumblr and Buzzfeed enthusiasts, despite the fact that they are the core group that would have embraced a Cinderella story adapted to address some of their political concerns – just look at the excitement over the advances of Frozen, Brave, and The Princess and the Frog.



Cinderella is part of an ongoing dialogue that the entertainment industry must now have with its customers, even if it doesn’t want to. The film’s internal ideological content represents a turn toward the certainty of fairy tales that exist somewhere in the distant and mythical past: royalty, castles, hierarchy, romance, rigid gender roles. The way it refuses to engage in or respond to contemporary political issues is itself retrograde, and reasserts a traditional unidirectional relationship between creators and consumers that no longer exists.

Audiences no longer respond to being patronised like this, and at the very least the film should have had the sense to poke fun at itself, which it doesn’t. It’s played straight down the line, without a trace of humour or irony. If not for the modern production techniques it could be straight out of the 1950s. Branagh has misunderstood the level at which “retro” reinterpretations, like those of Disney’s princesses, are appealing: they are supposed to claim, implicitly, the good bits without the bad bits; the fashion and vibe without all the nasty bad stuff that existed in the past.