Disney Was In Distress During The Late 1940s. Then ‘Cinderella’ Came To The Rescue And Saved The Company From Financial Disaster
Source: Smithsonian Magazine, Mary Randolph
Photo: Supervising animator Marc Davis often explored costume designs and helped develop the look and accessories of the characters he animated, including Cinderella. (Courtesy of Fox Carney/Disney Animation Research Library)
Over 75 years after its release, the film is still connecting with animators and audiences
In 1948, Walt Disney Studios was in trouble. The company, started in 1923 by advertising artist and animator Walt Disney and his brother, Roy, had brought the Mickey Mouse character into millions of American homes through cartoons and merchandise. In 1937, it had produced Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, which was a huge success. Upon initial release, it earned around $8 million, nearly $185 million today.
But with the 1940s came World War II and workers’ strikes, and Disney lost its foreign markets, most of its box office sales and many of its creative staff. After the company spent the war producing propaganda and training films for the government, it faced a debt of $4.5 million (around $65 million today).
Disney needed a hit.
“During and just after World War II, they’re really kind of gaining this identity as an American brand,” says Bethanee Bemis, a museum specialist at the National Museum of American History who researches Disney theme parks. “But at the same time, they were pretty deep in debt, and there was a lot of uncertainty [about] the company and what would happen next for them.”
The studio had not produced a feature-length animation since Bambi in 1942, which had not been a financial success, and the staff knew they needed something like Snow White to save the company.
Their salvation would come in 1950, in the form of a kind, long suffering scullery maid. In Cinderella, the titular character, mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters, has the chance to attend a royal ball with the help of her fairy godmother’s magic and sweet animal friends. There, she meets and falls in love with a prince but must leave the ball at midnight as the magic fades, before the prince learns her identity, and the two are separated—until he finds her using a glass slipper she left behind. She and the prince get married, and, of course, live happily ever after. Cinderella would go on to become a mainstay in Disney’s princess lineup.
“America loves an underdog story, and you don’t get much more of an underdog than the scullery maid, or the woman who’s been cast aside in the castle,” Bemis says. “And so, we really identify with these princesses. But I think also the sort of sidekick characters provide a way for people on the outside to see themselves. Part of what makes Disney so successful is that their characters are flexible enough that almost everyone can see themselves in one of them.”
In 1922, before he started Walt Disney Studios, Disney made a short “laugh-o-gram” cartoon inspired by Charles Perrault’s classic 1697 fairytale, Cendrillon ou La petite pantoufle de verre (Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper).
In 1948, the studio began work on it as a feature film. To do so, Disney brought together his “nine old men”—a group of animators who worked at the studio from the 1920s to the 1980s. Several of them had been away in the military, and Disney wanted this film to bring them back together, says Mindy Johnson, an animation historian who worked as a publicist for Walt Disney Studios.
“The whole production process was designed and structured to get everybody back on the same page with their skills and their talent and the vision of storytelling,” Johnson says.
Disney also brought in Mary Blair as the color stylist and concept artist for Cinderella. Originally a watercolor artist, Blair often brought together colors in ways that were unusual and had more “whimsy” than was typical for Disney, says Brittney Lee, a visual development artist and production designer for the studio.
The color palette and visual language employed by artist Mary Blair greatly inspired the look of the final film. Courtesy of Fox Carney / Disney Animation Research Library
“Her palettes at the time were so unexpected,” Lee says. “But now we look at these palettes that she created and to us, it’s the quintessential fairytale.”
As was typical before the advent of most modern animation technology, Blair likely spent hours sketching out different color palettes that artists now test with the click of a button, Lee says. The studio also brought in live-action references for the characters in the film as guides for the animators.
According to early Disney animator Marc Davis, the scene where Cinderella’s tattered pink dress transforms into the famous ballgown was one of Walt Disney’s favorite animations. Johnson says this reflects a larger goal of Disney.
“That transition moment always typified what Walt was aspiring to in each of his films, a sense of magic and wonder and transformation and possibility in life,” she says.
While talking about artist Mary Blair’s use of color in the film, Brittney Lee made one note: “The dress is silver.” Though current commercial re-creations of the dress are often blue, and some lighting in the film gives it more of a blueish hue, the original animation of Cinderella’s dress was silver. “Anyone who ever gets to say anything about Cinderella from Disney Animation, we like to make that distinction,” Lee says.
Beyond the dress or style or animation, though, the storytelling was what really resonated with audiences, says Fox Carney, manager for research at the Walt Disney Animation Research Library. Coming out of the war, he says, the story captured a “spirit of optimism” that the American public was craving.
“Even though the audiences may have changed after the events that the world had endured, I think there was something simplistic about it, something engaging,” he says. “The story reflected that everybody can go from tough times to wonderful times, which kind of models the society at the time.”
This audience connection was reflected in the box office, and it’s estimated that the film’s initial earnings, according to a Walt Disney Family Museum post, were around $7 million (more than $94 million today), which brought the company out of debt and allowed it to continue production on films such as 1951’s Alice in Wonderland and 1953’s Peter Pan. The financial stability also allowed the founder to turn his focus to projects like theme parks: Disneyland in California opened in 1955.
“The success of Cinderella not only ushered animation back as an in-demand medium of masterful storytelling and visual artistry, but the success of it on every level opened the doors for the modern, complex world of everything Disney,” Johnson says.
Today, Carney gives tours of the Animation Research Library to animators and designers, and says he often observes them drawing inspiration from the work of past animators.
Lee, who has worked as an artist on the Frozen franchise, says the color work and the design of the castle in those movies have many influences from Cinderella.
Blair’s work specifically, Lee says, has a timeless quality that she aims to bring to all of her projects.
“There’s so much whimsy in her work and so much fun and charm for all of the different projects she worked on, but the pathos aspect of the work in Cinderella really helps the film have the weight that it does, the longevity, the relatability, even for audiences 75 years later.”
The fairytale remains relevant for the public, too. Since its initial release, the film has had numerous re-releases worldwide, and Cinderella has become the model for the Disney princess, Carney says.
“The fact that people still talk about it means that it has an impact,” he says. “It has a connection. It’s made that connection, and it’s not letting go.”
Bemis, author of Disney Theme Parks and America’s National Narratives, says that since the creation of the parks, the Cinderella castle, even more than Mickey Mouse, has become the ultimate symbol of Disney. She points to how many children of different backgrounds come to the parks dressed as Cinderella seven decades after the film’s release.
“Cinderella and other films like it have become these touchstones of American film history that are passed down from generation to generation,” she says. “Repeating these stories to each other is one of the ways in which we create a collective identity. We’re all repeating these stories to our children, and we’re in effect telling them, ‘This is who we are.’”
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