The origins of Cinderella are often disputed. In Western literature, the earliest written version is Cenerentola, written by Giambattista Basile in 1634. The version which is closest to the one we know today is, Cendrillon by Charles Perroult in 1697. The Brothers Grimm also wrote a version in 1812, Aschenputtel. This version has a wishing tree instead of a fairy godmother, and it is in this version that the step sisters have their eyes pecked out by birds as retribution for their cruelty.

However, there are also claims of Cinderella-esque stories existing in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese legends. Arguments have also been made about Cinderella-esque stories existing within One Thousand and One Nights.

Despite its various iterations, the more brutal of which see the stepsisters’ eyes pecked out by birds at the story’s end, the story is more or less the same.

In this excellent video, Kurt Vonnegut breaks down various story shapes, and succinctly outlines the trajectory of the Cinderella storyline. So we can broadly break the formula down as follows:

Step One: Girl and boy find one another and in finding one another, make each other happier. Sometimes we may see difficulty in how they get together, which makes it all the more rewarding when indeed they do first kiss.

Step Two: Something happens to drive them apart; a misunderstanding, a betrayal—perceived or otherwise, the personal hangups of one or both of the characters; basically any plot device in the shape of a wedge between our happy couple.

Step Three: Reconciliation, which is generally facilitated by a grand romantic gesture.

Modern rom-coms generally lubricate the transition between steps two and three through some kind of introspection, or realisation of a personal foible which is preventing them achieving true happiness. Arguably, the parallel is the prince’s quest throughout the land to find the woman to whom the lost slipper—glass or otherwise—belongs. Nevertheless, a significant number of rom-coms (as the most prominent example) follow this structure with reasonable consistency.

Consider: To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, Silver Linings Playbook, Trainwreck (which inverts the gender roles of much of the traditional narrative but nevertheless follows the formula quite religiously), Friends With Benefits, Pretty Woman, and Ten Things I Hate About You (which possesses an artful ‘b’ storyline in the form of Cameron and Bianca that actually defies this formula, but I feel we can thank Shakespeare for this nice twisting of the traditional narrative progression).

But while we love the up-down-up element of the narrative, it’s arguably more than simply the manner in which the storyline progresses that makes it so beloved. We can attribute this to some of the key elements within the story.

Let’s look first at the rags-to-riches aspect. This narrative contains a fantasy that it would be hard to argue isn’t daydreamed about by many. The idea that someone middle class (like most of us) can be abruptly swept up and transplanted into a world of luxury and opulence. Really, who wouldn’t want to suddenly be dropped in a glittering world where their every whim is met. When it’s not a question of ‘if’, not even ‘how’, but ‘how long’.

The runaway success of the Fifty Shades trilogy can’t be dismissed, no matter how hard many would like it to be. One could easily argue that the Cinderella element to it is what made it such a deeply enthralling read to so many: a young, relatively unremarkable woman is plucked out of her humdrum life, lavishes luxurious gifts upon her, and eventually transports her to the modern-day equivalent of a castle: the penthouse of a luxury apartment.

Similarly, Crazy Rich Asians, 2018’s big rom-com film which is based on the book by Kevin Kwan. Rachel, our run of the mill college professor who worries about her weekly budget and only owns something like three dresses, finds out that her boyfriend is actually the heir to one of the most wealthy families in the Asian region.

Upon their arrival in Singapore, she is treated to every luxury imaginable, pampered, clothed, and fed like a princess. The sheer opulence with which she finds herself surrounded makes the story engaging and fascinating—especially as many of us can literally only dream of experiencing such things.

I mean, it we wanted to get really deep (always dangerous territory), it could be argued that this functions as an analogue for the American Dream. How? Well, significant upward social mobility within a very short space of time, the idea that anyone can be a princess, can go from literally scrubbing floors to being the person who requests that those floors be scrubbed, the promise that all of us are special enough to be picked from the crowd by a prince, all we need is a little bit of a makeover. Surely one must consider that the nerd-to-hottie transformation trope finds its inspiration in Cinderella, too.

And it’s the point about being singled out by an eligible, interesting (hopefully), wealthy individual of means and status from a sea of anonymous faces that we turn to next. The element of the love story is a fascinating, and enthralling, one. Given that we as a society do, despite our protests to the contrary, really buy into the premise that love at first sight does in fact exist. It’s the idea that Prince Charming (so charming we don’t even really need to know his name) can gaze out onto a sea of women and be captivated by Cinderella. Twilight which served as inspiration for Fifty Shades provides us with this exact story: Bella sees herself as nondescript, not really blessed with any overly impressive attributes, yet Edward— handsome, rich, intriguing Edward—finds her captivating. And this is a conceit that has been adored in stories for a long, long time. Some people consider the original Cinderella story is the Ancient Greek story of Rodopis. You can read a version of the story here and a less romantic analysis of it here. While the slipper element is present too, so is the key theme of someone relatively ordinary being plucked from anonymity by a figure of high status.

And that’s not all. Even Sarah J Maas’ book Throne of Glass has elements of the Cinderella story in it. While Maas claims she found inspiration from the series in the scene in Disney’s Cinderella when she flees the ball as midnight chimes, and its accompanying score, the story itself contains several elements of the Cinderella tale. It contains magic, the translocation of a character who is found at the story’s beginning in abject poverty and misery to somewhere full of opulence and luxury, a love story featuring an actual prince (for the first book, at least)… Even though as the series progresses and it moves sharply away from this, the original book’s use of those parts of the story cannot be denied.

I suppose if I had to remove my customary cloak of cynicism, perhaps I would also suggest that what captivates us about the Cinderella story is the promise that it gets better. Cinderella begins just about as low as it can get—her mother is dead, her father is either dead or so busy trying to provide for his family that he can’t see the abuse Cinderella endures from her stepmother and stepsisters. She is forced to be a servant in her own home where she is treated less well than a servant because, well, she doesn’t actually get paid.

She is alone, she is named for the cinders that she must sweep out from the fireplaces, and she has no obvious way to get out of this situation; a young girl escaping would probably fall prey to all manner of unpleasant travellers. Yet she does manage to escape, and she is given a home, the adulation she was forced to forfeit for so long, with interest no less, as she has an entire country beneath her feet now, she’s comfortable, and she has a prince who loves her. It offers a message to people that things may seem bad now, but they will improve, and you will be compensated for your suffering. And that’s a pretty powerful message.

What’s your favourite version of a Cinderella story? Tell us in the comments below!

The post What’s Our Fascination With The ‘Cinderella’ Story? appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

So let’s start with perhaps the biggest example of the divergence between books and films being so significant that we might be better to simply view them as distinct entities: Disney. Almost all Disney movies are remakes of classic stories, many of which are very different to the original versions.

While the fairy tales themselves have several versions—sometimes even the same author would rewrite them multiple times. This was the case with the Brothers Grimm who rewrote their stories in order to incorporate elements which were in keeping with fashions of the times. But the versions that were immortalised by Disney are very different to their initial incarnation.

A version of the Sleeping Beauty folk tale, published by Charles Perrault, then collected by the Brothers Grimm, sees the prince stumbling across the princess. He finds her so entrancing that he has sex with her while she is still asleep (given when this was written, instead of being rapey, it’s considered romantic) and she subsequently bears him twins. Clearly then, the version of Sleeping Beauty where the Prince and Aurora dance in the clouds singing to each other is a significant deviation from the original story, as is the fact that Maleficent transforms into a dragon and is valiantly defeated by the Prince. In one version she is an ogre who demands the twins be served to her by a cook who substitutes the children with lamb and goat…sound familiar, Disney’s Snow White?

Hans Christian Andersen’s version of The Little Mermaid sees her feel as though she’s walking on knives in order to actually get her legs and the prince views her as a pet rather than a person. Then, the Prince doesn’t actually choose her, he marries someone else and the condition of her becoming a human aside from the agony of walking is that she must be married of she will die, she must kill the Prince.

Moreover, the happy ending in which the princess is not only alive, but gets her man and her throne is a total deviation from the manner in which these stories originally ended. I suppose in Cinderella she does indeed get the Prince, but the eyes of her stepsisters are gruesomely pecked out by birds, which to me at least ruins the wholesomeness of the ending. As such, while the films themselves indisputably draw heavy inspiration from the original folk tales, it is compelling to suggest we should view them as distinct products and stories rather than a simple translation of a story.

Equally, Howl’s Moving Castle is a great example of a film which takes many of the original story’s elements but is not constrained by them. Arguably, there are sufficient differences that the book and film take on lives of their own. Miyakazi’s introduction of the war plot, and the different treatment of the Witch of the Waste are significant deviations from the book, but they contribute to the story that Miyazaki tells—one in which kindness and a gentle heart are the attributes which ultimately resolve the significant problems of the plot.

Indeed, this article discusses the arguably significant deviation between the two versions in noting “One difference is in its attitudes to evil. Miyazaki doesn’t do incorrigible villainy, and Howl the movie lifts that burden from the shoulders of Jones’s Witch of the Waste, sharing it out among a number of warmongers and miscreants.” In the words of Jones herself: “My philosophy would say that they would go to the bad for some other reason, if they didn’t have that one. I really do believe there are some people who are just irredeemable. But yes, Miyazaki is much more genial about the human race than I am.”

This therefore suggests that the divergences between the two creative forces of each version are grounded in fundamental differences of outlook and philosophy, leading to the creation of two very different stories. As a result, the film and book may be better viewed as two separate stories which happen to have several elements in common.

Less severe could be The Hunger Games films. The first film was reasonably faithful to the story barring the included scenes between President Snow and the Gamesmaster where the nature of power and control is teased out, giving us the audience greater insight into the kind of calculated control that President Snow extends across Panem. Is this sufficient to say that the book and film are two separate entities? Probably not, but the medium of the film enabled these scenes to take place whereas the first-person narration of the book limits its capacity to cut away to the Capital in such a fashion. It’s a great example of how films can move beyond the limitations of books in a way that augments the story.

Of course, there are then example of films that are clear in the adherence to the book, but deviate slightly in the telling. Baz Luhrmann’s version of The Great Gatsby offers a specific vision of the film that is both faithful to the book and moves away from it. The soundtrack is a really great example of this. It features rap, hip hop, and RnB songs, none of which existed in the roaring ‘20s. Luhrmann in an interview noted that he wanted to pay homage to the fact that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a modernist, as he was “in the moment, and the music of the moment was African-American street music called Jazz, and when he put Jazz music in Gatsby, everyone was like ‘What are you crazy? It’s a fad.”

As such, the movie Luhrmann created could be considered distinct from the original piece due to its inclusion of elements which simply did not exist when Fitzgerald wrote the book. Yet he was building upon and within the framework Fitzgerald’s legacy within the parameters of his own distinct style.

This article beautifully surmises: “Using technology, music, and the sheer emptiness of raw spectacle, he translates the exuberant spirit of the Jazz Age for an audience raised on Jay Z [who was the executive producer of the soundtrack], and wedges a wide enough rift between style and substance for Gatsby himself to fit comfortably inside.”

It goes on to note some of Lurhmann’s other works, and mentions his adaptation of Romeo and Juliet where; “he thread Shakespearean iambic pentameter through an explicitly 90s milieu, combining the feisty tribalism of Verona with the florid style of Venice Beach in order restore the present tense to a tragedy that feels like it predates all of civilisation”.

Interestingly, this leads into a quick discussion on adaptations. Ten Things I Hate About You may just be the greatest 90s teen film of all time (fight me if you disagree). It is a fabulous retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, updating the gossipy, jock-esque behaviour that Shakespeare captures so perfectly within his society by transposing it into a high school. Similar comments can be made about Bridget Jones’ Diary as both a book and film as a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, and Clueless as an adaptation that I would argue is better than the book of Emma.

Now of course, these are adaptations and very clearly re-interpretations, not faithful translations, but they themselves offer us the question of where the line exists between a retelling of the same story but in a different medium, and a distinct and new story, exists. There is also a somewhat compelling argument that The Lion King is based on Hamlet. If you happen to be well acquainted with the play, you too can sit glass of wine in hand and obnoxiously comment on the departures from the play throughout this children’s movie while also militantly skipping Mufasa’s death scene because you were too traumatised by it when you were four… or you could just read this article.

Ultimately, when books are made into movies, things are going to be different. If you imagined Dumbledore to be really tall and really thin, Michael Gambon was going to disappoint you. Sometimes the changes movies make are small deviations, or simply retellings of the story within the context of the modern world (like Gatsby). Sometimes the movies simply change things that happen, or place such a significant emphasis on certain parts of the plot, that the original message and original story has become transfigured. When this happens, perhaps it is best not to use the reductive phrase “the book was better than the film”, but instead to view them as distinct stories that happen to have similar elements.

But sometimes interpretations of books and the need to alter the specifics of the story in translating from page to screen can go awry. I ask you to look no further than the below evidence, which obviously arises from a distinct vision, but has perplexed some of the best minds of our generation:

What do you have to say about book to film adaptations? Tell us in the comments below!

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