'Cinderella' took more than magic !

 'Cinderella' took more than magic !

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Disney princesses are a billion-dollar business, but the idea of a hapless maiden saved by a prince? That's about as dusty as a storyline gets in 2015.

The live-action Cinderella arrives in theaters Friday, outfitted with a gutsy young orphan, Ella (Lily James). But her newly fashioned evil stepmother (Cate Blanchett) is the first to admit that the original telling wasn't quite her cup of tea.

"I didn't at all connect with Cinderella as a story growing up, because I didn't really understand why someone was so passive," says Blanchett. "And I thought, 'Well, I'm not the blond, beautiful girl who's going to get rescued by the guy who's equally as beautiful.'"
Cinderella is Disney's latest live-action excavation from Walt's vault: Johnny Depp led the effort in 2010's Alice In Wonderland, followed by Angelina Jolie's 2014 spectacle Maleficent. Next up: a live-action take on The Jungle Book; Emma Watson as Belle in Beauty and the Beast;and the just-announced revamp of Dumbo, to be helmed by Tim Burton.

But unlike Alice or Maleficent, there is no dark underbelly in Cinderella's retelling, directed sumptuously by Kenneth Branagh. Instead, under his watch, previously flat characters (such as Prince Charming, who famously had nearly no dialogue in the 1950 film) have entire backstories.

And this time around, the king is deathly ill, we actually meet Cinderella's mother and, heck, even that stepmother has some cause for her cruelty.

"Ken talked a lot about kindness as a superpower," says Blanchett, adding that the final product is "everything you want from a fairy tale without feeling like you'd been tricked into it or lured there because of some sort of Zeitgeist-y twist."

This Cinderella radiates "strength from within," says James (of Downton Abbey fame) who read for the role of stepsister Anastasia before being elevated to the title role.

There is some darkness in the PG-rated film, but it's mirrored in aches found in real life. After Cinderella's recent Hollywood premiere, a little girl came up to James, tugging her skirt. "She said, 'It's really sad both your parents died.' And I was like, 'Oh, no!' " says James. "It's a lot."

Blanchett nods. "We try and protect children from that, but that's also why you tell them fairy tales. Children are very resilient. They don't want to be patronized."
Which fairy tales did Blanchett read to her children (she has three young sons and a just-adopted baby girl, Edith): Those of the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen variety, or the more sparkling Disney stories?

"They love being read to, actually," says Blanchett, who reads her boys a chapter a night. "I read them a few Nordic versions of fairy tales, which are quite brutal," she says with a chuckle. One, in which a character's brother dies, "they were weeping. And then the other brother comes back as a ghost, sort of as his guardian angel, but we didn't get to that yet!"

 A live-action feature inspired by the classic fairy tale, “Cinderella” brings to life the timeless images from Disney’s 1950 animated masterpiece as fully-realized characters in a visually-dazzling spectacle for a whole new generation.

In the new film, signature Cinderella moments remain: the glass slipper (remade in Swarovski crystal), the prince (embodied by the dashing Richard Madden) the scene-stealing blue ballgown ("Richard just had to look at it and it ripped," says James) and of course, her fairy godmother (delightfully inhabited by Helena Bonham Carter).

But despite a classic take, the maiden's M.O. has been retooled. "We felt it was important that Cinderella not be saved by a guy. That she was responsible for her own destiny," says producer Allison Shearmur.

And the resulting message couldn't be more modern, says Blanchett. "What interested me was what makes someone beautiful and what makes someone ugly," she says. "This Cinderella, of course she's beautiful, because Lily is playing her, but it's an inner light.

"In the face of Internet reality and young girls and young boys on Instagram pretending to be things that they're not or feeling like that they have to pretend to be things that they are ... it's more important to be who you are than to be accepted for who you're not. I think that's really a fantastic, timely message for kids to be seeing."

Cr. USA today