User reviews

George Melies' second version of Charles Perrault's fairy tale (the first was in 1899) came when his filmmaking career was coming to an end, and this version offers evidence of one of the major reasons for his decline. While fellow directors like D. W. Griffith were developing and advancing the techniques and grammar of filmmaking, Melies was still making films in the same way that he had a decade earlier. The sets may be more elaborate, but they're still mostly painted backdrops, and his camera never moves, remaining for the most part at a discreet distance from the subject of its gaze. And the story devotes too much time to Cinderella's preparation for the ball, a sequence that gives Melies the greatest opportunity to show off his trick shots, but at the cost of pacing and audience engagement.

I agree with the people who describe the first part of the movie as slow paced and weak. It takes almost a third of it to just get to the actual plot. The first third involves the invitation to the party. It also doesn't really weigh in to well on the abuse of Cinderella. That said, we do have some decent special effects although the first effort at this story did them better. The clock business is fun but fills up too much space. Melies is sort of grinding to a halt here, but still worth a few minutes of our time.

Georges Méliès's first attempt at this fairytale was in 1899. That film was extraordinary then for having multiple scenes and a semblance of a narrative; additionally, the use of dissolves as transitions in it influenced other filmmakers for years to do the same. Méliès was the cinema world's preeminent leader then. By 1912, however, that was no longer the case; frankly, as evidenced by this feature, his style had become dated. Moreover, Méliès had begun to adopt techniques from other filmmakers, such as direct cuts instead of dissolves, and there's even a match on action shot during the slipper trying-on scene.

Yet, mostly, despite its short length, this film really drags in pacing. The opening camera placement doesn't change for four minutes. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Méliès's was advancing the medium largely by imitating theatre, in addition to his cinematic trick effects, but by 1912, other filmmakers had begun and adopted cinematic forms of narrative--best remembered today through the Biograph shorts of D.W. Griffith, but others were doing similar things, too. Méliès's film-making was now backwards.

Another complaint: perhaps, impolite to say, but the Cinderella here isn't even very attractive. Finally, there's a wacky clock nightmare here that can be worth seeing for comparison to that in the 1899 film as well as the one in the 1914 Mary Pickford "Cinderella".