Animal Rights and Interdependence in Cinderella

Cinderella interacts closely with the natural world in Disney’s Cinderella (1950). As the daughter again of a wicked stepmother, Cinderella’s outsider role suggests she has rejected human-centered culture in favor of a more interdependent relationship with nonhuman nature. When her father dies, the stepsisters (Anastasia and Drizella) abuse Cinderella with their mother’s approval and help. Cinderella maintains her good temperament in spite of this treatment because she accommodates nature, and nature accommodates her. She can talk to the birds who wake her up. She sings “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” as she awakens, and other birds come to listen and respond with only a whistle now and then. Mice come out of bed to listen, wearing shirts, hats, and dresses. Birds fill a sponge with water and shower her. They prepare her clothes and dress her in a frock, shoes, and apron. 

When they tie back her hair and tell her there is a new mouse in the house—a visitor in a trap, her connection with them becomes clearer. She serves them, too. She gets a mouse shirt out of a drawer to take to him and frees him, naming him Octavius or Gus for short, and tells the others not to forget to warn him about the cat. Cinderella interacts on a human level with all the animals in the house and yard. She puts Bruno the dog outside when Lucifer tricks him into barking. Cinderella feeds the cat milk and then feeds the chickens corn while the mice steal some food and frighten her stepsisters.

Lucifer the cat, the stepsisters, and their mother are the only negative characters in the film. Since they represent both the animal and human worlds, neither world is completely denigrated. In fact, Disney added a sequence to the filmic adaptation of the Perrault fairy tale: “a conflict between Cinderella’s pets/allies, the mice, and the stepmother’s pet, the cat” which, according to Naomi Wood, “metaphorically recapitulates the cat-and-mouse struggle between Cinderella and her stepmother and accentuates the life-and-death competition that motivates their actions” (26). The sequence also emphasizes Cinderella’s connection with the natural world.

When Cinderella overhears the decree that all eligible maidens must attend a ball for the prince, her relationship with the animal world again assists her. She is an eligible maid, and the stepmother says she can go if she finishes all of her work and prepares herself. The mice and birds hear the proclamation and help her fix up a gown from her mother, again connecting her with the animal world. They sing “We can do it,” as they sew. Jaq and Gus, two integral parts of the Cinderella romance plot, acquire cloth and beads from the floor where Lucifer sits in a comic scene, which ends with Lucifer getting caught in a shirtsleeve. According to Wood, “Jaq, the planner, is the picture of self-containment. Always thinking, he is instrumental in developing and carrying out schemes on behalf of Cinderella. Gus is his opposite: foolishly confident about his ability to deal with Lucifer, always one beat behind everyone else, and continually jeopardizing his own and others’ safety by his inability to control himself” (40). The other mice also exhibit such human qualities, singing as they refurbish the gown. According to Bosley Crowther’s New York Times review, “it is when they are joined with Cinderella in advancing her undismayed career—singing and busy about business—that the picture has real and flowing joy” (“The Screen: Six Newcomers” 33).

Although Cinderella’s stepmother tricks her daughters into tearing their discarded items from the gown, leaving her in tatters, both her animal friends and a supernatural fairy godmother intervene. The godmother sings “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo” as she animates nature, transforming a pumpkin into a carriage, mice into four white horses, Gus, the horse, into a coachman, and the dog into a footman. Cinderella is transformed, as well, and is now dressed in a white gown and glass slippers, so the prince falls in love with her. The familiar story of the glass slipper ensures Cinderella’s happiness, but, in a final act of interdependence, she takes her animals with her to the castle, sealing the interconnected view of animal welfare and environmentalism with festive birds and mice waving farewell as the film ends.