Ever After: A Cinderella Story

About this episode

This episode explores the film 'Ever After: A Cinderella Story' and its impact on the Cinderella narrative through a feminist lens.

Few films have done more to reimagine a fairy tale than Ever After: A Cinderella Story , Andy Tennant's 1998 period drama that stripped the magical elements from one of the world's oldest stories and replaced it with real historical characters, and a heroine who rescues herself. Set in Renaissance-era France and shot entirely on location across the Dordogne, the film marked a quiet revolution in the Cinderella canon, arriving at a precise cultural moment between Disney's pastel dominance and the full flowering of girl power that would follow in the late 90s and beyond. The story of Ever After goes from the ancient origins of the Cinderella myth, through the literary transformations of Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Rossini's opera, to the cultural watershed of Disney's 1950 animated classic and the Rodgers and Hammerstein television musicals that rewrote what the story could mean for successive generations of young women. Ever After sits in that lineage, and its particular brand of post-feminist revisionism hit hard in the summer of 1998. It broke away from typical fairy tale clichés, offering a fresh take that emphasizes empowerment and self-determination for women in a…

People in this episode

Host: Verbal Diorama

Topics covered

• Cinderella
• feminism
• film history
• empowerment
• fairy tales
• 1990s cinema

Keywords

• Ever After
• Cinderella story
• Drew Barrymore
• feminism
• 1998 film
• fairy tale
• empowerment
• historical context

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Ever After: A Cinderella Story, Cinderella, Disney's 1950 animated classic, Rodgers and Hammerstein television musicals, Perrault, Brothers Grimm, Rossini's opera

Places: Renaissance-era France, Dordogne

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