Cinderella and the Secret Prince – Cinderella and the Secret Prince (2018)

Directed by: Lynne Southerland | 90 minutes | animation, adventure | Original voice cast: Cassandra Lee Morris, Chris Niosi, R. Martin Klein, Tony Azzolino, Kirsten Day, Wendee Lee, Stephen Mendel, Terrence Stone, Stephanie Sanditz

Who doesn’t know the Disney classic ‘Cinderella’ from 1950? The glass slipper, the Prince Charming, the mice and the good Fairy? They are monumental elements from the rich history of Disney animated films. Yet there appears to be a completely different story to Cinderella; one that puts the story of the original in a completely different light.

Cinderella and the Secret Prince tells the story of a young Cinderella and her three mouse friends. Also in her youth there is a ball where the handsome (but in this case mean) prince is looking for a new love. However, it turns out to be a ruse to capture the real prince, who has been living as an enchanted mouse for years, and Cinderella. Of course this is not possible and so an adventure follows to straighten everything out.

As mentioned, this story takes place before the story of the classic. And there seems to be too little thought about it. It may be faint, but the ‘Cinderella’ casts a large shadow. If Cinderella, as in ‘Cinderella and the Secret Prince’, already has bad experiences with royal parties, why does she go to such a ball so reasonably unencumbered in the classic? If she already made a friend in her youth who can also do magic, then why the good Fairy? And finally, if one of the mice is a prince, why don’t you know when she grows up? It feels a bit like ET has actually been on earth a few times before with the same outcome and that you only find out through a rather weak prequel.

But if this were not a factor of assessment, would there be a nice or good film that can stand on its own? Unfortunately not. The story is too muddled, the plot too unmotivated and the animations too bad. To start with the first negative point: the story is made up of coincidences and is too thin to be really interesting. The choices that advance the story are random and sometimes illogical. Finally, the animation style seems cheap. There’s a scene in it where horses are running and it looks really amateurish. The horse floats more than it pushes itself on the ground; and that floating does not seem to be the intention.

It may not legally be banned, but the Cinderella universe deserves a better movie than this. Now the makers seem to want to score mainly on the name and deliver a somewhat lazy film, which is also disrespectful to the original.