If you can get past the giant pumpkin in the ballroom — really, why bother to remake “Cinderella” in 2015 if you have no new spin on the material? — there’s a lot to like about director Kenneth Branagh’s gorgeously fanciful tale.
Hewing closer to the previous Disney animated version than to the Brothers Grimm’s or Stephen Sondheim’s — no stepsisters were blinded in the making of this motion picture — it’s a perfectly serviceable addition to the studio’s princess-industrial complex.
Whereas last year’s “Maleficent” retold the Sleeping Beauty legend with the witch as a central character, portrayed as someone who had good reason to seek revenge, this “Cinderella” never strays far from the path laid out by the animation department in 1950; there’s no singing this time, but we do get the friendly mice.