Cinderella takes aim with her mighty crossbow.
What? Don’t you remember that part of the story???
In the history of cinema, no story has been more popular than the fairy tale of Cinderella. It’s been made over and over again from the Disney animated film to Pretty Woman. And all of this despite the fact that Cinderella herself is pretty much one of the weakest protagonists in literature. I mean, face it, almost everything that happens in most Cinderella stories happens to her, not by her. Cinderella is a mere reactive template whose sole ambition is to marry a prince. And, even that is achieved mostly through the magic of a fairy godmother, and the crowning moment usually involves the prince searching out Cinderella, putting a slipper on her foot and choosing to marry her.
Not so with Tri orísky pro Popelku (Three wishes for Cinderella), a Czechoslovakian version of Cinderella, sometimes called Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella. This obscure (in the U.S. anyway) film is really worth searching out. To begin with, it’s a live action film with period sets and costumes and pretty decent effects given its age. But what’s most remarkable is that the Cinderella of this film doesn’t particularly want to marry a prince. She’s much happier riding horseback riding, hunting and generally impishly cavorting around the woods near her village. A much more interesting character than the usual flat, saccharine, put-upon wallflower-who-gets-a-makeover that we normally see in these stories.
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