Cartoon a Day: Poor Cinderella

Poor Cinderella
1934
Directed by Dave Fleischer
Available on: YouTube

Once again, thanks to the lovely Miss Betty Boop's cartoons being in the public domain, we can embed the entire cartoon right from YouTube. So enjoy!



"Poor Cinderella" may be the most ambitious of the Betty Boop cartoons and it is her only color cartoon. And, as odd as it may seem to us today, she is made a redhead. Though this cartoon clearly shows some Disney influence, it's also very possible that this film had some influence on Disney when they made their version of Cinderella 16 years later.

You can really see what made Betty such a likable character, and I'm not just talking about her physical features, though the animators don't exactly hide those qualities in this cartoon.

The sequences at the ball are the real highlight of this short. The backgrounds are really beautiful and the dance between Betty and the prince is so graceful. It's probably rotoscoped, but it's so well done it made me think of the dance in "Beauty and the Beast."