Another entry in the animated, self-referential fairy tale genre, “Not Your Brothers (Grimm)”, Measures looks beyond its blonde heroine with two glass slippers to focus on Cinderella’s so-called evil stepsisters. Or, at least one of them, as long as he can stay focused on his fantastical, winding journey. Initially supposed go full-on Disney parody, with songs from comedy group Garfunkel And Oates (members Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome came up with the original script), Measures lost that sharper sense of personality during its production at Netflix, sanded down into something stuck between the sarcasm of Shrek and the feel-good pop chaos of Demon Hunters KPop.
Perhaps that’s what we should expect from a script with five credited screenwriters. (All five, along with Micucci and Lindhome, get “story by” credits, bringing that total up to seven.) With so many creative fairy godmothers vying for control, bibbidi-bobbidi-hooting the most mundane elements of Cinderella in self-aware updates of varying quality, it’s no wonder these half-baked changes compete with each other. The pivot with the most potential, and the one the film focuses on the least, is that in this story the stepsisters aren’t evil, they’re just Asian. Lilith (Ali Wong) and Margot (Stephanie Hsu) arrive in Alouette’s kingdom wearing bad clothes and looking nothing like their new Disney-ready stepsister, Cinderella (Amanda Seyfried).
But while the assimilationist plight of their seamstress mother, forced to adapt her style to the pouffe European style favored by the kingdom’s French aristocracy, is briefly touched upon—as is the idea that Cinderella and the magic pushing her toward a “happily ever after” is a substitute for white privilege—any glimpses gleaned of this “creative license” (as one character puts it in the film itself) are muddled by the film surrounding it. The real problem isn’t that the otherwise diverse kingdom (the black characters are in the background, though none have speaking roles) is racist, but that Cinderella doesn’t stand up for her new siblings when they’re bullied by Marie Antoinette-like fairy-tale leader Priscilla (Nikki Glaser). mean girls. It is this incident that pushes Lilith to become a rebellious goth who resents Cinderella, her long-winded voiceover explaining how this grudge has led the townspeople to view Lilith as the villain who perfects little Cinderella.
As the story strives to reinvent its classic source material while setting up a sisterly bonding adventure between Lilith and Cinderella. And a story where they must save the kingdom from Priscilla’s shenanigans, a bit like The Emperor’s New Groovedonned in a ball gown – some of the odd asides that feel like scattered subplots from another version of the film stand out. The most striking example is that of Margot, Cinderella’s younger half-sister, because the carefree character does not quite fit into the tale. After dancing to electropop with Lilith, she has nothing left to do. Turning her into a talking frog (Bette Midler’s Fairy Godmother loses her wand – don’t ask) for the majority of the running time mostly feels like an excuse to sideline her and to ensure that the remaining main characters look even more like lumbering action figures than their Disney counterparts. Margot has one of the rare character designs in Measures This doesn’t look like a Bratz doll, so it makes sense that they frog her ASAP.
Gn entert
