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Disney's Cinderella embroiders on the animal characters in Perrault's version and gives them as much emphasis as the human story. In Cinderella's house there live, as well as the wicked stepmother and her two ugly daughters, a haughty and malevolent black cat called Lucifer, and an amiable hound called Bruno. Lucifer is the only animal unfriendly to Cinderella; Bruno is her devoted slave, she sings to the bluebirds, and helps a colony of mice to outwit the implacable cat. The mice are characterised individually, the most endearing being the slow-witted, vacuous, but affectionate and loyal orphan, Gus-Gus.

Out of gratitude to Cinderella the mice make her a dress to wear at the royal ball, stitched together from her sisters' discarded garments and trinkets. But the sisters recognise their cast-offs, and spitefully deprive Cinderella of them. The fairy godmother steps in, and all goes traditionally until the scene of the trying on of the glass slipper. Lucifer interferes again, and all seems lost: but Bruno and the mice come to the rescue, steal the key of the room in which Cinderella has been locked, and she marries her Prince Charming.

Cinderella marks a return to the earlier Disney manner, and is undoubtedly much more successful than his more recent films. If, in spite of some brilliant invention and diverting animal creations, it falls short of Snow White and Pinocchio, this is due to the increasingly factorised methods by which he now works. With such a vast unit of technical collaborators, designers, animators and scenarists, the result is inevitably less fresh and less personal. The faults - the cutie doll figures of Cinderella and her Prince, the conventionally grotesque Ugly Sisters - seem magnified: when the figures are strip cartoon, they are very cheap and stereotyped strip cartoon. The vulgar patches of colour, most of all the unnervingly mauve ballroom scene, are more pronounced: the slushiest songs, like the opening bluebird number, slushier than ever.

By contrast, the apoplectic King and his dithering Chancellor are good comic figures, the Fairy Godmother is individual, the animals are noticeably successful, and there are some excitingly conceived moments - Cinderella's flight at midnight from the ball is dramatically designed and coloured, and some of the interiors of the house are unusually attractive. Though Disney's talent has become increasingly submerged by commercialism, his ingenuity and brilliance are far from dead: it is a remarkable gift that survives to this extent the flattening process of factory production.

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