Cinderella III: A Twist in Time

For many years, Disney set the level with family movies. Edward Perkis stated in his review, “They were the iPod and everyone else was, well, one of those mp3 players that has two percent of the market.” That began to change with the appearance of Pixar, Dreamworks, and a few other studios that constantly created inventive, smart, amazing animated films. It also helped that Disney mixed out some serious trash during the same time. However, Disney has got to make money somehow, and they have a large logbook of beloved characters. This is pretty much why films like the 2007 direct-to-DVD “Cinderella III: A Twist in Time” exist.

The Disney direct-to-DVD sequel list has a basic pattern. Take a familiar character and have their son, daughter, or other related relative or close friend, and put them through a situation which resembles the original theatrical release. Which is why in “The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea,” Ariel’s daughter is stuck on land, but really wants to be a Mermaid. Similarly, “Lady in the Tramp II: Scamp’s Adventure,” Tramp’s son wants to be a junkyard dog. Sequels to “The Lion King” and “Peter Pan” also followed that formula. You really have to applaud the writers of “Cinderella III: A Twist in Time” for giving a small amount of creativity into the story of this sequel.

The movie starts one year after the Prince (Christopher Daniel Barnes) has slipped the glass slipper on Cinderella (Jennifer Hale) and everyone is celebrating their happy life and love in an opening musical number. Perkis mentioned, “This is a full blown musical animated feature and the songs are only mediocre. That sounds bad, but some of the sequel music has been downright awful, so this is a step-up.” Cinderella’s step-sister Anastasia (Tress MacNeille) spies on the celebration and ends up stealing the Fairy Godmother’s (Russi Taylor) wand and giving it to her mother (Susan Blakeslee). The evil Lady Tremaine uses the wand to reverse time to the famous slipper fitting scene in the first movie and causes the slipper to fit Anastasia, leaving Cinderella crying on the side for not marrying the Prince.

The rest of the movie and songs deal with Cinderella trying to meet up with the Prince to show that true love and not the slipper were what brought them together. Anastasia begins to doubt that a love brought about by trickery is rewarding. The main mice from the first movie, Gus (Corey Burton) and Jaq (Rob Paulsen), are back for comic relief and fight with their old enemy, Lucifer the Cat (Frank Welker).

Perkis said, “On the very low standards of direct-to-DVD sequels, this movie isn't as awful as some. The plot is somewhat inventive and there is a healthy dose of humor.” Some characters, mainly the Prince, the King (Andre Stojka), and Anastasia, go through personality growing in the year between the original movie and the events of this movie. Anastasia also goes through a vocal transformation, since her musical lack of skill is a comic point in the original, but she has a nice vocal number in this sequel.

Perkis admitted, “This movie wasn't created and released for middle-aged men (at least not straight men). If you have an animation loving daughter in the target age range of this product (three to nine years old) then you can probably add two stars to my rating.” It’s quick (runtime of an hour and 14 minutes) and while the animation is an obvious downgrade from what you see in theaters, it’s a step (or two) up from bad TV animation. It will keep your children entertained until “The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning” was released the next year.

I’m sorry, but this film is not good at all. I know that people loved this movie over the second one, since this one holds a 71% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I don’t see anything good about this one. It’s really bad and I feel like they tried to redo the first movie, like a lot of the sequels were doing, so I say avoid this one at all costs. However, if you see this one and like it over the second, then that’s fine, but my advice would be not to watch this one.

Check in tomorrow when I finally talk about “The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning” in “Disney Sequel Month.”