Cinderella

Cinderella is a 1950 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures. Based on Charles Perrault's 1697 fairy tale of the same title, it was directed by Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, and Clyde Geronimi. The film features the voices of Ilene Woods, Eleanor Audley, Verna Felton, Rhoda Williams, James MacDonald, Luis van Rooten and Don Barclay with Helene Stanley and Claire Du Brey each serving as the live model for Cinderella and Fairy Godmother respectively. During the early 1940s, Walt Disney Productions had suffered financially after losing connections to the European film markets due to the outbreak of World War II. Because of this, the studio endured box office bombs such as Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), and Bambi (1942), all of which would later become more successful with several re-releases in theaters and on home video. By 1947, the studio was over $4 million in debt and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Walt Disney and his animators returned to feature film production in 1948 after producing a string of package films with the idea of adapting Charles Perrault's Cendrillon into an animated film. Cinderella was released to theatres on February 15, 1950, receiving critical acclaim and becoming a box office success, which made it Disney's biggest hit since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and helped reverse the studio's fortunes. It also received three Academy Award nominations, including Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, Best Sound Recording, and Best Original Song for "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo". The film was followed by two direct-to-video sequels, Cinderella II: Dreams Come True (2002) and Cinderella III: A Twist in Time (2007), and a live-action remake in 2015. In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".