Cinderella II – Dreams Come True (Disney Special Edition DVD)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C Film: C
Need some
moo-la…made number two-a…Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo! Disney, since the release of The Return of Jafar in the mid-90’s,
has been known to release its fair share of BAD straight to home video/DVD
releases. Well, throw another one on the
list with Cinderella II: Dreams Come
True – Special Edition. This
particular sequel follows our princess, Cinderella, on several tales after the
‘Happily Ever After’ of the first film. The stories (3 in all) are narrated by
the mice of the castle and chronicle one tale about Cinderella throwing a
banquet and her troubles when she tries to invite the entire kingdom (peasants
and all), a second tale of Jaq the mouse and his escapades as a human (with a
little Fairy Godmother help), and a third tale about one of Cinderella’s Step
Sisters falling in love with a commoner (bread maker) and her tribulations
dealing with her mother’s disapprovals.
The film is choppy and lackluster and only holds a slight glimmer of the
past classic.
This film
was released once before (Non-Special Edition) in February of 2002 and sold
very well. Fans must have been hoping to
relive the original and instead they received a royal slap in the face.
The film
is actually very bad and the third film in the series, Cinderella III: A Twist in Time (reviewed elsewhere on this site)
is better than this monstrosity. As
other critics have claimed Cinderella II
is very choppy and feels more like a bad television spin-off than anything
else. To this reviewer, after Disney had
produced such other hit television series based on Disney classic characters
like Aladdin, Tale Spin, and Rescue Rangers it would not at all be surprising
if they attempted to adapt Cinderella
into a series of its own and it never quite worked out. Rather than just putting this mishap of a
production into the Disney Archives
and calling it a day, the more profitable choice was to string three random
‘episodes’ together with bad music and call it a movie.
The DVD
presentation is good with few major problems, but does not measure up to other
quality Disney releases. The picture is presented in 1.66 X 1 Widescreen
enhanced for 16 X 9 televisions. The picture quality is clear, but has
many issues with the colors being off by either being too bright, too blurry,
or just careless. The production as said before seems to have been ‘made
for TV’ and little care was taken in the production. The sound quality is clean with a balanced
voices and music quality in its DTS 5.1 Digital Surround Sound, sounding better
than a lot of DVDs recently released but not perfect. The original
production didn’t seem to have the greatest voice talent or music scores, so
that definitely does not help. This
reviewer has always complimented Disney on having great bonus features, but
like its sequel this release was lacking to a degree only containing a Music
Video, two less than impressive games, a story book feature, and a few more
features that don’t hold too much interest.
- Michael P Dougherty II
