http://youtube.com/watch?v=iRodNml83iM&feature=related
Ever After is not your typical fairytale, and Danielle De Barbarac is not your typical Cinderella. This movie is set in the Renaissance period of France and she brings the voice of humanism to that world. Danielle presents Prince Henry with a theory of people's worth. As in the gypsies, theives and servants and how the government turned them into what they are then tries to punish them for that.
At first, Henry doesn't want to be the future king and tries his hardest to run away, but Danielle, in essence teaches him how to be king. The only woman the prince was able to save in the movie was the Mona Lisa because Danielle was either saving herself or him. She saved him from the gypsies and her self from Pierre Le Pieu. She fights for what she wants and knows how to get out of any situation. Andy Tennant, the director, presents Danielle as more of a role model cinderella than a damsel-in-distress. He says that he wanted something for his 2 daughter to look at.
I think Henry fell in love with her passion first. She had a real passion for reading, in life, her world and enjoyed intellectual engagements. Danielle can read, write and enjoy life and that inspires Henry to go to his father with the idea for a university.
Leonardo Da Vinci should never have known Prince Henry because he died before he was born, but that didn't stop this driven director. Tennant shows Da Vinci in the fairy godmother role, well godfather. Leo uses his mind for science, logica and art to help poor Danielle when she needs it most. He made her wings for the ball and got her out of the cellar by unhinging the door.
There is also a real sense of family in this story. Henry fights with his father, but the king comes around when he finds his son is in no way going to marry the princess of Spain. They reconcile their difference and helps him find another bride. Danielle shares a strong bond with her father, Auguste, who unfortunately died in the very beginning just shortly after marrying the Baroness. He used to read to his daughter every night he was there and always brought her a new book. She looks after her step-family in the end keeping them from a horrible fate, except for the good sister, Jacqueline, who helped this Cinderella out after she was whipped.
Danielle also considers the servants that work around her as her family, which leads her to pretend to be a courtier to rescue Maurice from a ship bound for the Americas. That actually is what made the prince believe she was a courtier in the first place which I'm not at all sure whether that was a good or bad thing. He would never have met he if she was just a servant, but he fell in love with her as a courtier.
The end shows the great-great granddaughter, dying Queen of France, telling the Brothers Grimm that it wasn't that Danielle and Henry live happly ever after, but that they really lived. That this was the true story of Cinderella.
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