Good news, everybody! We’ve been keeping score and as of today, with the release of Alyce Tzue and John Ripa’s “Steps,” it’s official: There are more revisionist fairy tales than the so-called “real” ones.
It’s ironic, if you think about it. So many children’s movies are about poking holes in the Brothers Grimm’s stories — and while we’re at it, Aesop’s many Fables — that messing with the formula is now the formula. It’s not a shock when the villain of “Sleeping Beauty” gets her own lucrative movie franchise, and it’s not the least bit weird when Hansel and Gretel grow up to become butt-kicking witch hunters. Kenneth Branagh played it relatively straight when he remade Disney’s “Cinderella” in 2015, but even that film acknowledged that a “wicked step mother” is a one-dimensional concept, and falling in love in seconds is not what anyone seriously considers love.
You’d be hard pressed to find any classic fairy tale that doesn’t need at least some finagling to become relevant to modern audiences, and since those tales were, themselves, constantly evolving over time, nobody can claim films like “Steps” are an aberration. They’re just what fairy tales are these days, and “Steps,” a lively and amusing and character-driven new animated take on “Cinderella,” proves we’re better off for it.
“Steps” begins with Lilith (Ali Wong), Cinderella’s so called “evil” stepsister, telling the audience the original story was a smear campaign. In reality, Lilith and her little sister Margot (Stephanie Hsu) were, along with their mother, immigrants from East Asia, and their bad reputation was fueled by racism and classism.
When they meet their new stepsister Cinderella (Amanda Seyfried), she’s an impossibly kind young girl who loves cleaning the house and talking to animals, and they take an immediate shine to each other. But an early traumatic incident occurs, Cinderella chooses to side with the popular children over her stepsisters, and a rift develops. It only gets bigger when their father dies and the town completely turns on Lilith’s side of the family. Poor Cinderella, everyone says, having to live with those monsters.
So Lilith does what any teenager would do: She goes to Hot Topic. Or, since Hot Topic hasn’t been invented yet, it’s probably more accurate to say she invents Hot Topic. She’s ahead of her time, so nobody notices she’s a total style icon, but she embraces her outsider status and makes it her whole identity.
It takes a lot of contrivances to get the plot going, but in a nutshell: Lilith is furious when she finds out Cinderella has a Fairy Godmother (Bette Midler), so she steals the Fairy Godmother’s wand and whips up some magical invites to the royal ball. Lilith and Margot also get new fancy dresses and a wicked cool Skulltula carriage. They crash the party and just when they were having fun, and just when Cinderella was about to get betrothed to the Prince (Daniel Radcliffe), an evil socialite named Priscilla (Nikki Glaser) steals the wand, steals the prince, turns Margot into a frog, and has her intimidating butler Roderick (Peter Dinklage) chase the stepsisters out of the kingdom.
There are a lot of things in “Steps” that don’t totally work. It’s a little hypocritical to tell a story in which all the women we used to hate turn out to be decent human beings, only to shift all the blame to another, cartoonishly wicked villain. When we find out why the Fairy Godmother went to all this trouble in the first place it creates a mountain of plot problems, many of which remain unresolved at the end of the movie. Even Lilith’s opening monologue stops making sense, since after the way things turn out, there’s no reason the original, allegedly inaccurate “Cinderella” story would ever have been told in the first place.
You can say “it’s just a kids movie” all you want, but that’s always an excuse for sloppy writing, and deep down, those “it’s just a kids movie” folks know it. Fortunately, in spite of its missteps (ha!), “Steps” is actually a very good kids movie, with rich characters and a big imagination.
The film even comes up with a clever reason why the Prince can’t recognize Cinderella after her clothes magically transform back into rags. Good luck finding a better explanation in any of the other retellings. So I offer my congratulations to the film’s seven credited screenwriters; for once, too many cooks didn’t spoil the soup.
“Steps” sends Lilith, Margot and Cinderella on a lot of adventures on their way towards saving the kingdom, and they’re all breezy and fun. Even better, they all provide ample opportunity for the stepsisters to reveal their true selves and reckon with the mistakes they’ve made. A simpler, drabber film would have made Cinderella the bad guy but she’s an exceptionally well-intentioned person, and when she realizes that the one time she let her guard down and wasn’t nice to everyone, it had lifelong, heartbreaking ramifications. Everyone screws up but at least everyone, with the exception of Priscilla, seems to be trying.
The animation in “Steps” is professional, if not always remarkable, but the storytelling is efficient and effective, and sometimes the designs are lovely and/or strange. So although nothing about Alyce Tzue and John Ripa’s is particularly novel, including and especially its attempts to be novel, there’s nothing seriously wrong with it either. The plot is wonky, but guess what, so was the plot of “Cinderella” in the first place. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. (And people who wear glass slippers should invest in more comfortable footwear.)
“Steps” premieres on Netflix on Nov. 20, 2026.
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