Why I Wrote Disney's Cinderella for the 75th Anniversary

The email came in on a Tuesday afternoon. I read it twice before I let myself believe it.

Disney was looking for an author to write a new edition of Cinderella for the 75th anniversary of the 1950 film. Would I be interested?

I sat in my kitchen with my laptop open and my coffee going cold and thought about what to say. Cinderella was one of the first stories I ever loved. She was on the wallpaper of my childhood bedroom. She was the costume I wore for three Halloweens in a row. She was the story my own mother had read to me, and the story I had already started reading to my daughters.

And now they were asking me to write her.

I want to tell you what that was actually like — what Disney asked for, what I pushed back on, what I added, what I fought to keep, and why, after I finished, I knew I had to write the Millie Magnus chapter book series next. Because the truth is that Walt Disney's Cinderella: 75th Anniversary Edition isn't just a book. It's the story of how a 75-year-old fairy tale gets handed to the next generation, and what an author has to decide along the way.

The Call

Here's the part that didn't make it into the press release.

When Disney calls a writer to retell a story like Cinderella, they don't say write us a new fairy tale. They say something more like: here is a story that has belonged to seventy-five years of children, and we'd like to hand it to the next ten years of children. What do you want to bring to that?

It's not flattery. It's a question. And the question has weight.

I said yes the same day. Then I went and sat with my older daughter — she was five at the time — and I read her the original 1950 storybook version, the one I had grown up with. I watched her face. I watched what she leaned forward for. I watched what made her go quiet. And I started taking notes.

Because here's the thing every parent already knows: Cinderella works on a five-year-old now, in 2025, the same way she worked on me in 1995, the same way she worked on my mother in 1965. The bones of the story are unchangeable. What can change — what has to change every generation or two — is the language we use to tell it.

What Disney Asked Me to Do

The brief was clearer than people might expect. Disney wanted three things:

1. Honor every iconic moment. The mice. The bibbidi-bobbidi-boo. The pumpkin coach. The midnight clock. The glass slipper on the staircase. None of those could move. Generations of kids know exactly what's coming on every page, and the new edition had to deliver every one of those moments with the staging they expected.

2. Use language that lands for a 2025 child. The 1950 narration is beautiful, but it's also 1950. The sentences are longer. The vocabulary leans formal. The internal life of Cinderella is mostly off-page — she feels things, but the book often describes the feeling rather than letting the child watch her have it. A modern picture book reader expects more interiority, more rhythm, more movement.

3. Make the values readable without preaching. This was the hardest one. Today's parents and teachers are asking sharper questions about what fairy tales teach kids. Why is Cinderella patient with cruel people? Is that the lesson we want? Is she passive? Is the whole story about waiting to be rescued? Disney wasn't asking me to argue with any of those questions on the page. They were asking me to write a Cinderella where the answer was visible in the story itself — where a parent reading it could see exactly what kind of strength Cinderella was using, and didn't have to defend the book afterward.

That last one is what I spent most of my time on.

The Three Things I Changed

I'm going to tell you the actual choices, in case it's useful for any other writer thinking about retellings, or any educator using the book in a classroom.

1. I made Cinderella's choices visible

In the older versions, the story often happens to Cinderella. Her mother dies. Her stepmother arrives. Her father dies. She's made into a servant. She gets invited to the ball. She gets stopped from going. She gets rescued by the Fairy Godmother. She loses the slipper. She gets found.

That's the plot. But that's not the story.

The story is the choices she's making in between every one of those events. She chooses to be kind to the mice when no one is watching her. She chooses to sing while she works. She chooses to stay hopeful. She chooses to trust the Fairy Godmother when she has no reason to. She chooses to go to the ball even though every adult in her life has tried to keep her there. She chooses to hope when the slipper is presented in the parlor.

In the 75th anniversary edition, you can see her choose. The verbs lean active. The narration leaves space for the child to notice the moment Cinderella decides something. That single change reframes the whole book — she's not the girl things happen to. She's the girl who decides who to be while things are happening.

2. I reframed her kindness as a discipline, not a personality

The older readings of Cinderella often present her kindness as just who she is — like it's a personality trait she was born with, the way some kids are born with curly hair. That framing makes the lesson useless. A child reading it thinks: oh, well, she's just nice. I'm not nice like that. So I can't be Cinderella.

What's actually happening in the story is much more interesting. Cinderella's kindness is a choice she keeps making under pressure that would make most people stop. She is kind to the mice when she could ignore them. She is patient with the stepsisters when she could fight back. She doesn't give up even when she has every reason to. That's not a personality. That's a discipline. That's something a child can learn to do.

The 75th anniversary text leans into that. Her kindness is something she does, again and again, on purpose. Which means a child reading it can see the practice. They can imitate it. They can carry it home from the book in a way that's actionable, not just admirable.

This is the throughline I would carry into Millie Magnus later. It's the same lesson, just told longer.

3. I changed what the magic does

This was the most subtle change, and the one I'm proudest of.

In a lot of older Cinderella retellings, the magic is the moment when Cinderella becomes a different person. The dress arrives. The shoes appear. The carriage rolls up. And suddenly Cinderella is worthy of the prince. The transformation is the point.

That's the wrong reading of the story. And kids feel it, even when they can't name it. If the magic is what makes Cinderella worthy, then the lesson is that you have to wait for magic to be allowed to matter.

What I wanted to do — and what the 75th anniversary edition does — is make it clear that the magic doesn't change Cinderella. It just lets the world finally see her. The girl who walks into the ball is the same girl who fed the mice that morning. The dress is the part the world finally sees. The kindness was already there.

If you read the book to a child carefully, you can show them the moment. The Fairy Godmother doesn't say now you'll be wonderful. She says, in essence, now they'll know what's already true about you. The magic is a reveal, not a transformation. That distinction is the whole story.

What I Fought to Keep

For every change, there were three things I argued to keep exactly as they were. I want to name them, because I think they're underrated.

The mice. The mice are not decoration. The mice are the proof. They're how a child knows that Cinderella's kindness is real — because she's kind to them when no one is watching, when there's nothing in it for her, when no one will ever know. If you cut the mice or shrink them, you cut the entire moral architecture of the book. I would not have moved on this.

Midnight. Some modern retellings get rid of the midnight rule because it feels arbitrary. It is not arbitrary. The midnight rule is what makes the prince fall in love with Cinderella, and not with the dress. If the magic lasted forever, the prince would have married a costume. Because the magic ends, the prince has to find the girl underneath. Midnight is the mechanism that protects the integrity of the story.

The forgiveness ending. This is the part contemporary retellings most often want to remove. In the older versions, Cinderella forgives her stepfamily. There's a trend in modern fairy tale retellings to give the heroine a satisfying revenge — to expose her stepfamily, banish them, marry the prince in their faces. I understand the impulse. But I think it's wrong for this story.

Cinderella's forgiveness is not weakness. It's the final proof of the discipline she's been practicing the whole book. To get to the end of a story like that and say I am not going to let what they did to me decide who I am is the most powerful thing she does. If you take that away, you collapse the whole arc into a story about getting back at people. And kids deserve a different ending than that.

I kept it. Disney supported keeping it. I'm glad we did.

What the Process Was Actually Like

People ask me about the process, so a few practical notes.

I worked closely with an editor at Disney Press for about a year. We went through five major drafts and a lot of small ones. The hardest revisions weren't the big structural ones — those came together fast — they were the line-level decisions. Every word in a picture book has to earn its place, because there are so few of them. A 32-page picture book is somewhere between 500 and 1,200 words. That's not a lot of room. So every adjective, every verb, every cadence is a decision.

I read every draft aloud to my daughters. Every single one. They are the most honest readers I have ever met. If a sentence didn't land, my younger daughter would just start playing with her hair and stop listening, and I would know I had to cut it. If a sentence landed, my older daughter would interrupt the read-aloud to say something. Both are useful in different ways.

The illustrations were not mine — Disney has its own art direction process for licensed properties — but I did get to see early sketches and weigh in on a few moments where the words and pictures needed to talk to each other. The biggest thing I asked for was that we never show Cinderella crying alone in a way that made her look small. She can be sad. She can be tired. She cannot look defeated. That's the visual equivalent of the line-level work I was doing on the text.

And then it went to print. And then it landed on shelves in fall 2025. And then I started getting emails and pictures from parents whose kids were reading it.

That part is what I will never get used to.

Why I Wrote Millie Magnus Next

While I was working on Cinderella, something started bothering me. I'd be writing a scene where Cinderella chose kindness in the kitchen, and I'd realize: this child reading the book is going to have a chance to make this exact same choice on Tuesday at recess. And the picture book ends. There's no follow-up. The lesson is in their head, but they don't have a longer story showing them what kindness looks like in their actual life.

That's where Millie Magnus came from.

Millie Magnus is a Black girl in second grade. She is not a princess. She has a regular family, a regular school, regular problems. In Millie Magnus Won't Be Bullied, she has to figure out what to do when a boy in her class won't stop teasing her. In Millie Magnus for Mayor, she runs for class president and has to decide what kind of leader she wants to be. In Book 3, Millie Magnus Is NOT Jealous, she has to learn what to do with the feeling of watching a friend get something she wanted.

If you read the books in order, you can see what I'm doing. Millie is the modern, Black, second-grade version of the same lesson Cinderella was teaching. The discipline of kindness. The choice to be brave when it would be easier to be cruel. The integrity of who you are when no one is watching. The forgiveness that doesn't excuse anyone but also doesn't let what someone else did decide who you are.

The two series are not in competition. They're a reading path. You read Cinderella to a four-year-old. Two years later, that same kid reads Millie Magnus on her own. The lessons are the same. The format is age-appropriate. The heroine's complexion is different, on purpose, because not every kid grew up seeing a princess who looked like them and they deserve to.

If you want a deeper version of this argument, I made it in What Cinderella Teaches Kids and again in Chapter Books for Disney Princess Fans. They're companion essays.

A Note for Parents Reading the Book to Kids

If you have the 75th anniversary edition (or you're thinking about getting it), here are the moments I would slow down on while you read.

Page where she's feeding the mice. Pause and ask: why do you think she does that even when she's tired?

Page where the stepsisters tear her dress. Pause and ask: what do you think they were feeling? Were they happy?

Page where the Fairy Godmother appears. Pause and ask: what changes about Cinderella here? What stays the same?

Page where the slipper fits. Pause and ask: do you think the prince already knew it would be her? How?

The forgiveness page at the end. Pause and ask: do you think she should forgive them? Why or why not? What would you do?

If you want a fuller list, I built it out into the Cinderella Discussion Questions for Kids guide — twenty-five questions, organized by age and theme, with notes on what good answers sound like. There's a free printable PDF version at the link.

Frequently Asked Questions

More Reading Guides from Brittany

If this essay was useful, here are companion pieces from a Disney author and mom of two:

• What Cinderella Teaches Kids: 7 Lessons from the 75th Anniversary Author — the longer essay version of what I was trying to do on the page.
• Cinderella Discussion Questions for Kids — twenty-five classroom-tested questions to use after reading, with a free printable PDF.
• Books Like Cinderella for Kids: 25 Magical Stories — a curated list of multicultural retellings, fractured fairy tales, and chapter books with Cinderella's heart.
• Multicultural Cinderella Stories from Around the World — the Cinderella variants I'd pair the 75th anniversary edition with for a richer compare-and-contrast.
• Chapter Books for Disney Princess Fans — the reading path from princess picture book to chapter book, with Millie Magnus as the modern complement.

One more thing. If you've read the 75th anniversary edition with your child and you're looking for what comes next, the Millie Magnus chapter book series is the answer I built. Same author, same values, written for the chapter book reader your kid is becoming. Book 3, Millie Magnus Is NOT Jealous, is on pre-order now for September 2026.