Research: Title Sequence Analysis: A Cinderella Story

When analysing ‘a Cinderella story’ title sequence, I considered the different elements that were shown to establish the character, surrounding, genre and time.

A Cinderella Story is a well known chick flick movie, released in 2004 featuring Hilary Duff who is a well known actress in the chick flick genre. The target audience for this film is mainly teenage girls aged from 12 to 16 years old. Chick flicks are stereotypically about young girls who fall in love, with the occasional comedy moments. Therefore openings usually revolve around the characters and their typical life. Within the first seconds of a chick flick you are most likely to see something girly.

A Cinderella story initially starts with a view of some mountains, at first the audience cannot tell the genre immediately which you can in other films of this genre. Then the camera moves up the mountains using a tilt movement, this then reveals a castle. The title is shown and then the narrative starts. The camera then continues to zoom in towards the castle, turning outwards to reveal the castle is actually inside a snow globe. Then a young girl is looking at the snow globe. This is when we are first introduced to the main character that is with her dad. The title sequence then speeds up as the scenes change taking us through the girls’ life with her father. Most people know the story of Cinderella, and this film is basically a new updated version. Therefore on the title sequence we meet the evil stepmother.

As this film is a modernized version of the old fairytale the mise – en- scene is different to the original story. The original story explained Cinderella as a servant girl who wore rags. The new version shows a normal teenage girl whose father dies and so she has to live with her wicked stepmother and her evil step sisters. The main character who is called Sam wears casual jeans and a t-shirt; she also wears a cap as she tries to not be noticed by people around her. There are still similarities to the fairytale as Sam is still a servant to her stepmother, they live in a big house and her father dies leaving her. The title sequence also establishes Sam’ dad’ diner, this place plays a big part throughout the movie.  The girl also has a book of fairytales; this shows her connection to the story.

The sound is very important in the title sequence; the sound in the title sequence immediately tells the audience that this film is a chick flick. The film starts with a piece of music, music that you would usually associate with a fairytale, which are usually aimed at females. The music is diegetic as the characters cannot hear the sound. After we see the castle the narrative starts, the girl who is shown tells the audience her modernized version of the fairytale. In those few minutes we get to learn about years of her life. When the girl talks about her dad’ diner non-diegetic music starts, the song is ‘this will be’ by Natalie Cole which is well known for being a female/diva ballad. After the music fades out we are left with a scene between the girl and her father, after this scene we find out the girls father has died. The diegetic sound then returns in the forma of a slow/sad song. The music going from girly to sad is very common in chick flicks as females often link feeling to songs.

The first writing on screen is the title of the film which is shown within the first 30 seconds. It is written in calligraphy, old English way. We would link this writing to fairytales; we would then link fairytales to girls as you would not see this writing in an action film. The credits are written in a font similar to Script MT Bold, they are all written in pink as well which is a traditional female colour. The credits fade in and out of the scenes and travel quite simply. These are fairly obvious signs to the audience that this film is of the chick flick genre.

The opening titles of a film are supposed to indicate to the audience a number of things: the film genre, the time, the characters, and tone. I feel the opening title sequence to ‘A Cinderella story’ does this. The storyline is made immediately clear and the audience are left asking questions like ‘what will happen next?’ and ‘how will this relate to the original fairytale?’ These questions are what inspire people to watch the rest of the film. So if the opening titles succeed in getting their message across, the audience will then want to watch the rest of the film.