The film features the voices of Ilene Woods, Eleanor Audley, Verna Felton, Rhoda Williams, James MacDonald, and Luis van Rooten.

During the early 1940s, Walt Disney Productions had suffered financially after losing connections to the European film markets due to the outbreak of World War II.

It received critical acclaim and was a box office success, making it Disney's biggest hit since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and helping reverse the studio's fortunes.

In 2018, Cinderella was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Jealous of her stepdaughter's beauty and determined to forward her own daughters' interests, Lady Tremaine orders Cinderella to become a scullion in her own château, overburdening her with chores.

The fairy godmother also bestows Cinderella a shimmering ball gown and glass slippers, but warns her that all the magic will end on the stroke of midnight.

[12] Lucille Williams, Thurl Ravenscroft, Clint McCauley, June Sullivan and Helen Seibert provided uncredited voices for Perla and the other mice.

Walt Disney first adapted Charles Perrault's 1697 fairy tale "Cinderella" as part of his cartoon shorts series for the Laugh-O-Gram Studio in 1922.

[20] He was interested in producing a second version in December 1933 as a Silly Symphony short; Burt Gillett was attached as the director while Frank Churchill was assigned as the composer.

[24] By September 1943, Disney had assigned Dick Huemer and Joe Grant to begin work on Cinderella as story supervisors and given a preliminary budget of $1 million.

"[28] In spring 1946, Disney held three story meetings, and subsequently received treatment from Ted Sears, Homer Brightman, and Harry Reeves dated March 24, 1947.

By May 1947, the first rough phase of storyboarding was in the process, and an inventory report that same month suggested a different approach with the story "largely through the animals in the barnyard and their observations of Cinderella's day-to-day activities".

Disney felt the characters in Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan were too cold, while Cinderella contained elements similar to Snow White, and greenlit the project.

Selecting his top-tier animation talent, Ben Sharpsteen was assigned as supervising producer while Hamilton Luske, Wilfred Jackson, and Clyde Geronimi became the sequence directors.

[35] Although Disney no longer held daily story meetings, the three directors still communicated with him by mailing him memoranda, scripts, Photostats of storyboards, and acetates of soundtrack recordings while he was in England for two and a half months during the summer of 1949.

[36] In one instance, when Disney returned to the studio on August 29, he reviewed Luske's animation sequences and ordered numerous minor changes, as well as a significant reworking of the film's climax.

[40] She got involved with the project when she did a favor to its songwriters Mack David and Jerry Livingston, who had known Woods from working with her on her eponymous ABC radio program.

[45] Disney had previously used live-action reference on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), and Fantasia (1940), but as part of an effort to keep the production cost down, the footage was used to check the plot, timing, and movement of the characters before animating it.

[46] The footage was then edited frame-by-frame onto large Photostat sheets to duplicate, in which the animators found too restrictive as they were not allowed to imagine anything that the live actors did not present since that kind of experimentation might necessitate changes and cost more money.

[56] However, Disney grew displeased with this approach and assigned Davis as the second supervising animator,[44] whose designs suggested a "more the exotic dame" with a long swan-like neck.

[28] Two years later, Disney turned to Tin Pan Alley songwriters Mack David, Jerry Livingston, and Al Hoffman to compose the songs.

[66] On September 12, 1995, a special edition of the soundtrack entitled Walt Disney Records Presents The Music of Cinderella was released to coincide with the film's re-release on home video.

[75] To celebrate Disney's 100th anniversary, the film was re-released in cinemas across the UK from August 25 to 31, 2023,[76] and Latin American theaters from October 12 to 18, 2023, alongside Toy Story (1995).

"[85] A review in Chicago Tribune remarked: "The film not only is handsome, with imaginative art and glowing colors to bedeck the old fairy tale, but it also is told gently, without the lurid villains which sometimes give little tots nightmares.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, "The beautiful Cinderella has a voluptuous face and form—not to mention an eager disposition—to compare with Al Capp's Daisy Mae."

"[88] Similarly, Variety claimed the film found "more success in projecting the lower animals than in its central character, Cinderella, who is on the colorless, doll-faced side, as is the Prince Charming.

[90] Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote the film "shows Disney at the tail end of his best period, when his backgrounds were still luminous with depth and detail and his incidental characters still had range and bite.

The website's critical consensus reads, "The rich colors, sweet songs, adorable mice and endearing (if suffering) heroine make Cinderella a nostalgically lovely charmer.

[105] On October 4, 1995, a digitally remastered edition of film was released on VHS and LaserDisc as part of the "Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection", and later in the UK on November 24, 1997.

[108] The Platinum Edition was also released on VHS, but the only special feature was the "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" music video by the Disney Channel Circle of Stars.