On Tuesday at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Netflix held a work-in-progress presentation for its upcoming fractured fairy tale “Steps.” The movie, set to debut on the platform this fall (likely around Thanksgiving), follows one of Cinderella’s supposedly wicked stepsisters Lilith (Ali Wong), as she is begrudgingly forced to team up with Cinderella (Amanda Seyfried) for the good of her kingdom. It might not have the legacy or weight of Brad Bird’s upcoming sci-fi noir “Ray Gunn,” but you should still keep it on your radar. It has the possibility of being very special.
On hand to present “Steps” were the film’s core creative team – art director Dan Carey, head of character animation John Figliozzi, and directors John Ripa and Alyce Tzue. Together, they highlighted a new iteration of the classic fairy tale, one that has been told countless times in just as many countries over thousands of years, but that leans into modern sensibilities in a way that feels both refreshing and unique.
The team also noted the fact that “Steps” has been in development for a long time. And even after they got the official green light back in 2020, there was much they had to figure out. First was uncovering what the movie was really about. By incorporating some of Tzue’s childhood memories of being an awkward Asian kid in a predominantly white California town, they finally hit upon their theme – everyone deserves their happily ever after.
But there was still other stuff they needed to refine. Including what Cinderella was all about – was she the doe-eyed do-gooder from the Disney version? Or perhaps something more flawed and messy? And figuring out Cinderella would impact their take on the stepsisters, too. One version had Lilith as a kind of freedom-fighting rebel, stealing magic from the kingdom’s elite and returning it to the people. That didn’t get very far.
In one of the most memorable moments shared, the “Steps” team presented a slide that showed Cinderella as a bloodthirsty heroine; feral and disheveled. They even looked at designing a dress for her that would evoke a bloody wedding gown, with a garish red slash down the middle. (Seriously). Casey said that the take away from these explorations was “don’t mess with Cinderella.”
“Only we didn’t say mess,” Tzue added.
Another fascinating portion of the presentation focused on creating the fairy tale kingdom of Alouette, which was described by the team as being inspired by the French retelling of the Cinderella story and set in a pre-Revolution version of the country, fully embracing the rococo design aesthetic of the time. They were governed by what they described as “tactile textures” and “elegant clutter” (for the latter, Ripa briefly showed a shot of his overflowing home office – creatives, ya know?).
To design the movie, Tzue said that they were looking to lean away from the more painterly styles and 2D textures that other computer-animated films have embraced recently. (It probably didn’t help that Disney’s “Wish,” which used flat backdrops and other flourishes, came out during the production of “Steps” and floundered horribly.) Instead of shying away from the movie’s 3D computer animation, the team chose to embrace it.
“We wanted to make 3D more touchable,” Tzue said.
To that end, they wanted to create a maximalist look that embraced both of their design edicts, particularly by creating most of the sets and locations out of foods. If the motto of Marie Antoinette was “let them eat cake,” they were going to literally fashion the entire movie out of cake. Clocks would be made out of taffy. Jewels would be giant sugar crystals. And the look of entire sections of castle could be sliced up and consumed wholly, should that be your approach.
When it came to the elegant clutter, they looked at heightening the environments to what they described as “dollhouse scale,” so things were bigger and more exaggerated. There would be stuff on and in everything, like in the Fairy Godmother’s house, which was loaded with character-specific treats.
As the team detailed the characters of “Steps,” you also got that their approach was going to be unique and highly specific to the film. The aforementioned Fairy Godmother, for example, voiced by Bette Midler, feels like an overprotective Jewish grandmother. In this version of the story, she’s actually intervened countless times throughout Cinderella’s life, fashioning her fairy tale over 20 years. (So when things go south in “Steps” and Lilith steals her wand and turns her sister Margot into a frog, well, she takes that personally.) The story’s new villain Priscilla (voiced by Nikki Glaser), takes inspiration from circa 2000s mean girls, with a decidedly Paris Hilton approach.
It should be noted that the costumes that the characters wear, which are just as embroidered and delicate and full of character as anything else in the movie, was given its own section. Our takeaway was not only that the costumes are incredible (including the discarded bloody wedding dress for Cinderella), but that, really, it’s high time the Academy start awarding animated films for their costume designs. C’mon people.
“Steps” feels like a very modern fairy tale, in a new and galvanizing way.
In some of the clips, you saw that the characters all speak in a contemporary fashion, which even after countless re-contextualized storybook movies, felt fresh. Like hearing Robin Williams’ Genie for the first time in Disney’s masterpiece “Aladdin.” When Lilith is dashing out of the castle and sees Cinderella’s glassy coach waiting out front, she quips, “Of course she found street parking.” Likewise, Midler’s delivery of her lines and some of the things that Margot (Stephanie Hsu) says after she’s been turned into, as Tzue calls her, “the world’s most adorable frog.”
But there’s also modernity in the team’s approach to the material.
One of the most memorable interludes from the presentation was when Tzue pulled up a Tumblr post that she remembered seeing years earlier. The post broke down the way that current animated characters are designed, using only their face shapes. While there was a wide variety in the way that male characters were designed, in movies primarily made by Disney and Pixar, using fun, curvy styles that left an impact, when it came to the female characters they were all basically the same – a single, simple set of ovals that Tzue described as “baby alien heads.”
This clearly stuck with Tzue as she was leading the “Steps” team with Ripa. As such, they pushed for more variety in the face shapes, leading to characters like Lilith whose face shape is like a martini glass, while others looked even more jagged and surreal.
“Steps” feels like it’s willingly casting off some of the tropes that would have left it feeling uninspired and same-old, same-old. At one point, the film was a musical before they decided to scratch that idea as well. There will be needle drops, the filmmakers promised, but no character would be bursting into song to explain how they are feeling. That, to them, would be leaning on the old fashioned, the tried-and-true. Instead, they strove for something different, unique and new. They might not mess with Cinderella in “Steps,” but everything else is fair game.
