A fairy tale is a story that has been passed down through many generations by either word of mouth or by text. Fairy tales often evolve over time and become more modern as time goes on to keep up with the younger generations. To become a fairy tale a story must contain some elements to put it into the fairy tales genre, such as a magical event, some fantasy within the story, a character confronting and resolving a problem, a happy ending, and the audience must relate to the central protagonist (Jones p. 7-17). There are many popular fairy tales today, but one of the more popular stories is the tale of Cinderella.
             Cinderella is one of the greatest fairy tales of our time, and one of the most widely told and one, which has undergone more than a few artistic changes while keeping the basic storyline. Cinderella is a story everyone has known probably from preschool, maybe earlier. Not only is it a book, but it is also a major motion picture. The story that most people know is the Walt Disney version only because Walt Disney's Cinderella movie was very popular. As time goes on we go on to learn that Walt Disney did not originally write the story, but that it has been a fairy tale for many years. Another very popular Cinderella story is the Grimm brother's version called 'Aschenputtel' written in 1812. These two stories are alike in so many ways but so radically different in others.
             In most of the Cinderella stories the mother dies and the father remarries an 'evil stepmother'. Only in the Chinese version both the mother and the father die leaving Yeh-hsien (Cinderella) with her father's co-wife. In Walt Disney's version the father dies and shortly after he remarries, which mirrors the plot of 'Aschenputtel'. The step-mothers are all mean spirited women who make the Cinderella character work harder than any of the other children as they berate her by calling her names (Warner p. 202-...