A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes

A Dream is A Wish Your Heart Makes – Writing of the Song

“A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” was written and composed by Mack David, Al Hoffman and Jerry Livingston for the 1950 Walt Disney film Cinderella. It finds Cinderella, as voiced by Ilene Woods, encouraging her animal friends to never stop wishing and dreaming. The Pinocchio song “When You Wish Upon A Star” has a similar theme.

The melody is based upon Franz Liszt’s “Ricordanza” Étude, the ninth of the Hungarian composer’s 12 Transcendental Études.

Perry Como recorded the song with Mitchell Ayres’ and His Orchestra in New York City on October 3, 1949. Other artists that have covered the tune include Michael Bolton, Hilary Duff, Johnny Mathis, Cher, Bette Midler and Linda Ronstadt.

English actress Lily James, who plays Cinderella in the 2015 film adaptation, recorded the song for the film’s soundtrack.

Jessie Ware recorded a cover of the song for the 2015 compilation album We Love Disney. The English songstress said: “Basically, I got accused of trying to sing too Disney on my first record when I was doing demos I love Disney songs so, so much, so to be able to sing on this album is a huge honor and a real treat.”

A History of Disney’s Cinderella

Cinderella is a 1950 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures. Based on Charles Perrault’s 1697 fairy tale of the same title, it was directed by Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, and Clyde Geronimi. The film features the voices of Ilene Woods, Eleanor Audley, Verna Felton, Rhoda Williams, James MacDonald, Luis van Rooten and Don Barclay with Helene Stanley and Claire Du Brey each serving as the live model for Cinderella and Fairy Godmother respectively.

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. Because of this, the studio endured commercial failures such as Pinocchio, Fantasia (both 1940) and Bambi (1942), all of which would later become more successful with several re-releases in theaters and on home video. By 1947, the studio was over $4 million in debt and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Walt Disney and his animators returned to feature film production in 1948 after producing a string of package films with the idea of adapting Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon into an animated film.

Cinderella was released to theatres on February 15, 1950, receiving critical acclaim and becoming a box office success, which made it Disney’s biggest hit since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and helped reverse the studio’s fortunes. It also received three Academy Award nominations, including Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, Best Sound Recording, and Best Original Song for “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo”.

The film was followed by two direct-to-video sequels, Cinderella II: Dreams Come True (2002) and Cinderella III: A Twist in Time (2007), and a live-action remake in 2015. In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

Disney’s Cinderella Becomes a Critical Success

The film became a critical success garnering the best reception for a Disney animated film since Dumbo. In a personal letter to Walt Disney, director Michael Curtiz hailed the film as the “masterpiece of all pictures you have done.” Producer Hal Wallis declared, “If this is not your best, it is very close to the top.”

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. It is enhanced by the sudden, piquant touches of humor and the music which appeal to old and young.” Time magazine wrote that “Cinderella is beguiling proof that Walt Disney knows his way around fairyland. Harking back to the style of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), a small army of Disney craftsmen have given the centuries-old Cinderella story a dewy radiance of comic verve that should make children feel like elves and adults feel like children.”

However, the characterization of Cinderella received a mixed reception. 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.” However, criticizing her role and personality, Crowther opined, “As a consequence, the situation in which they are mutually involved have the constraint and immobility of panel-expressed episodes. When Mr. Disney tries to make them behave like human beings, they’re banal.” 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.”

Modern Day Reviews Rate the Movie a Classic

Contemporary reviews have remained positive. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film three out of four stars during its 1987 re-release. 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 review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported the film received an approval rating of 98% based on 40 reviews with an average score of 8/10. The website’s critical consensus reads, “The rich colors, sweet songs, adorable mice and endearing (if suffering) heroine make Cinderella a nostalgically lovely charmer.”