Cinderella Trivia
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118 free Cinderella trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
62 free Cinderella trivia questions with answers. Cinderella is not one story but thousands. The oldest version on record is a Greek slave girl in Egypt whose sandal is stolen by an eagle; the Grimms' heroine gets golden shoes from a hazel tree and watches doves blind her stepsisters; the glass slipper, the pumpkin and the fairy godmother only arrived with Charles Perrault in 1697. This quiz runs 118 questions across all of it: the folk tales from Naples to ninth-century China, Disney's 1950 film that pulled the studio back from bankruptcy (the 380 auditions, the calico cat, the Nine Old Men), Kenneth Branagh's 2015 remake and its unwearable crystal shoes, the three Rodgers and Hammerstein television versions, Ever After with Drew Barrymore, and the steel-and-plaster castle in Florida with two missing tower numbers. It starts easy and works up to questions for people who know their Aarne-Thompson types. Every answer has been checked against reference sources and is shown with a short explanation once you answer, so it works for a family movie night, a Disney round at pub quiz or settling an argument about what the slipper was really made of.
30 of 118 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which French writer's 1697 telling of Cinderella added the pumpkin, the fairy godmother and the glass slippers?
Charles Perrault
Charles Perrault called it Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre, and it came with two morals, the second admitting that talent gets you nowhere without a godparent.
Q 02In the Grimm tale Aschenputtel, the heroine's help comes not from a fairy godmother but from what?
A hazel tree on her mother's grave
She grew it from a hazel twig her father brought back from a fair, watering it with her tears; a white bird in its branches throws down whatever she asks for.
Q 03In the Grimm version, what are the slippers the heroine wears on the third night made of?
Gold
On the third night the bird throws down a dress and slippers of pure gold; the shoe left in the pitch is a golden one, unlike the glass slipper of Perrault's French telling.
Q 04In the Grimm tale, what does the elder stepsister cut off on her mother's advice so the slipper will fit?
Her toes
The mother tells the elder girl to cut off her toes, since a queen need not walk; the younger trims her heel, and two doves on the hazel tree point out the blood in the shoe.
Q 05In the Grimms' Cinderella, how does the prince try to stop the mystery girl escaping on the third night of the festival?
He has the staircase smeared with pitch
He has the staircase smeared with pitch, but it only half works: one slipper sticks in the tar and she gets away, having earlier fled via a pigeon coop and a pear tree.
Q 06In the coda the Grimms added in 1819, what happens to the stepsisters at the wedding?
Doves peck out their eyes
The 1812 first edition had no punishment at all; the blinding was bolted on for the second edition, one eye on the way into church and the other on the way out.
Q 07Which ancient writer first recorded the tale of the Greek girl Rhodopis?
Strabo
Strabo's Geographica, around the turn of the first century, tells how Rhodopis's sandal was carried off to the king at Memphis; Herodotus had mentioned her centuries earlier only as a courtesan, without the shoe story.
Q 08In the ancient tale of Rhodopis, an early Cinderella, what snatches her sandal and carries it to the king of Egypt?
An eagle
An eagle drops it in the king's lap while he is holding court outdoors, and he sends men across the country to find the foot that fits.
Q 09In the ninth-century Chinese tale of Ye Xian, the heroine's festival finery comes from the magical bones of what?
A fish
In Duan Chengshi's ninth-century Youyang Zazu, Ye Xian's stepmother kills her pet fish; its buried bones grant her a gown and slippers for the festival, and the stepfamily is later killed by flying stones.
Q 10The first European prose version, Basile's La Gatta Cenerentola of 1634, was published in which city?
Naples
It was written in Neapolitan dialect and printed in Naples in 1634 in Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti; the heroine, Zezolla, helps her governess become her stepmother by killing the first one.
Q 11In Basile's 1634 version, how many stepsisters does the new stepmother spring on the heroine?
6
Zezolla is dressed for the ball by a fairy living in a date tree grown from a seedling her father brought back from Sardinia.
Q 12In Rossini's opera La Cenerentola, what replaces the slipper as the proof of the heroine's identity?
Matching bracelets
Angelina gives the prince one of a matching pair of bracelets and tells him to find its twin; Ferretti's libretto dropped the fairy and the slipper, giving her the philosopher Alidoro as helper instead.
Q 13Folklorists classify the tale under which Aarne-Thompson-Uther type number, 'Persecuted Heroine'?
510A
Type ATU 510A, the Persecuted Heroine, also covers The Wonderful Birch and Fair, Brown and Trembling; stories where the father himself is the persecutor, like Donkeyskin, are type 510B.
Q 21What is the name of Cinderella's dog in the 1950 film, who is turned into a footman for the ball?
Bruno
Bruno later saves the day by chasing the cat Lucifer out of the house so the mice can free Cinderella from the attic.
Q 22Where did Walt Disney find the model for the villainous cat Lucifer?
At animator Ward Kimball's home
Walt spotted Ward Kimball's own calico cat at the animator's home and declared it was Lucifer; none of Kimball's earlier designs had pleased him, and the animals were animated without live-action reference footage.
Q 23Cinderella's reference model Helene Stanley later did the same job for which Disney heroine?
Aurora in Sleeping Beauty
Q 14If Cinderella's 'glass' slipper came from confusing French verre with vair, what would the slippers be?
Squirrel fur
Vair was the heraldic name for squirrel fur, hence the old theory that Perrault meant fur slippers; most scholars think the glass was deliberate, though Nabokov's Professor Pnin states the squirrel-fur theory as fact.
Q 15Who made the first film version of the story, Cendrillon, in 1899?
Georges Méliès
Georges Méliès shot Cendrillon in 1899, a trick film in several tableaux; hundreds followed, from Mary Pickford's 1914 silent to the 2025 Norwegian body-horror film The Ugly Stepsister.
Q 16Who provided the voice of Cinderella in Disney's 1950 animated film?
Ilene Woods
Ilene Woods got the part after recording demo songs as a favour for songwriters Mack David and Jerry Livingston; Walt Disney phoned her two days later, and she was named a Disney Legend in 2003.
Q 17Which song does Cinderella sing while scrubbing the floor among multiplying soap-bubble reflections?
Sing Sweet Nightingale
Cinderella sings Sing Sweet Nightingale while scrubbing the floor, harmonising with several reflections of herself in the soap bubbles, after the stepsisters have mangled the same song at their music lesson.
Q 18Which Disney regular voiced the Fairy Godmother in the 1950 film?
Verna Felton
Walt wanted a tall, regal fairy like Pinocchio's Blue Fairy; animator Milt Kahl used Felton's casting to win him over to a dotty little one instead.
Q 19Eleanor Audley, the voice of the stepmother Lady Tremaine, went on to voice which other Disney villain?
Maleficent
Eleanor Audley went on to voice Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty (1959), also serving as the live-action reference for that villain, and is familiar to TV viewers as Eunice Douglas on Green Acres.
Q 20Which stepsister, alongside Anastasia, torments Cinderella under Lady Tremaine's roof in Disney's 1950 animated film?
Drizella
Drizella and Anastasia are Lady Tremaine's daughters; the other names belong to rival versions: Javotte is Perrault's elder stepsister, Marguerite is in Ever After and Esmerelda in the 1965 TV musical.
Helene Stanley was the live-action reference for Aurora in Sleeping Beauty and later Anita in One Hundred and One Dalmatians; Cinderella was shot as a full live-action reference film first, partly to keep costs down.
Q 24By 1947, shortly before the film was greenlit, roughly how deep in debt was the Disney studio?
Over $4 million
Roy Disney wanted Walt to sell up and retire; the film's success instead funded Disneyland and the studio's move into television.
Q 25Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo lost the Academy Award for Best Original Song to which song?
Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa, sung by Nat King Cole in Captain Carey, U.S.A., took the 1950 Oscar; Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo's most popular record, by Perry Como and the Fontane Sisters, reached number 14 on Billboard.
Q 26In Disney's 1950 film, what is the name of Cinderella's horse, who becomes the coachman?
Major
Major, Cinderella's old grey horse, is turned into the coachman by the Fairy Godmother's spell, while four mice become the white horses that pull the pumpkin coach.
Q 27At the very first Berlin International Film Festival in 1951, the 1950 film won which award?
The Golden Bear
Cinderella took a Golden Bear at the first Berlinale in 1951, when the festival gave one per genre; Berlin screened it again in 2023 in a new 4K restoration for Disney's centenary.
Q 28The 1988 VHS release of the film was the best-selling video title ever until which film overtook it?
E.T.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, released on tape later the same month in October 1988, sold about 15 million copies; Cinderella had shifted more than 7 million before Disney returned it to the vault.
Q 29Disney's 'Nine Old Men' nickname borrowed a jibe Franklin Roosevelt aimed at what?
The Supreme Court
Roosevelt called the Supreme Court justices who struck down New Deal laws 'nine old men'; Walt applied the tag to his core animators, two of whom, Eric Larson and Marc Davis, both drew Cinderella herself.
Q 30Who took over the voice of Cinderella for the 2002 direct-to-video sequel Dreams Come True?
Jennifer Hale
Jennifer Hale took over as Cinderella for Dreams Come True in 2002 and kept the role for A Twist in Time in 2007; original voice Ilene Woods, by then in her seventies, did not return.