For hundreds of years before Disney adopted her, Cinderella belonged to the peasants, a diversionary tale told around the fire, in the centuries before television and radio. Folklorists have uncovered thousands of Cinderellas in places as diverse as China, Japan, ancient Egypt, and the wilds of Tennessee.

The most influential Cinderella story is French. Published in 1697 by a society intellectual named Charles Perrault, it was printed under his son’s name (presumably in order to protect his scholarly reputation) as Cendrillon or The Little Glass Slipper. Perrault is the source of classic Cinderella imagery like the pumpkin coach and the glass slipper. It has been fashionable to say that the glass slipper (pantoufle de verre) is a mistranslation of the French for a weasel-fur slipper (pantoufle de vair), but there are many who believe Perrault was capable of conjuring up an image as fantastic as the glass slipper quite on his own. In 1897, folklorist William Ralston Shedden-Ralston wrote that the glass slipper is one of the few ways “to track a story's wanderings.”

And it leads us right to the most famous Cinderella retelling: Walt Disney’s 1950 animated classic, Cinderella, now retold itself in the new live-action Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh and written by Christopher Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon).

This 2015 Cinderella is a faithful re-creation of the 1950 animated film, complete with pumpkin coaches and fairy godmothers. But the biggest challenge may have been to write a heroine who, over the years, has been criticized for her passivity. In the age of Katniss, Hermione, Maleficent, and Elsa, what room is there for a princess whose quiet goodness is her best quality?

"She’s not very modern, at first glance," Weitz told Vanity Fair. "She doesn’t fight back directly, she doesn’t talk back." But, "There are plenty of movies in which heroines are tremendously active and aggressive, and there was room for a character whose resilience was really the most important aspect of what she was doing."

Even armed with the knowledge that folk and fairy tales in their earlier forms are darker than the Westernized, Disney-fied versions we’ve grown up with, early versions of Cinderellas can be startling.

In one of the oldest, Cinderella is a slave girl for sale in a region called Thrace, which envelops parts of modern Turkey, Bulgaria, and Greece. Fragments of poetry indicate she may have been a real woman, named Rhodopis (“rosy cheeks”), who had been purchased by the poet’s brother. The story that this Thracian Cinderella was sought out by the emperor after an eagle dropped her golden sandal in his lap does not change the fact that she was trafficked for sex and companionship.

In another shocking Cinderella tale, Cinderella lives with her mother and natural sisters in the woods. They are plunged into a terrible famine. Driven mad with hunger, Cinderella’s sisters decide to kill and eat their mother. Cinderella refuses to join in. Because of this, it is her mother’s bones that are her “magical helper,” providing her with the necessary finery to go to the ball.

A mother’s grave also features prominently in the better known Grimm Brothers’ Cinderella, Aschenputtel, as the site of an enchanted tree that throws Cinderella beautiful dresses and jewels to wear to the ball. Over the years, the Grimms were known to scrub some of their tales to better convey Christian family values (although, it must be said, they did appreciate gore—it is their version that features the wicked stepsisters hacking off their heels and toes).

But it was Disney who rolled the character of Cinderella in powdered sugar. In 1977, Caldecott-winning children’s book author Jane Yolen called the American Cinderella "a disaster.” In Disney’s version, Yolen argued, “she cowers as her sisters rip her homemade ball gown to shreds. (Not even homemade by Cinderella, but by the mice and birds.) She answers her stepmother with whines and pleadings. She is a sorry excuse for a heroine, pitiable and useless. She cannot perform even a simple action to save herself, though she is warned by her friends, the mice.”

The new, pathologically patient Cinderella, played with amazing grace by English actress Lily James, is hardly more proactive. We are first introduced to her in the midst of an impossibly blissful childhood, which gives her the foundation to face the cruelty of her stepsisters and stepmother later. Armed only with her late mother’s mantra—“Have courage and be kind”—she is able to steel herself against a mounting list of injustices.

Folklore professor David Pace once described Cinderella as “an adult myth” that “there is an innate justice within the social system and that wrongs will eventually be righted." Weitz and Branagh’s version clings to that same belief.

At the end of the film, locked in the attic with her remaining glass slipper destroyed by her wicked stepmother, Cinderella’s response is to twirl dreamily with her eyes closed and a small smile on her lips, resigned to the fact that her night at the ball and her happy childhood are behind her, while the Prince’s men try the slipper on her wicked stepsisters downstairs.

It is only when the prince overhears Cinderella singing from the attic window that she is rewarded for her goodness. But it seems something like divine intervention; even Disney's dopey 1950s Cinderella slipped out of the attic and came downstairs in order to present herself to the Grand Duke at the end.

Active, outgoing heroines are hardly a problem for Disney anymore. To name just a few: Toy Story’s Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl, Merida from Brave, the dorky Anna from Frozen, the kickass Mrs. Incredible—shall we go on? So Cinderella, a woman whose strategy is to outlast the enemy through dignified, peaceful resistance, is thoroughly fascinating. While on the surface Weitz's Cinderella looks like a throwback to her 1950s sister, she could be perceived to possess an admirably modern source of strength—with bullying in the media spotlight more than ever, the resilience Cinderella shows in the face of abuse may be a more useful model for today’s kids than Katniss with her bow and arrow.

Even in her triumph, Cinderella finds her strength in quiet ways. At the end of Perrault’s version of the story, Cinderella finds a home for her sisters in the palace and pairs them with husbands. Most of the Cinderella tales aren’t so kind—in a Chinese Cinderella, the stepmother and stepsister are stoned to death.

Weitz’s Cinderella ends up somewhere in the middle. Leaving the house with her prince, and her horrified stepfamily looking on, James’s Cinderella turns to her stepmother and says, “I forgive you.” It is not anything as aggressive as revenge, but it is a show of real strength.