Cinderella’s stepsister has been the punchline of this story for about 400 years. Netflix is handing her the lead.
Steps, premiering on Netflix on Nov. 20, follows Lilith (Ali Wong), the misunderstood stepsister who watches the Fairy Godmother (Bette Midler) hand Cinderella (Amanda Seyfried) a dress, a carriage and glass slippers, then decides she’d like some of that magic herself. It goes badly. She accidentally turns her sister Margot (Stephanie Hsu) into a frog and throws the kingdom into chaos.
Which means Cinderella and Lilith have to work together to undo the spell, while also stopping Priscilla (Nikki Glaser), the scheming mean girl angling to take over the kingdom.
The director spent her childhood rooting for the wrong sister
Alyce Tzue grew up in New Jersey as the only Asian kid in a homogeneous community, loving fairy tales and quietly convinced none of them had a happily ever after with her name on it. She didn’t see herself in Cinderella. She saw the stepsisters and wondered why they never got any magic.
Now she’s co-directing the answer to that question alongside John Ripa, who co-directed Raya and the Last Dragon.
Tzue doesn’t treat Lilith as a gimmick.
“She comes into this fairytale world of hope with lofty dreams of being able to live harmoniously with everyone,” Tzue said. “The sense of being initially rejected deeply resonates with me. I would say Lilith is braver than I ever was. She has this rebellious attitude, but, of course, you find that spiky exterior is just a defense mechanism. I had my own defense mechanism of retreating into my books and art. She’s kind of aspirational. I wish I was a little bit more like her when I was younger.”
There was never one Cinderella to begin with
The pitch sounds like revisionism. Ripa argues the opposite, that the story has been getting rebuilt for centuries.
“There really is no one Cinderella story,” Ripa said in an interview at Annecy Festival. “A Chinese version introduced the stepmother, and the Italian version introduced the stepsisters.”
Steps pulls that history together and updates it.
“There are certain things the audience wants to see. We were able to take some of these iconic canon moments and give it a little twist and show it from every perspective.”
The villain is just insecurity with better shoes
Priscilla isn’t evil for sport. Tzue frames her as the byproduct of a system.
“Priscilla is someone who wishes she was like Cinderella,” Tzue said. “In a kingdom that elevates just one sort of symbol of perfection, that can create someone like Lilith, who’s the outcast, and someone like Priscilla, who is driven by the sense of insecurity to kind of be evil.”
That idea runs straight into the art direction. The film draws on the French Rococo movement and Cendrillon, the French version of Cinderella, and uses a pastel palette to signal conformity. When Cinderella and Lilith travel past the kingdom’s borders, the colors get bolder and more natural.
And since the stepsisters are traditionally described as ugly, Tzue refuses the narrow read on what beauty means.
“We want to lean into a diversity of design in the female characters to make sure they don’t all have the same face shape or the same body shape,” she said. “We’ve been very conscious to make sure that the designs reflect the diversity of their personalities.”
Yes, people are going to say Frozen
Ripa was a story artist on Frozen, which also put sisterhood ahead of romance in a princess movie. The pairing tracks. Tzue would rather the comparison be a starting point than a ceiling.
“I’m a huge fan of Frozen,” Tzue said. “I wouldn’t say it’s a direct inspiration, because my hope is that there can be as many movies as we’d like about female friendships. If there are comparisons, it may just mean that we need even more stories about sisterhood.”
The Kpop Demon Hunters question
Netflix already found out what happens when an animated original connects, thanks to the enormous success of Kpop Demon Hunters in 2025. Steps could reach the same crowd with a soundtrack that mixes needle drops and original songs, giving a fairy tale a contemporary texture it doesn’t usually have.
Tzue isn’t chasing it.
“We are huge supporters of the creators of Kpop Demon Hunters,” she said. “We were working in parallel, so we’re very happy for them. I feel personally very supported by Netflix as a filmmaker working on their own project. I don’t feel pressured to be a Kpop Demon Hunters because it wouldn’t serve the story.”
What Ripa and Tzue want out of it is smaller and harder than a streaming record. Empathy, inclusion, belonging.
“If we can inspire even one person to stand up for someone that feels different, we will have done our jobs,” Tzue said.
