groundbreaking portrayal at time," inspiring the character to become more diverse in the following years. Essence's Deena Campbell credited the singer with "inspiring other young girls to be Black Cinderellas". Media criticism professor Venise Berry found Brandy's casting and performance to be a "wonderful opportunity to reflect the true diversity in our society", writing, "I think that Brandy will help African-American females see there are other possibilities that their lives can blossom into something good, and you don't have to be white for that to happen," in turn making the classic story more accessible "to little girls" who had believed that ascending into a life of privilege was only possible for white people. Writing for Nylon, Taylor Bryant called the film both "An Underrated Classic" and "One of the most important moments in [film] history". Applauding the film for providing minorities with "the chance to see themselves depicted as royalty for perhaps the first time", Bryant identified Brandy as a princess for Black girls to "fawn" over, which Disney would not revisit until The Princess and the Frog (2009). Similarly, Martha Tesema wrote in an article for Mashable that "seeing Brandy as Cinderella on screen was groundbreaking" having "grown up in a time where future Disney characters like Tiana did not exist and the reason why didn't cross my mind—until this Cinderella. Seeing a princess with box braids like mine and a fairy godmother like Whitney ... gave me and girls who looked like me a glimpse at an early age of why it is necessary to demand representation of all types of people playing all types of roles in films." Ashley Rey, a writer for Bustle, opined that the film "helped show the world that and brown faces should have just as much of a presence in fairytale land as white faces do." Martha Tesema, a writer for Mashable, called the film "the best live-action princess remake", writing that it "deserves just as much praise now as it did then." Tesema credits its ethnic diversity with making the film as "enchanting" as it is, continuing that the production "invites you to accept these [characters' races] as just the way they are for a little over an hour and it's a beautiful phenomenon". Furthermore, the writer opined that future live-action remakes should watch Cinderella for reference. In an article for HuffPost, contributor Isabelle Khoo argued that despite the constant remakes