Japanese rock band Mrs. GREEN APPLE released the music video for their new single “Cinderella” on October 24, and it quickly drew criticism on X (formerly Twitter) over its storyline centered on a hostess club worker and animated sequences that many viewers say closely resemble Disney characters.
The video follows a woman who dreamed of becoming a princess as a child but grows up to work as a hostess at a nightclub, struggling with the gap between her childhood fantasy and her adult reality before arriving at the conclusion “this is me.” Some viewers questioned why a song called “Cinderella” was built around hostess work at all, with one user asking why the band made the lead character a hostess in the first place. Others picked apart inconsistencies in her backstory, questioning why someone raised in a loving, financially stable home would end up in that line of work, and whether the video was meant to affirm or criticize the profession.
The animated portions of the video drew separate criticism. Several users pointed out that the prince and princess characters closely resemble Eric and Ariel from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” despite the song being titled “Cinderella,” and some said they detected SynthID, a digital watermark Google attaches to AI-generated images, embedded in the footage. That fueled accusations that the band had used AI tools trained on Disney’s character designs, which some viewers called disrespectful given Mrs. GREEN APPLE’s past collaborations with Disney.
Several commenters also referenced the band’s 2023 single “Columbus,” whose music video was previously criticized and revised after viewers said its imagery trivialized colonization. One user wrote that vocalist Omori Ryota (大森元貴) “hasn’t learned” from that earlier backlash, while another suggested he should receive “human rights education.” Not every reaction was negative, though; some users acknowledged they were mainly seeing critical posts because of their own social media feeds, and others noted the song itself has been well received musically even as the video draws fire.
Who is Omori Ryota?
Omori Ryota is the vocalist, guitarist, and primary songwriter of Mrs. GREEN APPLE, a Japanese rock band formed in 2013 that has become one of the country’s most commercially successful acts, known for melodic, high-energy songs featured as theme music for major anime and film releases. As of this report, neither Omori nor the band’s label had issued a public response to the criticism surrounding the “Cinderella” video.
Author’s Comment
Look, I love a bold comeback as much as the next person, but naming a song ‘Cinderella’ and then handing the glass slipper to a hostess with main-character energy? That takes nerve, and I respect the swing even if it didn’t quite land. The real problem isn’t that hostess work exists in a pop video, it’s that nobody seems to have asked what the story was actually trying to say before they animated it. And if those SynthID rumors hold up, somebody at that studio owes Walt Disney’s ghost an apology, because borrowing Ariel’s cheekbones for your own fairy tale is a choice. Omori clearly still has the melodies down, I just wish the people around him would pump the brakes on the concepts a little more often.
