Disney better be careful. If they keep this up I might actually start going to their movie screenings with an expecation that they’ll be good.
First ,I was pleased with Dan in Real Life (review) and now I’ve been enchanted by Enchanted (relax, that’s the closest to title punning as I ever get). So it looks like the Disney strategy of cutting back the production schedule and focusing on quality family entertainment is actually paying off. I’ve even been told that National Treasure 2 may be better than anybody expects.
Enchanted is something of a reversal of the standard story of real-world/fantasy world migration. It is more standard for the real world participants to end up in a fantasy world (Never Ending Story, The Chronicles of Narnia) but this time around we have the Giselle (Amy Adams), the soon-to-be princess from a, ahem, fantasyland ending up in the real world.
Photo © Disney
The movie starts with a 15-minute animated section showing the characters in their home environment. Giselle is a poor maiden living out in the woods (think Sleeping Beauty‘s Aurora post-banishment) with talking animals and singing about her true love’s kiss. She then meets that true love in the form of Prince Edward (James Marsden) and they immediately decide they will marry the next day. Unfortunately, Edward’s stepmother Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) has spent his entire life preventing Edward from finding love so that she’ll never have to give up the throne (the rules of successsion seem a bit weird in this land called Andalasia) and she isn’t about to lose out now.
So Narissa tricks Giselle and pushes her into a portal that leads to a land where “happily ever after” doesn’t exist. In other words, New York City.
Photo © Disney
Except for a couple brief moments, that marks the end of the animated sequences. When the animation was first reported it sparked excitement about the return of traditional hand drawn animation to a Disney feature film but it really isn’t anything to get too excited about. It looks good but isn’t anything exceptional, and Disney outsourced it. Admittedly, they outsourced it to former Disney animator James Baxter but it was still done without creating any infrastructure for traditional animation within Disney. So, if you go to see it just because of the animated bits you’ll probably be disappointed.
On the other hand, if that is the only reason to go you’ll probably end up very happy with the live action majority of the film.
Once through the portal, the animated Giselle becomes the very real Amy Adams. Now, you’d think that suddenly appearing as a real person in Times Square while wearing a very Disney Princess-y wedding dress would cause a person to pause, but animated characters are always taking magical transformations with aplomb and Giselle is no different.
Photo © Disney
She immediately sets out in search for a way home and along the way ends up in the care of Robert, a New York divorce lawyer played by Patrick Dempsey, and his 8-year-old daughter Morgan (Rachel Covery).
Eventually all the major animated characters (including a very anthromorphic squirrel) end up coming over to our side to either find and rescue Giselle or prevent such a rescue from happening. And everybody ends up learning that the world is more complex or less complicated than they had been thinking (depending on where they started life).
Nothing in the broad story arc is going to surprise even a 2-year-old. What is surprising is how the corny is given conviction by placing the entire movie on the very capable shoulders of Amy Adams.
Photo © Disney
Adams earned herself a best supporting Oscar nomination playing a naive, dim, but well-meaning yokel in 2005’s Junebug. It was a remarkable performance and she deserved every accolade. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that she once again does an amazing job with Giselle, who once in New York City is essentially a naive, dim, but well-meaning yokel.
It is in that surface similarity, though, that the immense talent of Adams is further revealed, for they are not the same character and Adams does not give the same performance. She quite simply is a Disney princess come to life. She comes from a fantasy world where love is extremely sanitary and simple; where birds help you make wedding dresses, and where whenever you fall there is a hero there to catch you. She makes you believe this and somehow, coming from her, it all seems OK. She never winks at the camera.
When she uses the “fauna” of New York City to clean a dirty apartment or gets all of Central Park involved in a musical explanation of how simple love is, it just makes perfect sense for that moment in time that somehow her fantasyland magic has carried over in some ways to our world. There was some early “Oscar buzz” related to her performance and if it is a weak year for notable female performances I would get behind that idea, but unfortunately while the movie overall is good, it probably doesn’t have enough heft to carry through to any major nominations.
Photo © Disney
The same can’t quite be said for James Marsden at Prince Edward. He does a fine job but there is something about the cockiness of his grin, a glint in his eye, that seems to be saying “this is a bit silly, isn’t it.” But then, unlike Giselle, Edward never gets to change out of his Prince Charming finery so maybe it is justified.
Patrick Dempsey is the straight man in all of this so really doesn’t have to do much more than stand there and be a love object (and all the people who know Dempsey primarily as Dr. McDreamy will have no problem with that, I’m sure). As is fitting for a Disney princess movie, the most amusing member of the supporting cast is a computer-animated squirrel that comes to our side of the portal losing the ability to speak but not at all reduced in intelligence. That squirrel is the comic relief and allows the movie to get away with some interpersonal abuse that wouldn’t be possible with a human character (and also avoids over-thinking commentators from drawing unwarranted parralels as one scene of confinement would certainly have done).
At its most basic level Enchanted is the perfect movie for young girls ages 6-12 and it hits that market perfectly. What is surprising is how the cast (primarily via Amy Adams) actually sells the movie to everybody else who may be in the audience. Parents can confidently take their children knowing they won’t be rolling their eyes on the way out of the theater and mumbling “the things we suffer for our children.” Tweener boys will be forced to pretend they weren’t at all interested and found it all very boring and girly—don’t fall for it.
The movie ends with a violent confrontation that is the source of the PG rating but that is more a factor of it being much harder to get a G rating than it used to be. The violence and peril in Enchanted is well in line with similar elements to Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and other classic G-rated Disney cartoons.
- Enchanted is a Walt Disney Pictures release
- Wide release November 21
- Directed by Kevin Lima
- Written by Bill Kelly
- Starring Amy Adams, James Marsden, Patrick Dempsey, Timothy Spall, Susan Sarandon
- Running time: 107 minutes
- Rated PG for some scary images and mild innuendo.
- Alex’s rating: 8 out of 10.
