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| I like your sleeves - they're real big |
It’s been several years since I’ve watched Enchanted (in fact, I don’t think I’ve seen it since the HiddenQueen and I went to the movie theater on a date night back in 2007,) but watching it again with the family, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. While the premise of “cartoon/fairy tale characters enter the real world” was pretty much an old gimmick by the time of release (we’re looking at you, Anchors Aweigh, Roger Rabbit, Cool World, Space Jam, etc.) the witty script and actors’ dedication to their roles carry the film.
Amy Adams, who within a few years would be over-worked as one of the few employed redheads in Hollywood (DISCRIMINATION!), brings a believable earnestness to would-be Princess Giselle, gliding and singing her heart out in what is arguably the role she was born to play. An interesting(?) side-note: Disney was gearing up to make the character one of the officially-branded Princesses, going as far as to create toy-dolls with the Disney Princess packaging. They changed course due to the fact that, unlike the other animated Princesses, everyone already knows what Giselle looks like as a flesh-and-blood human. I suppose they didn’t want to try and hire a bunch of Amy Adams look-alikes for their theme park Meet & Greets ... not that I would've complained…
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| A song in her heart |
Given less screen time, but delivering another memorable performance is the giant-sleeved and sickeningly handsome James Marsden, who discreetly chews up every scene he’s in. His ridiculously valiant Prince Edward runs amuck in New York City, attacking busses and yelling at TV screens, an over-the-top parody to Amy Adams' gentle satire. Call me crazy, but I’ve always enjoyed Marsden in any movie in which he isn’t killed off-screen by Famke Janssen.
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| Big sleeves are apparently all the rage in Andalasia |
The only one who doesn’t work for me is Chicken McDreamy himself, Patrick Dempsey. I’ll admit that playing the straight-man love interest in a movie about fairy tale characters is a pretty thankless role, but there is such a thing as being too “straight-man.” His bland single-dad shtick and nasally voice made me wish the movie was all about Giselle finding herself, without the requisite love story. Sorry, Dempsey – you’ll always be Ronald Miller to me, riding off into the sunset on your lawnmower with Amanda Peterson.
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| Nerds, jocks, my side, your side - it's all bullshit! |
Also helping the movie breeze along is the return of Alan Menkin to the Disney fold, whose clever songs and appropriately fanciful score now seem like a sort of audition for Tangled a few years later.
As a matter of fact, watching the movie now, much of it feels like there’s a cleansing of sorts going on. More than trotting out old fairy tale stereotypes for satire (which it does, and very well,) the film systematically exposes, twists and purges all of the tropes of Disney’s animated canon that no longer feel relevant. That Giselle traverses the usual storybook arc backwards, going from (almost) Princess to independent woman, rather than the other-way around, is significant; it's a reversal that the animated canon itself wasn’t quite ready for yet.
Look at the animated films that came immediately before - Home On The Range, Chicken Little, Meet The Robinsons - and what came after - Bolt, The Princess And The Frog, Tangled. Excluding Robinsons and Bolt (awkwardly placed in the midst of the great Disney/Pixar merger,) you can make out a pretty sharp dividing line where Disney stopped trying too hard to either “capture the old magic” or be hipper than DreamWorks and decided to get creative again.
So despite this film’s seemingly clichéd worlds-collide story and lightweight subject matter, it seems to play an important part in the recent resurrection of Disney’s animation studio (if more in spirit than in fact.) It’s a sign of things to come that Idina Menzel, six years before she would vocalize the reigning Snow Queen of merchandise, plays a character who chooses to become a fairy tale princess on her own terms at the film’s end. And she does so without ever singing a note (unfortunately.)
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| Come to Mama... |
Thus concludes our reviews of the Kevin Lima trilogy. Since Enchanted, Mr. Lima has been involved in a number of projects that seem to have gotten lost in development hell. Based on the three movies reviewed here, it would be a wonderful thing to see his name attached to another film sometime in the near future.
(He also directed 102 Dalmatians, but I’ll choose to ignore that.)
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