ENCHANTED

Slightly disappointingly, the first thirteen or so minutes of Enchanted the classic Disney fairy-tale straight. Knowing the intention of the movie from press-releases (the idea originated from a script written by Bill Kelly back in the fall of 1997, which he sold to Touchstone for $450,000) and the promise of the posters (a princess in New York) makes reading between the lines and reserving our judgment easier.

In the wake of the first three Shrek movies (the third having been released that summer) there was some talk of the fairy-tale spoof having become so overdone that the classic narrative was due for a comeback. Even more widespread was the lamentation over the near total demise of hand-drawn animation in favor of more cost-effective CGI cartoons. Besides cutting costs, it’s not hard to see why in the mid-2000s Disney decided to abandon its original look after the critical and commercial failure of Home on the Range, marketed as the last of its kind. When it took a critical beating upon its release in the spring of 2004, Home on the Range gave Disney reason, becoming the last straw in a dire string including Atlantis: The Lost Empire, the overrated Lilo & Stitch, Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, which only hurt the case for the traditional look when standing by the side of Pixar’s golden hits. Still, there was much unhappiness. This, of course, meant never again seeing the gothic majesty of Beauty and the Beast or the vibrant color of Aladdin and The Lion King or the warmth of the early classics.

There was, then, hope that Enchanted would restore faith in Disney’s roots, but if the opening of the movie put that hope in jeopardy, the commercial shortcomings of The Princess and the Frog (actually a better movie than its reputation would suggest) two years later dashed it. Now, with the uncertain future of Studio Ghibli, we are unlikely to see a quality hand-drawn animated feature for a while, the form relegated mostly to TV cartoons.

The animated segments of Enchanted are too minor a component to the overall film to justify taking blame for helping to seal the fate of the style, but they do serve as a reminder of what was growing stale in the animated fairy-tale, and not just Disney’s, toward the end of their era. It emulates the style of the traditional formula to a fault and with misguided direction. There is no tangible irony in Princess Giselle singing in her forest cottage to all her little animal friends about her dream prince. Neither is there much of the wanted sarcasm directed at the dashing Prince Edward, who spends his days riding through the forest hunting trolls.

Director Kevin Lima stuck closely to the early works the film and Giselle borrow from. “She is about 80% Snow White, with some traits borrowed from Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, although her spunkiness comes from Ariel of The Little Mermaid” Lima said. “These characters expect things to happen to them, but being in the contemporary world forces Giselle to grow and become an active participant.”

There is nothing wrong with the look of the animation. In fact, Lima’s style has always been refreshingly bouncy for Disney. His superb character movements and lush backgrounds for Tarzan are the apex of his work at Disney, but here he retains the style of his A Goofy Movie and The Emperor’s New Groove, not necessarily a bad thing since both films had an enjoyably relaxed feel to their movements and scenery. Lima thought so anyway and stuck to the tested formula.

“Kevin wanted the animation to feel nostalgic, to have it feel familiar to the audience,” said fellow animator James Baxter. “But he also wanted it to have a style of its own, a unity. We used art nouveau as a jumping-off point”

Indeed, this was the sort of approach Disney was after. Producer Barry Josephson spoke enthusiastically about it. “Kevin knows the world of Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas and Mulan. He knows what princesses are like, what they want, how they sit down, how they talk, what their eyes look like. He knew exactly what Giselle should embody.”

 Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty meant for their simplistic interpretations of love to be taken seriously. For a film that avows to kid the formula, the opening of Enchanted plays it pretty much by the book. Disney also sets itself up for a black eye with the oafish big green troll, an obvious mockery of Shrek, apparently unaware that the insipidness of these opening moments is precisely what DreamWorks loves to rip apart in its Shrek movies.

All this is simply a prologue to say that not everything is as it seems. Also as expected, a wicked queen dwells in the land of Andalasia who also happens to be the mother of Prince Edward and jealous of her throne. Should her son marry she loses her title and so, once she discovers the romance, she sets off to banish Giselle by way of a secret portal to another world; namely New York City.

From here, Enchanted becomes a thorough delight and one of Disney’s best surprises in years. It’s often funny with a lot of magic, fabulous music, and a great sense of fun. Once the setting changes to New York and the footage to live-action the loving parody becomes evident and we also get an abundance of jokes about the absurdities of modern life when seen through the more simplistic eyes of someone fresh out of an enchanted Bohemian wood.

Philosophically, too, Enchanted asks a lot of questions about the cartoon world in relation to ours. In the past, different movies have suggested different theories. Who Framed Roger Rabbit had the toons coexisting with humans albeit living in the segregated district of Toontown. Looney Tunes: Back in Action had more or less the same idea but Space Jam had them travelling to our world only when the need arises. Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks had them living in far off lands (beneath a pavement picture and the Island of Naboombu), which were accessible to humans only through magic. Pete’s Dragon showed the other side of the coin, where animated characters could enter our world. Disney used special portals as explanation for these inter-world visits from his early Alice shorts and revisited them again in The Three Caballeros, where books and greeting cards were the way in and out of live footage for the cartoon characters. Later features (Fun & Fancy Free, Melody Time, and even Song of the South in its two musical numbers) features cartoons strolling around the real world as if it were familiar territory. Animation pioneer Max Fleischer had taken it once step further since his Out of the Inkwell series, exposing the cartoons’ origin as drawings that come to life and hop out of the paper and into the artist’s studio. This formula was repeated in a few Warner Bros. cartoons like You Ought to Be in Pictures and even (to a lesser extent) in the Disney feature The Reluctant Dragon. None of these theories necessarily contradict each other, though celebrity cameos in TV shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy as well as some classic cartoons like Disney’s The Autograph Hound and Warners’s Hollywood Daffy, which featured cameos by many stars in caricature, could make a case for an inverse to what happens in Enchanted. When humans enter a cartoon world they may become into animated beings.

Be that as it may, Times Square is no place for a former cartoon princess, though seeing a damsel in a puffy dress is not all that startling to Manhattaners. But Giselle’s innocence puts her in danger, running her afoul of pedestrians, gets her robbed by a homeless man, and trapped in a perilous perch.

These early fish-out-of-water scenes work as well as they do thanks to the casting of Amy Adams as the new flesh and bone Giselle, an actress that radiates innocence and delicateness. A part like Giselle requires some degree of overacting, but the stranded princess’s ability to see the best in everyone makes her a natural fit for Adams. Tearing up at the thought of the divorce of a couple she doesn’t know only seems genuine coming from her.

“Ultimately, she survives because she has an instinctual ability to adapt,” Lima said. “he can follow her dream no matter what stands in the way, whether it's a houseful of rats or learning how to make a new dress. She can survive. Unlike Edward. He's all about entitlement and bravado. He doesn't doubt himself very much. The world is too much for him.”

There isn’t a bad note in all of Enchanted, least of all with its casting. Patrick Dempsey makes for a surprisingly appealing as Robert, the aggressive divorce attorney raising a six-year old girl on his own at the time her rescues Giselle from a rooftop tumble. Dempsey’s performance runs on nuances; the pain of divorce still hangs over Robert, the hope of rekindling love with a new woman played by Idina Menzel, and the trials of a soul-drenching career.

As Morgan, Robert’s daughter, Rachel Covey holds her own against the two adult leads. Her relationship with Dempsey is especially truthful to that of a little girl seeking more affection from a troubled parent and Covey captures the magic of the moment when in Giselle she finds the friend she longs for.

It would be easy to tear apart James Marsden’s over the top performance as Prince Edward, who travels to New York via the portal to rescue his lady fair, but its stoic flamboyance is all part of the game.

“The princes didn't have much personality. So I borrowed a little of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, minus the evil intentions, and some Buzz Lightyear. Edward is always in love with being in love,” Marsden said of his interpretation.

 The dashing debonair and his well-meaning but primeval ideas about marriage are no longer a suitable match for Giselle after her education about love in the modern world. His own misadventures in the city make for some great comedy, especially his clash with an irate bus driver and the toned down blue humor of an unexpected encounter with a biker during his door-to-door search for Giselle; a remnant, no doubt, of the raunchier film Enchanted was meant to be in Bill Kelly’s original screenplay, in which Giselle first entered the real world through a portal that led her into a bachelor party in Chicago where she was confused for a stripper.

 Disney quickly rejected this screenplay only to revisit it in 2001 with the hope of shaping it into a family movie. By 2001, Rob Marshall left the project and Kevin Lima eventually took over as director. By 2005, Bill Kelly was brought back on as screenwriter and development for the film that would be Disney’s holiday hit of 2007 was in full swing.

Villains can make or break like this and Enchanted has two marvelous baddies played with awesome derision by Susan Sarandon and Timothy Spall. Actually, it’s more like a villain and a half since Spall’s Nathaniel starts off in Andalasia an infatuated henchman of the queen who follows the prince down the portal where he has a change of heart. Even his transformation into a good guy is given a comic pay-off though it comes rather abruptly (and a scene featuring his morality at a cross-road was deleted). Still, the array of disguises and voices make great use of Spall’s weasly villainy. Sarandon spends most of the movie as an animated queen, but makes a wonderfully acid witch in human flesh. Her climactic showdown with the princess atop a skyscraper makes a thrilling finale and represents CGI at its best.

Enchanted would not be complete without music and the film boasts the return of the legendary Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. The lively Oscar nominated “That’s How You Know”, a beautifully choreographed number set in Central Park , is the film’s highlight and a tribute to musicals themselves (featuring dancers from West Side Story).

“"Think of it as “Under the Sea”, but paying tribute to the melting pot of New York,” Menken said. “It starts with salsa, moves to steel drums, then reggae, an oompah band, even some Bollywood.”

 “Happy Working Song” is the film’s most elaborate parody of predecessors. Giselle follows ancestors Snow White and Cinderella, summoning her own animal friends to help her tidy up her benefactor’s apartment, which soon becomes a vermin filled menagerie as rats, pigeons, and all the other undesirable inhabitants of New York City respond to her call.

 To Giselle this is a perfectly harmonious chorus, Robert is, of course, horrified. This worked so well that Disney tried a variation for its ABC series Once Upon a Time where Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin), sweeping up the dwarves’ cottage in tuneful bliss attracts affable birds from outside…which she immediately takes a swing at with her broom.

Enchanted has a gentle way with breaking conventions, never crushing them enough to alienate purists but, instead, presenting an alternative.

“Shrek has a tendency to beat up on Disney,” Lima said. “This is just the opposite. We lovingly embrace Disney.”

 Case in point, Giselle tells Morgan that not all stepmothers are evil, just before the film cuts away to the scheming Queen. But, Giselle’s words are proven true by Nancy, Robert’s girlfriend, sincere attempt to bond with Rachel and be part of the family. In the end, Nancy does find her own happy ending in an unexpected place.

Enchanted is fine bright entertainment of the sort that doesn’t sell children short of the old magic that was becoming scarce and with enough references to classic works and even some innuendos to keep adults engaged. It is, after all, a return to the animated classics they grew up with.