Enchanted (2007)
Directed by Kevin Lima
The beautiful princess Giselle is banished by an evil queen from her magical, musical animated land and finds herself in the gritty reality of the streets of modern-day Manhattan. Shocked by this strange new environment that doesn't operate on a "happily ever after" basis, Giselle is now adrift in a chaotic world badly in need of enchantment. But when Giselle begins to fall in love with a charmingly flawed divorce lawyer who has come to her aid - even though she is already promised to a perfect fairy tale prince back home - she has to wonder: Can a storybook view of romance survive in the real world?
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She played the pregnant hometown girl in "Junebug," as well as the nurse with the braces in "Catch Me If You Can," and the way she combines irrepressible high spirits with slyly subversive comic wiles in "Enchanted," she's every Disney princess in one ebullient package.
"Enchanted" squeaks by on the charm of its performers, particularly Adams, who played another version of the daffy Giselle in "Junebug," for which she earned an Oscar nomination.
While Oscar nominated for her turn in Junebug (how many remember her…or the film?), she is simply astounding here.
Enchanted's most obvious asset is Amy Adams, who is probably best known for her scene-stealing work in Junebug .
Adams received a great deal of wholly deserved attention for the film Junebug in 2005, but that film simply didn't have the impact necessary to make her any kind of star.
In "Enchanted," Amy Adams ("Junebug") plays Giselle, a pen-and-ink fairy tale princess banished to live-action New York City, where she stumbles into the protective arms of a hunky single-dad (Patrick Dempsey) in the city's seedy Bowery district.
Director Kevin Lima ("102 Dalmations") and screenwriter Bill Kelly reference half the Disney canon in "Enchanted," from "Sleeping Beauty" to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
It's a clever, high-spirited romp spoofing fairy tales and the animated, musical versions of them that have been around since 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
From "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," it borrows the helpful woodland creatures and a poisoned apple.
The film begins with 12 minutes of 2-D animation, the classic Disney cartoon style of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
It mocks such sacred masterpieces as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Cinderella," while spinning a lovable fable of its own.
And the five new songs by Stephen Schwartz (“Pocahontas”) and Alan Menken (“Beauty and the Beast”) ride a similarly fine line between parody and celebration.
The woodland cottage where Giselle lives is a dead-ringer for Aurora's hiding place in Sleeping Beauty, and the rest of the design freely blends elements of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast .
Songs from multiple Oscar winners Alan Menken ("The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin") and Stephen Schwartz ("Pocahontas," "The Prince of Egypt") and splashy, polished dance numbers complete the package.
His animation background taught him to think out gags visually: There's a thigh-slapper where Giselle runs up a hill in Central Park, arms outstretched, in an echo of the famous shots in "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Sound of Music."
Although the fish-out-of-water Enchanted parodies nearly every Disney movie and many of their songs, it's still unique and really entertaining, especially with music and lyrics by Alan Menken ("Beauty and the Beast") and Stephen Schwartz.
Lima worked on Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, three of the better Disney animations, and his live-action resumé includes 102 Dalmations and Eloise at the Plaza.
Somewhere deep in the movie's genetic structure is a chromosome or two of Rocky and Bullwinkle's bi-level wit mixed in with the DNA of Mary Poppins.
Andrews, of course, played the title nanny in the studio's Mary Poppins, which contains the famous phrase "practically perfect in every way."
As far back as 1964, Mary Poppins and its charismatic star Julie Andrews bridged the animation/reality divide with a musical that truly was magical.
"Mary Poppins": The voice of the narrator is that of Julie Andrews, who played the title role in the 1964 classic.
“Enchanted” is more on the order of “Mary Poppins”: magical, endearing, funny to both kids and adults, and featuring a star-making performance.
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The character design, meanwhile, takes the distinctive colors and costumes of the older films and re-renders them in the distinctive Disney house style developed in the '70s and perfected in The Little Mermaid : slightly angular faces, just-too-large eyes and little crinkly noses.
Songs from multiple Oscar winners Alan Menken ("The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin") and Stephen Schwartz ("Pocahontas," "The Prince of Egypt") and splashy, polished dance numbers complete the package.
Lima worked on Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, three of the better Disney animations, and his live-action resumé includes 102 Dalmations and Eloise at the Plaza.
And although Oscar-winning composer Alan Menkin's songs might not come off as crisp as his contributions to such classic Disney fare as "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast" and "Aladdin," the song "That's How You Know" -- which, judging by the size of the production number built around it, Disney will likely push for Oscar consideration -- has a certain stick-in-your-headness about it that's not at all unpleasant.
The curiously enervating Dempsey does his best to sap the energy of the curiously enlivening Adams, and Enchanted meanwhile resurrects the calypso themes of The Little Mermaid without delving any further into its racial implications in a film every bit as vanilla and Wonder Bread as the rest of Disney's cavalcade of schlock.
And the five new songs by Stephen Schwartz (“Pocahontas”) and Alan Menken (“Beauty and the Beast”) ride a similarly fine line between parody and celebration.
The songs by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz (the team behind Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame , Menken's much better writing partner Howard Ashman stubbornly remaining long-dead) are effective enough in the moment - and lead to the film's most transcendent scene, a Freed-style musical extravaganza in Central Park - but they're not all that memorable.
Songs from multiple Oscar winners Alan Menken ("The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin") and Stephen Schwartz ("Pocahontas," "The Prince of Egypt") and splashy, polished dance numbers complete the package.
"Pocahontas": Judy Kuhn, the singing voice of Pocahontas, plays a woman with kids for whom Prince Edward is "too late."
Speaking of excellence, the music is by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz (the duo behind Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame).
But Disney deserves credit for half-pretending to undermine its foundational material and not just transpose it to the sea (The Little Mermaid) or onto non-white cultures (Pocahontas).
"Lady and the Tramp": Robert and Giselle have lunch at an Italian restaurant named Bella Notte, the title of a memorable song from the 1955 tale of puppy love.
Not since 1992’s Cool World has animated characters-turned-real people been so convincing.
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In fact, the closest any previous film comes to this is Ron Howard’s hilarious Splash – and that fabled literal fish out of water tale had the late great John Candy around to keep things rib tickling.
Enchanted references everything from Snow White to The Lion King with both gentle satire (like "Happy Working Song" where real-life rats and pigeons help a cartoon princess clean a New York apartment) and sly references (pay attention to little details and character names).
She emerges through a manhole cover in Times Square, but a more appropriate site would have been the basement of a theater playing "The Lion King."
The era of classics like Beauty And The Beast and The Lion King, produced during Disney's seemingly unstoppable 1990s reign as kings of the animation market, now seems a very long time ago.