I watch movies, not to be educated or manipulated or shocked, but to be entertained. Measured by that standard, Disney’s Enchanted was a success. The story line, if you don’t know it already, goes like this: Giselle, a fair maiden living in a cartoonland called Andalasia, is in love with a handsome prince named Edward. Edward’s stepmother, the Queen, fears that Giselle will be a rival for her throne, so she throws her down a wishing well to a place “where there are no happy ever-afters” – New York City.
Giselle, now played by the flesh-and-blood Amy Adams, clambers out of a manhole in Times Square and is immediately surrounded by the horrors of Gotham. She is rescued from danger by a passerby named Robert. He is a lawyer and a single dad, living with his little daughter Morgan, and the trio repair to Robert’s apartment until he figures out what to do with this confused young woman dressed like a princess in a fairy tale. Eventually, Prince Edward also makes the trip from cartoonland to New York in search of his true love, who is learning the way people in the real world go about courting. The queen, keeping an evil eye on things from Andalasia, isn’t crazy about these developments and dispatches a minion to dispatch Giselle.
You get the idea: Animated characters are thrust into the real world, learn some lessons and teach some, too. In this case, Giselle from Andalasia and Robert from New York City fall in love and are obviously fated to live happily ever after.
Woody Allen also arranged for a handsome movie actor to step out of a movie to fall in love with a downtrodden housewife in the audience. The movie was The Purple Rose of Cairo, and it was clever and enjoyable. It was set in the Great Depression, and it exploited the contrast between the on-screen characters in a drawing-room comedy and the dreary moviegoers seeking escape from hard times. In Enchanted, no one is conspicuously miserable. Robert is a successful lawyer living in a luxurious Manhattan apartment. But his life is empty. Morgan, his little girl, wants a fairy-tale pop-up book, but her father gives her a coffee-table book on famous women like Rosa Parks and Madam Curie. He doesn’t do fairy tales.
Enchanted, given that plot, could have been sappy. Instead it is, well, enchanting. It has something Woody Allen, with all his talent, could never have.
That something is the Disney touch.
Talk about a brand for the ages! The screen fills with the glorious colors of the magic kingdom, against the strains of “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Then the narrator, Julie Andrews, sets up the story with the aid of a pop-up book of fairy tales, a device that will be revisited at the end of the movie. It had to be Julie Andrews. The adorable Amy Adams looks very much like Julie playing Cinderella in the Rodgers and Hammerstein TV special so many years ago, and of course Julie has That Voice.
The Disney touch also fills the screen with the usual menagerie of happy-go-lucky computer-generated animals, including a chipmunk who does his best to protect Giselle from harm. The movie is also chock-full of references to earlier Disney classics. The queen is a dead take-off of the queen in Snow White, as is her alter ego, the old hag who offers Snow White (and now Giselle) a poison apple. On one level, this latest Disney hit is making fun of all the Disney golden oldies. Only a film studio with monumental self-confidence would dare to do that.
Most of the movie takes place in New York, with real people, and the Disney touch is just as magical here. A long musical scene in Central Park involves dozens if not hundreds of dancers (there are certainly more than 100 dancers named in the end credits), and the obligatory ball scene at the climax is Disney at its best.
A word must be said in praise of the two actors who play Giselle’s suitors. As world-weary lawyer Robert, Patrick Dempsey has a tough assignment. When he is on screen, Giselle is usually with him, which means no one (no man, certainly) is looking at him. His dialogue is mostly straight lines, though every now and then the writers give him a gem. He is absolutely perfect in the role. James Marsden, who plays Prince Edward, is given a showy costume and a sword to brandish, and he must have had great fun hamming it up. The make-up crew and the costumers should also be credited for making the cartoon characters and their worldly counterparts look reasonably alike. (They obviously had no trouble sounding alike.)
I don’t want to give the impression that Enchanted is flawless. First, while I accept that birds and chipmunks and even caterpillars can sing and dance in the magic kingdom, I can’t buy lovable rats and cockroaches. (No, I didn’t like Pixar’s Ratatouille.) Second, the over-the-top finale, with the queen transforming herself into a huge dragon and then climbing a skyscraper, King Kong style, struck me as pointless. In Snow White, the queen/hag with her poison apple were quite enough. Maybe the Disney folks thought a modern audience needed a heavier dose of shock and awe, but I thought the last 10 minutes of the movie (after the exquisite ball scene) was a misfire.
Still, the pluses outweighed the minuses, and the movie was a winner.
Once upon a time, long long ago, I saw the original Snow White, and in the years since I have seen most of the animated Disney classics and have visited Disneyland with my children. There is nothing like the Disney experience, because it taps into a very deep, very primitive feeling that there must be someplace where dreams really do come true. I’ll let the psychologists and the theologians sort that out, but what I know is that for me, the Disney magic never pales. It is as bright and colorful as ever.
