Movie Review: Enchanted

Enchanted (4/5 stars)

It's a routinely classic Disney fairy tale - brought to life! The first portion of this film is completely animated, full of vibrant color, over-exaggerated characters, and lyrical songs every five minutes. Right away, the prince and princess meet, fall instantly in love while singing together and are about to marry when, you guessed it, the evil step-mother tries to prevent this matrimonial event to preserve her crown. She shoves our main character Giselle, into a fountain-well, where on the other side, exists New York City.

Hilarity ensues as we observe Giselle (Amy Adams) struggle to understand the ways of 'normal' life outside of ceaseless happiness, love at first sight, and talking animals. Upon entering New York, she immediately meets Robert (Patrick Dempsey), a divorced divorce lawyer with a 6 year-old daughter. He assumes Giselle is crazy and reluctantly decides to help her, with strong motivation from his star-struck daughter. Meanwhile, Prince Edward (James Marsden) dives into the portal to rescue his princess, blissfully ignorant to the fact that his step-mother is the perpetrator.

Life for Giselle is tremendously different in a big city, than what she is used to in fantasy-land. Adams does a wonderfully superb job of acting inappropriately naive throughout the entire film. Her facial expressions and body language are painfully over-done, but for this film, it's perfect. The first 3/4 of the movie genuinely mock Disney's artificial formula, showing us how ridiculously far-off their films are to real life events. However, because it’s Disney doing the mocking, I can give them a friendly nod for knowing perfectly how to add to their monstrous profits.

Marsden offers us a large chunk of humor in this film, already encompassing animated princely features, even though he has only a quarter of screen-time as the other actors. His subtle, yet engaging facial expressions are so quick, you really have to pay attention to his reactions. He also acquires some of the best lines in the movie, notably calling New Yorkers 'noble peasants' throughout the film. Susan Sarandon, as Queen Narissa and step-mother to Prince Edward, has a commanding voice (animated or not) and a sleek, midnight outfit that I would don immediately, if ever given the opportunity. Although she's animated for most of the film, when you finally get to see her in real life, it's worth the wait.

However, the last part of this film really took a dive back into Disney-animated dribble, but in unpalatable human form. Disney wants to make sure you remember that it’s their product you're viewing, by force-feeding you ‘popular’ moments from their classic animated films. The poisonous apple makes an appearance (as it annoyingly did in Pirates), as well as the single shoe left behind at the ball, and a terrorizing dragon (formally a queen). Normally, I'm all for dragon-appearances in any movie, CGI or animated; but all that the freshly-transformed Narissa did was blather on while trying to narrate her haughty frustrations and dispose of Robert and Giselle. Once the dragon is defeated (sorry, was that an unapparent spoiler?), Giselle realizes she would rather stay in the real world with her newly-discovered true love (oops, that was a spoiler). But not to worry, it's a Happy Ending for everyone, if you were curious... it's Disney you know!

Overall, because this film was so mockingly and consistently funny for the majority of its running time, I give it 4/5 stars. The script was a comfortable mix between animation and real-life speak, and the costumes were an exact replica of what they would be, had animated people stepped into the real world. It's just too bad the strong plot declines toward the end, turning it into a bona fide Disney flick. But the situational humor, well-executed during the bulk of the film, makes it worth seeing!