Post a Comment        E-mail To A Friend        Join The List

Kevin Lima, Enchanted

by T.O. Lawrence
12/19/2007

Children don't get nearly enough credit. I mean sure, they're always sticky and they tell stories about as entertaining as the back of a box cereal. But they're special and should be taught to avoid movies like Enchanted.

Enchanted has been promoted by Disney as their new "Fairy tale come to life." Playing on all the old stereotypes and giving them a quirky postmodern twist, Enchanted begins in the animated world of fairy tales until the evil Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) ejects the happily harmonizing heroine Giselle (Amy Adams) into the real world of modern day New York to send her away from Prince Edward (James Marsden). There, she meets a divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey) and his daughter (Rachel Covey) who are forced to take on this musical stranger and her various vermin friends as she adjusts to modern concepts of love, morality and commercialism.

Fairy tale optimism vs. divorce lawyer pessimism. Love written in the stars vs. vows written on contracts. A world of magic vs. a world of possessions. And so on, and so on, blah blah blah.

The majority of the movie is spent showing off mediocre CGI through animated New York wildlife as they harmonize Cinderella-style with Giselle as she teaches the real world about keeping magic alive. The acting is pitiful save the occasional entrance of Timothy Spall as Nathaniel, the Queen's bumbling cohort who is funny without even trying and deserves so much better. Sarandon, Adams and Marsden all manage to keep strictly to stereotype and add absolutely nothing that another cartoon couldn't offer.

On top of mediocre acting, the musical material is less than pleasing. One of the songs, a Little Mermaid "Under the Sea" ripoff if I ever heard one, actually has a pretty nifty musical dance thing to it the quality of Ferris Beuller back in the day. But if I had twenty bazillion dollars to spend on this crap, I could have a neat dance sequence too and the music wouldn't make you want to clean your ears with a bullet.

The most astoundingly painful part of this movie is how many stereotypes it recalls and fails to break. I mean isn't that the whole point of the movie? Yet the only black people I see in the movie are a bickering overweight couple and a Jamaican steel-drum player, problems with money are only for the poor and the ugly, and women should constantly be subordinated to men because they keep too many silly ideas in their pretty little heads.

Maybe I read too much into this whole thing but the fact that this movie was #1 in America distresses me. It also distresses me that this is what we show children to promote following their dreams. Seriously, see Mirror Mask or any of the older Henson Studios movies for the sake of your kids and see what these movies actually should be. Disney should stick with the subversive pornography its used to and leave the real world alone. We've got Alvin and the Chipmunks in theaters now; do we really need to retard our youth that much more?

Name
Email
URL
Body
Are you human?