Enchanted
Disney Pictures, 107mins, PG

Directed by
Kevin Lima

Now is the time to discuss the theory of higher dimensions: As you know there are the usual three, up and down; back and forth, side to side, and the bonus fourth of yesterday and tomorrow. Now for the better part of a generation, physicists have been postulating more, up to twenty in fact, most of these, they say, are rolled up in microscopic coils that cannot be experienced. Some have postulated that the fifth dimension is slightly larger and effects gravity and wormholes, shortcuts between distant places. Then there is the sixth dimension, through which one can travel to alternate universes, which are formed by billions of personal choices. Earth one, for example is where we live, and Earth two is where Disney's princesses, Roger Rabbit, and all those other cartoon characters reside.

This film is about the sixth dimension. It's also about the art of parody. About half a dozen years ago, Bill Kelly, who had done some minor films and a quirky feature called “Blast From the Past” managed to sell a parody of those Disney princess movies like “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty” to the studio, which was still under the Michael Eisner regime. The film was to be live action, with about ten minutes of genuine Disney® animation at the beginning.

Unfortunately for the World, Disney's “Treasure Planet” became the Mouse House's second major flop in a row, and Eisner made the astoundingly dumb decision to shut down the two traditional Feature Animation departments, and “Enchanted” as the project was called, was put on the shelf as hundreds of brilliant artists were given their pink slips and sent off into the wilderness.

Now about this time, an actress named Amy Adams was trying to get work. She wasn't doing very well, and was rapidly running out of her twenties without getting more than a few lines here and there in independent films and off Broadway plays. Now here's where the weird paradox, had Disney decided to keep all those wonderful people employed, someone else would have been cast as the lead in this thing, and Amy Adams wouldn't be in a position to get her second Oscar nomination.

Be that as it may, Disney had to go to James Baxter's boutique animation house to get the traditional stuff done. Granted, Baxter and his number two Andreas Deja had worked for Disney in it's second era of glory, and they and Director Kevin Lima (who had done two animated features for Disney back in the day) managed to get a team of talented veterans from the old days, so this is in fact Disney animation.

The animated opening takes place in the animated kingdom of Andalusia, where The beautiful peasent Giselle (voice of Amy Adams), is living in the woods with her furry funny animal friends and waiting for Prince Charming to show up. Now Charming's name is Edward (James Marsden) and he's a moron, something known all too well to his stepmother, the evil queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) and his officially designated sidekick Nathaniel (Timothy Spall), who's job it is, is to make sure that he never finds true love and gets married, which would mean that Narissa's regency would be over and the country would be in deep trouble. But no, he meets and falls for Giselle and they are to be married the next day. But Narissa changes into an old granny right out of “Snow White” and pushes poor Gisell through the sixth dimension [remember that?] to a place where no one lives happily ever after: Old New York, naturally, as they couldn't get the Rights to Paris or Berlin.

  The transition from 2D to 3D is done flawlessly, and here we get to see Amy Adams in a poofy dress wandering around Times Square and the lower East Side. She's brilliant. The script is hilarious, with all sorts of takes on the cliché Disney plotlines, using rats, both the feathered and mammalian kind, and Roaches, to help clean up her new friend Robert (Patrick Dempsey) [a humorless divorce lawyer], and his young daughter Morgan (Rachel Covey), who believes that Giselle in indeed who she says she is and not some nutcase from Sheboygan. This, of course causes problems with Robert's fiancée Nancy (Idina Menzel, who if there's any justice in the world will be starring in the movie version of “Wicked” sometime around 2010), Then there's the traffic across the sixth dimension as first Prince Edward, then Nathaniel, a chipmonk named Pip with a mafia accent, and finally Narissa, head off to either save Giselle or cause trouble.

The jokes work, ALL of them. This rarely happens in films like this. The filmmakers GET IT, they know that this kind of project cannot be just for little girls with an infantile PeTA-approved plot. No, this is parody, and that's artistic violence. The audience is in on the joke, and that's all to the good. I know that Disney's working on a CGI version of “Repunzel” and it's supposed to be a hoot. If it doesn't happen, this is a good enough way to bury the genre. This is going to be the family film of the season.


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