Enchanted

I've been on a bit of a Disney kick lately, which led me to visit this 2007 "affectionate parody" for the first time. I did not love it. There were plenty of elements worth praising: a handful of memorable songs, a pair of surprisingly earnest performances from Amy Adams and James Marsden, a boatload of references to classic Disney movies. Still, the sum total final product here felt more lazy and self-congratulatory than clever or off the beaten path. The tone wandered back and forth between embracing and mocking so many Disney fairy tale tropes. I get that Disney would be hard-pressed to outright make fun of their own legacy with a straight up lampooning of so many older classics, but perhaps that just means a movie like this would have been best left to another studio altogether. Instead, it was never really clear when the movie wanted me to be in on the joke and when it just wanted me to enjoy everything at face value. The whole thing also felt completely uninspired. The idea of New York City being the polar opposite of a fairy tale setting felt straight out of 1993 and the movie gave up on exploring that contrast before the first act had ended, anyway. Toss in some overly kiddy shit like a CGI chipmunk, a campy-as-hell Susan Sarandon as the villain, an undercooked plot with underserved characters, and a generally bland lead performance from Patrick Dempsey, and Enchanted struck me as a fairly flawed movie in a variety of ways. By stripping away, say, half of its elements and expanding on the rest, it could have been a pretty decent movie. In this form, it just wasn't.

Now, if you want to see a Disney movie that manages to embrace the legacy of the animated fairy tale formula while simultaneously subverting a few tropes and delivering a very satisfying story with endearing characters in a hundred minutes or so, check out Frozen. That sales pitch probably seems to come out of left field, but honestly, I could not stop comparing Enchanted unfavorably to that movie in my head while watching it.

Lastly, I was surprised when doing a little background research on the production of Enchanted that Disney wanted to go with a "younger and little-known" actress for the lead role and thusly opted for Amy Adams, a 39-year-old five-time Academy Award nominee and bona fide A-list actress. Then I realized that the Amy Adams who appeared in Enchanted was a 31-year-old independent actress whose biggest role to that point in time had been either the naive nurse in Catch Me If You Can or Jim's two-episode girlfriend in the first season of The Office. Life just flies by, doesn't it?