Walt Disney, part LXVI: Disney Princess enchanted tales

ENCHANTED

2007

Directed by Kevin Lima

Written by Bill Kelly, Rita Hsiao, Todd Alcott, Bob Schooley, and Mark McCorkle

Spoilers: high

Despite the enormous importance of Pixar and the Disney-Pixar relationship to what would eventually become of Walt Disney Feature Animation (down to something as cosmetic as the 2007 name change, to Walt Disney Animation Studios), I'm not sure that it was so much Pixar that haunted Disney's collective nightmares, and I don't know if I didn't already come up with the aptest reduction of how thoroughly lost Disney animation had gotten itself in the mid-00s when we discussed Meet the Robinsons, and I suggested that the studio's philosophy had become something akin to, "Pixar is hard, but DreamWorks is popular."  Disney's first clutch of CGI features—Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, The Wild (if you deign to count it and I think we should), and arguably even Bolt—can often feel like DreamWorks ideas, and they can even more often feel like DreamWorks execution.  It's not so surprising, I suppose, that Jeffrey Katzenberg's rival company would have overshadowed Disney's choices in this era; yet the most important and most enduring product of its influence came out of its penumbra, and not from WDAS, but from Walt Disney Pictures, the live-action branch of the company; and this film was shaped as much by a resentment of the influence as by anything else.  This is Enchanted, which is basically the result of Kevin Lima storming into the Disney offices one day and declaring, "Shrek doesn't parody our movies right."  (History is silent on how his wife, Brenda Chapman—a DreamWorks employee, who worked on Shrek—responded to the charge.  But obviously I'm also being fanciful.)

Enchanted, as consensus has it, does get it right, and it has commanded a great deal of affection ever since its 2007 debut for being sincere about the value of fairy tale open-heartedness in the modern world, specifically fairy tale open-heartedness of the kind that had once upon a time (so to speak) been so vividly embodied by Disney's princess musicals, which you can make an argument the company stopped producing in their pure form as early as 1991 with Beauty and the Beast, given that Aladdin's protagonist technically wasn't a princess, Pocahontas is, even more technically, "history," and Mulan is an adaptation of a quasi-historical poem about an aristocratic but non-royal soldier (and is only halfway a musical, too).  It's all very nice, of course, for Enchanted to have done this, and we doubtless owe it some thanks.  I could be making too much of Enchanted's inauguration of the whole "past participle adjective" naming convention, but it feels like its success must've paved some runway for Tangled, and, in a different fashion, The Princess and the Frog.

Amusingly, it began quite differently.  Enchanted actually had its genesis years before, even years before Shrek, when Bill Kelly wrote a high-concept romantic comedy script all the way back in 1997 (or even earlier, since that's just when Disney's Touchstone Pictures bought the script); and Kelly's original screenplay was reportedly not so family-friendly (I've heard tell it would've flirted with an outright R-rating).  I do not know if being (apparently) kind of sleazy means it was necessarily insincere; Pretty Woman, in some sense the Touchstone film, had its own R-rating, after all, yet it still manifestly means it.  I also don't know how early in the day Enchanted adopted its hypothetically most-pleasing conceit, of being a hybrid between a live-action "real" world where everything is difficult and complex, and the world its fairy tale heroine comes from, where everything is simpler and more direct, and is therefore literally a Disney cartoon patterned upon the storytelling tropes of Disneyfied fairy tale romance.  It's possible that this didn't arise till Lima took the project over as director in 2003—Lima having feet in both filmmaking forms and a sense of how to do emotional realism with cartoon characters as well as a sense of how to do cartoons with live-action performers (he'd been a director not only on Tarzan but on A Goofy Movie, and he had directed 102 Dalmatians*)—and it's hard to assume one way or the other: on the one hand, it seems like you'd pursue an animated segment as a matter of course with this project; on the other, Enchanted is surprisingly close to a remake of Cool World just with a different attitude, which would've been more obvious in 1997, and I suspect everyone involved would've wanted to have put as much distance between this and that as possible.  In any case, this is where Enchanted gets on its rails, Kelly coming back aboard after numerous other writers had tried their hand at his basic concept, and despite the apparently massive gulf between his original idea and Enchanted as it was produced, plus the patent fact that Lima was calling the shots, Kelly did receive the film's sole screenplay credit.

And so do we enter the world of Andalasia—I'm sorry, the card says "Moops"—a fantasy kingdom modeled upon the idea of Disney animation fantasy kingdoms, where lives in a house in the woods one Giselle (Amy Adams), a singing optimist swarmed by animal friends and helpmeets.  Her beautiful song attracts the attention of the prince, Edward (James Marsden), who speeds off to find its source, but his stepmother and the queen regnant, Narissa (Susan Sarandon), fears that were her stepson to wed and solidify his dynasty, her rule would be imperiled, so she uses all the resources at her disposal—an evil troll, the as-yet-undiscovered perfidy of Edward's servant, Nathaniel (Timothy Spall)—to destroy Giselle and/or Edward.  Her earlier efforts failing, on the day of Giselle and Edward's wedding, she magically disguises her appearance into that of an old hag, but the poison apples will have to wait till later, because what she does is simply wait until the young woman's back is turned and push her into a well that is, evidently, also a dimensional portal.  Although her plan would've worked better if she'd pushed her down a regular well.

Giselle emerges in our world (specifically New York City, rather than, say, Kinshasa, or the bottom of the ocean, because obviously), and is very much out-of-place—her poofed-to-the-max wedding dress isn't helping—and everyone is indifferent to her plight if not actively predatory, except that at last, in her most pitiful state, knocking on the "doors" of a two-dimensional representation of a "castle" on a billboard, she's taken in by Robert (Patrick Dempsey), a cynical divorce attorney.  It's actually his more generous daughter Morgan's (Rachel Covey's) idea, though possibly the best-observed bit of "realism" in the whole film is that when he does take this decompensating madwoman in, on that first night, he keeps Morgan in his room and the definite implication is that he locks its door.  Nonetheless, Giselle turns out to be a salutary influence on Robert, and on his work as a cynical divorce attorney, and on his daughter, and all that, even though she causes problems at Cynical Divorce Attorneys, LLP, and with his fiancee Nancy (Idina Menzel).  Meanwhile, Edward has flung himself into the quest to rescue Giselle, bringing Nathaniel along with him, and they are naturally as stymied by New York as she is, though Edward has the benefit of being armed; and Narissa hasn't just stopped being evil, and from the other side plots and schemes to rid herself of her enemies once and for all.

Look, with apologies—and in case you couldn't tell—I don't really like Enchanted.  I like it the most when it's still a cartoon, which it is for only about eight minutes, and I don't even love that cartoon, as while it is successful at doing "Disney parody" in a snotty way, that way is still only slightly to the left of the snotty way that Shrek did it.  The approach here is "what if it were just really stupid and insipid, but we didn't verbally mock it, and assumed the audience got the joke?"  I probably do prefer that and it is funny, with its goal being to remix various Disney tropes from across a span of sixty years in a very overwhelming form, from Giselle's frankly grotesque "dream prince" mannequin that she puts together with the help of animal pals not unlike Briar Rose, to the wiseacre sidekick not unlike that of any given Disney 90s protagonist though he could also make you think of Cinderella's mice (in this case it is a squirrel, however; Jeff Bennett), to Disney Renaissance musical veterans Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz providing a song that somehow isn't as memorable as its 50s ballad analogue.  (And none of Menken and Schwartz's songs will prove to be remotely in the same league as the Renaissance music they're even less ready to be compared to; even so, I confess being irritated that the one that would've tied up the happy ending for the two inevitably-rejected partners, who pair off themselves and vanish into the Andalasian fantasy world, got cut.)

It is, anyhow, an okay cartoon: as a result of WDAS's turn towards CGI, of course, it was not actually made by Disney, but it was made by Disney Renaissance animator James Baxter's outfit; and I don't think it's too much to say that a big part of Enchanted's critical legacy is a direct result of how in 2007 animation aficionados were desperate to latch onto anything that helped them believe that 2-D American feature animation had any future.  Well, it didn't, so let's be serious.  (Enchanted's Wikipedia article, with a disturbing level of disingenuousness, implies Baxter's studio used actual traditional animation techniques, like a Disney Silver Age movie, which is a motherfucking insane implication to make, given how extremely obviously it's using a digital ink-and-paint system—I'm pretty sure it has rack focus!—though that system was not, I believe, CAPS.)  While we're at it, I don't like the Reel FX CGI they used for the film's first, High Disney gesture—an illuminated storybook opening—that renders the nostalgic sigh it hopes to generate into the pinched frown brought about by a tacky digital pop-up book; I am genuinely baffled by what's going on with the aspect ratios in this prologue, starting with what it wants you to think is the Super Technirama 70 aspect ratio (it isn't), and then boxing itself into regular damn flat widescreen (not, incidentally, the aspect ratio of the live-action portion), which is all hellaciously distracting, and has been rather awful on a TV presentation ever since it came to home video nineteen years ago.

I do enjoy Giselle's Art Nouveau abode, and as the joke of her Disney Princess purity reaches a fever pitch (again, somehow without the movie stressing it as an avowed joke), it even hits "hilarious"; but the action scene to follow is middling and there's always a sense of the fly-by-night to the whole affair.  The animation isn't bad, but it does feel distinctly sub-Disney (there's certainly a reason nobody's favorite Andreas Deja villain is "Narissa, you know, from Enchanted?"), and more than that you can always perceive how it's being packed into as small a container as is possible while still getting across the vibe and basic plot information.  I might be the only person who feels this way, but it hit me watching it this time that one of the things Enchanted is missing, like a hole in the movie, is any return to Andalasia.  The climax is a King Kong riff instead—gender-swapped, not that this means Giselle actually performs the function of either Prince Philip or machinegun-armed biplanes; the now-inarticulate, now-CGI squirrel is actually the movie's most effective hero—with a character inspired by Maleficent and even so getting fully-rendered in a CGI form courtesy of the Tippett Studio.  Of its period's technological level, Narissa's dragon form is not, accordingly, "outright bad," but it does get overanimated, in accordance with the trivializing performance and the autopiloted waste this makes of Sarandon, so that this enormous dragon doesn't even momentarily feel like a demidivine threat, which is a hell of a thing to do with the Maleficent figure in a movie, or even the Evil Queen figure.

(Okay, it's only mostly wasted.)

But that's in keeping with my general feeling towards Enchanted, which is that it's missing a lot.  What it's not missing, at least, is a very strong central performance: Enchanted is basically responsible (for good and ill) for Amy Adams's A-list career, Lima arriving upon her after some 300 auditions of other actors, and to the extent that Giselle does register as a human being with a different, better way of seeing the world, rather than solely an inconsistently-characterized engine for jokes, while still being good at being an inconsistently-characterized engine for jokes, it's because of her.  But then, I tend to think Marsden is the one walking away with the movie whenever he's afforded the opportunity, because Marsden is under no obligation to be a human being, and can devote his entire energies to being (a more consistently-characterized) moron who traipses around New York, indulging in completely cartoonish shtick such as stabbing city buses because he's mistaken them for monsters.  (Though if you're even slightly hostile to the movie, you'll notice "returning to Anadalasia" is, literally, just retracing your path through the magic manhole in Times Square.)

It's going to be Dempsey's lawyer who wins Giselle's heart, though I think if he counted, we'd have an automatic champion for Disney's single dullest prince.  (I think it speaks volumes that Marsden did not even bother going out for the male lead here.)  Robert is an arc-shaped object that sometimes serves, sturdily enough, as the straight-man for fish-out-of-water jokes.  I am, however, somehow a little bothered by his "realist" backstory: I appreciate that this movie has determined it can't be out-and-out anti-divorce or anti-remarriage here in 2007—it's certainly not for lack of trying!—but to position Robert where they need him to be when Giselle collides with him, he and his daughter have had to have been full-on abandoned by his ex-wife, like she lit out for the territory and lives under an assumed name now or something, which I think is a handy example of how completely sanded-down this movie is, not in terms of "edge," as that's obviously a somewhat edgy idea in theory, but the actual effect and indeed the actual goal was featurelessness.

That's what it is, featurelessness, and maybe that makes some sense when you consider: what is this even a parody of?  When you get down to it, it's no more than three movies: Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty—and I don't honestly think it is ever a parody of Cinderella, as Cinderella specified its protagonist far too sharply.  And so, Giselle (at least as written) is virtually an internally-inert catalyst for change who is a parody of characters who barely exist in their movies (Briar Rose, infamously, doesn't even have a line of dialogue for something like the last two-fifths of her movie's runtime; Briar Rose, not quite as infamously but it should be, doesn't even have a scene where she reacts to the fact "Briar Rose" is a cover identity**), so there's just not much to draw from there besides the tropes; she can't parody the Renaissance Disney Princess films much because they had already corrected for this.  I mean, Giselle gets angry for the first time, and that's the parody, one that assumes a level of non-characterization in the referents that accords to almost no actual Disney character besides just those from two movies made in 1937 and 1959, respectively, neither of which ever made any claim to psychological rounding; Ariel, Belle, and even Cinderella could sure get noticeably pissed.

She sounds like an accidental Ariel; but thanks to having film-bending superpowers she almost never has any credible reaction to, or even curiosity about, our "quotidian" world—a world that should probably come off like a cyclopean dreamscape to her, and for longer than just that one introductory shot—and now that I think about it, I'm not really sure the movie explains why she wants to stay except New York is where Robert's job is.  And it also means her fish-out-of-water jokes often aren't so good, because it's mainly a function of Adams's performance that Giselle isn't impervious to new information and new sensations altogether.  Enchanted could draw from the villains of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty for additional personality, and it does so superficially, but Narissa is in this movie less than Briar Rose is in hers.  (It indicates some kind of arc for Spall's Nathaniel, a comic boob infatuated with Narissa.  It partially does so via perplexing master-of-disguise ethnic subterfuge that, in the case of his subcontinental cab driver, feels like the adjacent scenes that explain the "but why?" must be missing.)

It's cute enough; the parody can be funny.  I think it does so truly successfully in a rather lumpy, "that was a good scene" manner, at least outside of Marsden's performance.  My favorite, by a lot, is the Snow White cleaning scene ("Happy Working Song" is probably the best Menken & Schwartz piece here, though I could not hum a note of it 48 hours, and probably 48 minutes, later), although this scene does require you to find dozens of unwashed plates for a household of two people credible without simultaneously wondering if Morgan should be handed off to CPS, because the live-action part is still a cartoon (and probably should be moreso than it is).  The joke here, anyway, is that it replaces the adorable woodland animals with urban vermin, but the truly funny part of the gag is that Giselle is entirely indifferent to whatever distinction you or I might make between hand-drawn cartoon rabbits and realistically-CGI'ed rats, or helpful sparrows and a swarm of cockroaches.

The big choreographed musical centerpiece "That's How You Know," a montage where Giselle attempts to explain the concept of true love to soul-dead Robert, is at a minimum likeably energetic—there's an idea being developed, that I'm not sure Lima was entirely conscious of because it could've scaffolded out much further if he were, of aggregating every possible form of ethnic musical performance (Caribbean steel drum, Mexican mariachi, German folk!) into a single frame (plus some wild-looking stilt-walking street performers)—though the joke I kept wanting it to make, and in Dempsey's, and editors Gregory Perler and Stephen A. Rotter's, defense, I think their performance and cutting choices are actually sometimes making, is that this blandly uncinematic dude continues to exist between those cuts, and this chaotic and burly musical number keeps unaccountably restarting around him despite what for him (but not Giselle) are clearly five or six minute pauses between its waystations.  I am also extremely fond of the running gag that Giselle can, in the offscreen space, make any garment of any complexity out of household items, and quite possibly without any implements as I doubt the lawyer would have them around, and I get the impression that Mona May's costume design has as much currency as any other aspect of the movie—I wouldn't go so far as to say it has great costume design—but it has clever enough costume design that I would say that the most significant token of Giselle's transformation, a "real" and very boring dress, and newly-flatironed hair, sucks.

And mostly the jokes aren't even this good; mostly the parody is the most low-hanging-fruit, path-of-least-resistance, whatever-metaphor-you-like; and sometimes it's the squirrel shitting itself, because it's 2007.  It's still functional enough as a comedy that if it devoted itself fully to comic vignettes (basically if everyone were Marsdening across the entire film), it would probably tip Enchanted over for me.  But it doesn't; I think it genuinely believes it has heft, even when there's so little actual story content in the film it's a little hard to understand how it entirely fills all of its 107 minutes (and it is, absolutely, too long—I don't think the parody, however affectionate, of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty ought to be that much longer than they are).

It banks on the power of romantic fantasy delicately interweaving itself with real romance, and it barely forwards the one or the other, except as the shallowest version of either.  (It also insists on Disney romantic fantasy to the point that it all but explicitly declares that e.g. Ariel the Mermaid is more important than Maria Sklodowska-Curie or Rosa Parks.)  I don't begrudge Enchanted its legacy, for it's not the kind of movie that I could ever hate, but despite the overwhelming evidence that it works for so many others, it feels so empty to me, essentially an idea for a movie that keeps repeating its pitch for that idea, over and over but pretty much always in the same way, until eventually it stops.

Score: 5/10

*And since we won't get another chance to talk about Kevin Lima after this, let's just say that it's a little shocking how little career he's had since Enchanted, despite the filmmaker having been a success at almost everything he ever did except executive producing The Wild.  Apparently, it's nothing to do with him and just really incredibly rotten luck.

**I mean, Sleeping Beauty is more "glorious art object" than "functioning narrative motion picture," after all.