See 'Enchanted' for fun
Directed by Kevin Lima
Rated PG
(Three Stars)
By Bruce Bulloch
I like to imagine the epiphany came after one too many hours hunched over a meticulously crafted animation cell: that the best way to satirize one of Walt Disney's classic fairytales is to simply play it straight.
Take the lilting voices, high-fructose nobility and kitchen-cleaning forest critters, strip them of their cartoon cover and see what kind of havoc they could wreak on a real street among real people.
Whatever the inspiration, the result is Walt Disney Pictures' wonderfully self-lampooning romantic comedy, "Enchanted."
Our heroine, Giselle, dances around her forest cottage in a hand-painted paradise that only Disney animators could create, dreaming of the day her prince will come. When he finally arrives, he brings along the unhappy baggage of an evil stepmother with plans to do poor Giselle ill. Forgoing the standard poison apples and needle pricks, mom pushes Giselle down a magic well.
After an extended freefall, Giselle pops out of a manhole transformed into a real woman (Amy Adams) on the dirty, unfriendly and all too real streets of New York City (its small wonder we all have nostalgic pangs for Bambi's forest).
In one fell swoop Giselle has been transformed from fairy-tale princess into a modern day Blanche DuBois - a theatrical eccentric dependent on the generosity of a stranger, Robert Philip (Patrick Dempsey), and his young daughter, Morgan (Rachel Covey), who find her wandering the streets in search of a castle and her prince.
In this collision of realities, Giselle soon grabs the upper hand. Her absolute faith in the storybook underpinnings of the universe unbalances and ultimately sweeps along everyone she meets. She is unfazed by the strange little wrinkles the urban world throws at her fairytale lifestyle.
Waking up in Robert's cluttered apartment, Giselle decides to repay her host's kindness by doing a little house cleaning. Opening the window she sings out a tune to call the woodland creatures to help her with her chores. In this case she gets an enthusiastic, though not all too competent (they scrub out the toilet with Robert's toothbrush), crew of rats, pigeons and cockroaches.
"Enchanted" has a lot of fun placing the sunny clich
