an enchanting return to form…

November 22, 2007

…for walt disney.

I was surprised… very pleasantly surprised… that I loved Enchanted. Judging from its trailer, I was expecting it to be another one of these cheesy, corny and ineffective gimmicky feel-good throwbacks to good old days of Disney. However, as much as the film still is cheesy… it never comes across as corny and ineffective.

I didn't think they would be able to pull it of, but Enchanted is almost just like the experience of watching your favorite Disney films… but in live action. Just like Disney classics such as Snow White, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, Enchanted has just the right amount of romance, comedy, fantasy and the great Disney music (thanks to Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz) that I bet many people have missed so much.

Amy Adams totally owns the role of Giselle (some sort of a re-hased Snow White). She's light, bubbly, funny and innocent. She twirls and glides and sings to her animal friends. She's a hopeless doe-eyed romantic and an adorably exaggerated caricature of what made all the past Disney princesses so appealing.

Actually, most of the characters in the movie are exaggerated versions of everything we've loved about Disney. Susan Sarandon plays the evil witch/stepmother; James Mardsen plays the stereotypical charming prince (although why are most prince charmings portrayed as stupid nowadays?); and in the spirit of the classic cute and hilarious Disney sidekicks, we also have Pip, Giselle's chipmunk friend.

It's cheesy. It's predictable. It's preposterous. But you will not care about these at all because Enchanted proves to be a genuinely funny and heartwarming parody of Disney's time-tested princess genre.

Surprising as it may seem, Enchanted may be the best and most rewarding movie I've seen in the past few months.