With movies as diverse as Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, 300 and Beowulf bringing the worlds of live action and animation ever closer, it makes perfect sense for this Disney movie to make this collision of sensibilities its very subject. Starting off with a romantic cartoon sequence so intentionally cliché-ridden it’d leave Walt himself groaning, it both tweaks and celebrates the Disney legend. There is a princess, called Giselle (Amy Adams), a prince (James Marsden), and an evil queen (Susan Sarandon) so diabolical that she casts Giselle into a place, on the opposite side of the world from a fairy-tale paradise, called Manhattan that’s lively, but not animated.
Immediately she is nearly run down, stolen from, and lost in a seedy part of town, until she’s rescued by a native (Patrick Dempsey). When, by way of explaining her troubles, he says “Welcome to New York,” she misses his intention and replies with a sunny “Thank you!” Because while there is plenty of evil in fairy-tale land, there is no sarcasm. The rest of the story plays out as the prince and the queen’s henchman (Timothy Spall) race to catch up with Giselle, Dempsey’s single dad tries to figure out where she came from, and she tries to adapt. The prince’s chipmunk friend tries to help too, but humorously finds he’s lost his voice. It’s just enough of a story to keep things interesting while not getting in the way of the central fish-out-of-water comic motif. (The script is by screenwriter Bill Kelly, who’s done genre parody before with Blast from the Past.) Adams follows on the promise of her underseen, Oscar-nominated Junebug performance with a role that should give her a much higher profile.
Non-ironic musical centerpieces by Disney vets Alan Mencken and Steven Schwartz (who last collaborated on The Hunchback of Notre Dame) provide the most charming scenes. In the first, Giselle pays seriocomic homage to Snow White as she singingly summons a menagerie, including local cockroaches, to clean up her rescuer’s bachelor pad. She learns from his world, he learns from hers, and an overblown finale (it reminded me of Ghostbusters) sets everything right. Inevitably, the last half is not quite as good as the first, as you’ll have figured where things are headed, and Giselle has had time to adjust to three-dimensional life. It is nice that the princess ideal gets retooled for the post-feminist age; in the real world, being the heroine sometimes means not waiting for Prince Charming to rescue you.
IMDB link
reviewed 12/01/07
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