Enchanted (***1/4)

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

Shrek the Third (**3/4)

Saw this on opening weekend. The short version: it’s nothing special, certainly not enough to spawn such hysteria had it been the first in the series rather than the a follow-up to a classic original and a 2004 sequel that felt like a really long epilogue.

It starts off fresh and fun, with the plot hinging on the death of the king of Far Far Away, which looks like Hollywood with medieval trappings. The classic storybook animation is so fine you can see the characters’ dermatological flaws. Do we really need that level of realism? Anyway, the ogre Shrek (voice of Mike Myers) is the heir apparent to the late ruler, even though it’s Princess Fiona’s (Cameron Diaz) dad who’s kicked off. This plotline may be symptomatic of the series’ transformation from fresh and original to reactionary. It’s as if Prince Philip had inherited the throne over Elizabeth in Britain.

Yet Shrek doesn’t want power. Why, he doesn't even want to rule over the baby Fiona’s going to have, so he goes off to search for the other potential heir, a high school nerd (Justin Timberlake) who looks like another strike against a hereditary aristocracy. The American high school with drawbridges is fun here. Accompanying Shrek on his quest are the mildly tedious Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and the amusingly effete Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas). It’s something like The Wizard of Oz, with Shrek as Dorothy and Justin as the Cowardly Lion, and sure enough a wizard turns up.

Meanwhile, Fiona spends her pregnancy hanging with Snow White, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and someone who appears to be a transsexual (who’s funnier than the whiny heroines), while the villain—yes, there is one—Prince Charming schemes to usurp the throne. The Charming technique is to turn all of the classic storybook villains, Captain Hook and all, against Shrek. A bold move, using the same plot as the execrable Happily N’Ever After, which came and went in January.

Wow, that’s a lot of plot that comes to naught. Things start off well, with rapid-fire sight gags and humor that manages to be contemporary without straining to be hip (i.e., no Paris Hilton jokes). Soon enough, the humor flags. And there’s no payoff, plot wise, just some moralizing pap for the kids, the ultimate message being, boy, it’s sure easy to manipulate cartoon villains. Or, perhaps, frazzled parents with insistent children.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0413267/

Happily N’Ever After

? Another retelling of the Cinderella story, this time an animated one from the point of view of a household servant (Fredie Prinze Jr.) who wonders what Ella (Sarah Michelle Gellar) sees in that dunderheaded prince.

+ The Cinderella plot is actually just the main thread in a larger story about all of the villains from famous fairy tales getting together and rewriting the endings to suit themselves—hence the title. The wicked stepmother (Sigourney Weaver) is the ringleader who stages a one-woman coup at the Department of Fairy Tale Land Security. It’s not a bad idea.

- However, it’s an idea that is executed very poorly. Check out Hoodwinked to see a snarky twist on an old fable that works. The supporting characters of Shrek also parody familiar characters in a more satisfying way. Perhaps this is trying to do too much at once. The pining-servant subplot ends up being extremely conventional, so much so that the screenwriter and director veer away from it for long stretches as we follow the villain. That part is muddled and probably confusing for small kids, with sarcastic asides and quick cuts that incorporate Rumpelstiltskin, Sleeping Beauty, etc. In the short runtime, there’s not enough time to do much with these other fairy tales, although the idea of Rumpelstiltskin mellowing out into a doting babysitter is one of the few decent ones here. Of the other characters, the most prominent are a tiny pig and mouse played by Andy Dick and Wallace Shawn, whose unique vocal qualities fail to render either as lovable or memorable.

= *1/2 There’s a reason this got released in the doldrums of January instead of the more competitive Christmas season, despite the fine animation. This isn’t as annoying as the previous year’s dog Doogal, but it’s probably more boring. I can’t even see kids getting excited about this mixture of blandness and witless parody.

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Chicken Little (*3/4)

This is Disney’s pre-Thanksgiving turkey. The old fable gets reworked from a cautionary tale about gullibility to a weak, computer-animated (and possibly computer-scripted) tale about father-son bonding. Despite the best vocal efforts of Zach Braff, the title character is as bland as, say, boiled chicken. His companions include a large pig, Runt (Steve Zahn), who warbles disco tunes when nervous, and an ugly ducking (Joan Cusack) who has a crush on CL and whom you’ll probably want to crush underfoot the third or fourth time she tells him he needs “closure” with his dad (Garry Marshall). It’s the kind of film that affects hipness by having the its beastly junior high schoolers speak in soon-to-be-dated sitcom slang. By the fifteen-minute mark, it’s already trotted out the cliché of having CL (unconvincingly) save the day on the ball field. Switching gears, it then becomes the mildest sort of satire of War of the Worlds (the Spielberg version), though the film’s target audience won’t get that. The bright graphics and genial animals should be pleasing enough for the under-7 set, but older kids and adults can probably find something more fun to do.

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circulated via email 11/10/05 and posted 10/2/13

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (***)

I have to admit, I was a bit sleepy and sort of fell asleep during parts of this short (1:18) animated musical, so my rating is kind of tentative. Anyway, it’s a dark fairy tale in the vein of the Burton-produced Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), which with it shares one of its writers. In Burton's world, the land of the dead, shown in various states of decomposition, is literally more colorful than that of the living. Curious that the nervous groom voiced by Johnny Depp (with a British accent) wants to return to the dark Victorian place he came from, although, on the plus side, his fiancée there (Emily Watson) has no holes in her face, and no worm eating her eye socket. This contrasts with her decaying rival (Helena Bonham Carter). The contrasting visual imagery is stunning, the story less so. Longtime Burton collaborator Danny Elfman contributes one of his better scores, though I thought his songs in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Burton's other 2005 film, were better.

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circulated via email 9/29/05 and posted 11/18/13

The Brothers Grimm (**)

Director Terry Gilliam’s first film since 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is an ambitious work that never quite gels. Matt Damon and Heath Ledger are those famous 18^th-century German folklorists. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger (who also penned the US Ring movies and the current Skeleton Key) has concocted a fictional back-story for the duo (actually trained in the law) as roaming charlatans, pretend witch-busters, forced to confront the truly supernatural. Weaving in motifs from “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Rapunzel,” and assorted grotesqueries, Gilliam seems to be trying to create both a haunting fantasy and a mildly goofy comedy. A darker Princess Bride might be a very rough analogy, but that had a much better screenplay. Here, the romance is perfunctory, and what’s meant to be humorous is simply weird, like a lesser sketch from Gilliam’s old Monty Python troupe. Jonathan Pryce plays the villain (a henchman for Napoleon) with an odd, pseudo-French accent, for example. Damon wavers between British and American English, and some of the dialogue also detracts from the period feel.

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viewed 8/27/05; reviewed 8/29/05