By Catherine Sodano
Simple brilliance is exhibited from director Kevin Lima in Walt Disney's new live-action/animation movie "Enchanted." A fantasy-meets-comedy, it is a film children and adults alike can enjoy. "Enchanted" shifts a cartoon world to real-life actors. Throughout the movie, the characters sporadically burst into song. At first, viewers may feel a bit confused by these characters gleefully parading around in song, but as the film progresses it grows to a feeling of simple delight.
Princess Giselle (Amy Adams) has a great voice, which displays the sense of innocence Disney princesses characteristically possess. As far as musical comedies go, the choreography of "Enchanted" is comparable to that of those performed on Broadway. Disney played a very different card in terms of demographics. By casting Patrick Dempsey and Susan Sarandon, it invites an adult's interest, regardless of its half-animation and half-musical composition. A major appealing factor of this movie is that it diverts attention away from the light-and-feathery, stereotypical plotlines that Disney movies habitually encompass.
This film indeed benefits from an all-star cast: Sarandon, Dempsey and Adams, who plays an amiable princess just exiled from her musical land, Analasia, by an evil queen and re-routed to New York City. She soon is astonished by the technology and the ways of the modern world. Princess Giselle misses her homeland and is confused by the most common things including dating and television.
Much to her surprise, she becomes consumed and overwhelmed with the hustle and bustle of New York. She finds herself dwelling in frenzied surroundings in need of desperate help from the magical, musical and animated land she calls home. Patrick Dempsey (or "McDreamy" for "Grey's Anatomy" fans) collides with Adams only to ignite romantic sparks. Dempsey is able to display a softer, more-sensitive side. Personifying Good-Samaritan behavior, amid the ignorant and arrogant people of New York, Dempsey also plays father to a sweet young girl.
However, one fabrication in this movie was the rude behavior of New Yorkers. Given that residents of the Big Apple stereotypically may not be the most gracious and hospitable of citizens, they certainly fall into an archetype of arrogance in the movie that is unjustly portrayed. Perhaps Disney had to exaggerate in order to portray a concrete picture of the brutal, new environment into which Princess Giselle is ejected.
As the drama unfolds, it is revealed that Princess Giselle was previously engaged to a prince back home while at the same time falling in love with a man outside her fairytale world (what is a princess to do?) Can New York City corrupt her fairy tale ways and break off an engagement? Or will she receive her happily-ever-after, fairy-tale ending the way she had anticipated?
One thing is for sure, Disney did it again, fulfilling every aspect of enchantment on the big screen.
"Grey's Anatomy" favorite Patrick Dempsey plays the prince to Amy Adams' princess in "Enchanted." (AllMoviePhoto.com)