Skip to main content

REVIEW: Disenchanted


 Once Upon a Time, Disney's Enchanted reminded us that deep down inside, even the most cynical of us was pining for a fairy-tale. In those days, a musical rom-com featuring hand-drawn animation and overtly referencing films of the Disney animated catalog actually felt novel, even daring.

But today is a different climate. Disney fairy-tales are unambiguously a popular presence in modern pop culture. They are regularly referenced, discussed, and abused both by their parent company and the public at large. Any sequel to such a film wouldn't have the same opportunity to feel revelatory or groundbreaking. 


But this proves to be an inadequate defense for this movie's shortcomings. Turns out, you can sing about fairy-tales for two hours without earnestly exploring what makes them so special to begin with.

I say shortcomings deliberately because there's not a lot that's actively wrong with this movie. Almost everything about this movie could have worked if it had been properly finessed, but the film consistently stops short of saying something anything truly insightful, in daring to probe what might actually compel a fairy-tale princess to morph into a wicked stepmother. The conflicts and questions are all surface level. This lack of curiosity betrays the film's intended thesis about magic, true love, and wishes being perfectly at home for the adult, thinking mind. 

As one example, the choice to center the film's conflict on Giselle's relationship with her teenage stepdaughter, Morgan, should open some doors for some ripe emotional ground, but the film's excuse for why Morgan should suddenly act so antagonistic toward her stepmother is nothing more than "adolescence," plain and simple. The movie takes it as a given that there are no teenagers in fairy-tale land, which I guess de-canonizes The Little Mermaid.

    Amy Adams was undoubtedly the secret ingredient to that first movie's success. Adams reminded us that even a cartoon princess could possess emotional texture and complexity that adult viewers had forgotten about. Here, Adams just uses sweetness like a band-aid. I suppose there's something novel about a 40 something year-old woman expressing herself with all the spriteliness regularly afforded to much younger female characters. At the same time, Adams never gets to reach the depths of emotional truth that revealed themselves naturally in that first film. Even as Giselle descends into wicked stepmother-ness, the film only ever lets her play it as a parody, as though we all wouldn't be here for a genuinely evil Disney Princess. 

Meanwhile, the music behaves less like a family of individual numbers supporting a central theme or story, each with their own function and character, and more like a single channel frequency that the characters sometimes accidentally synch up with. Credit where it's due: Amy Adams is still an unappreciated musical goddess, but I had difficulty keeping track of which numbers were meant to be reprises of earlier songs and which just sounded like faded copies. There are something like a dozen musical moments in the film, and not one of them carries a memorable lyric (though I think at some point Giselle calls Maya Rudolph's character a bladder. I couldn't have imagined that ...) The closest we get to a truly iconic song is Nancy's ballad, "Love Power," which might enrapture the audience with its lush visuals for a moment. That is, if they can get past its unmistakable resemblance to another recent Disney powerhouse song performed by Idina Menzel.

I'll clarify, this sequel doesn't fall prey to the same diseases that afflict so many of their live-action fairy-tales these days (e.g. 2017's Beauty and the Beast). Despite the film's title, Disenchanted never feels cynical or overtly antagonistic toward the fairy tales it's referencing. The film is occasionally patronizing, but never insincere. For all its problems, Disenchanted does seem to believe in what it's doing, even if it doesn't understand it. And I can't honestly decide if that's better or worse. 

                    --The Professor

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

REVIEW: Jurassic World - Rebirth

     I had a mixed reaction to  Jurassic World: Rebirth,  but it did make for one of the most enjoyable theater experiences I've had in recent memory.      I have to imagine that a part of this is because my most common theater appointments are matinee screenings, but I had the opportunity to see this one at a fairly well-attended midnight screening. And there's nary a film more tailored for surround-sound roaring and screens wide enough to contain these de-extinct creatures. ("Objects on the screen feel closer than they appear.") It was natural for me to cap the experience by applauding as the credits stared to roll, even if, as usual, I was the only one in the auditorium to do so.     Yes, I am that kind of moviegoer; yes, I enjoyed the experience that much, and I imagine I will revisit it across time.      That's not to imagine the movie is beyond reproach, but for I suppose it bears mentioning that, generally , th...

REVIEW: Superman

      I feel like it's essential that I establish early on in this review that this marks my first time seeing a Superman movie in theaters.      The Zack Snyder saga was actually in swing while I was in high school and college--back when I was in what most would consider in the target audience for these films--but that kind of passed by me without my attention.      And I'll be clear that I take no specific pride in this. I wasn't really avoiding the films by any means. My buddies all just went to see them without me while I was at a church youth-camp, and I just didn't bother catching up until much, much later.  I'm disclosing all this to lay down that I don't really have any nostalgic partiality to the Superman story. Most of my context for the mythology comes from its echoes on larger pop culture.     I know, for example, that Clark Kent was raised in a smalltown farm community with his adopted parents, and it was them who...

REVIEW: ELIO

    Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth.      There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true.      The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space?      But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Resurrecting Treasure Planet

   Wherever any given cinephile falls on the totem pole, they are certainly familiar with the idea of the film canon, this idea of an elect selection of films that signal the height of the artform's cultural value, touchstones for all who consider themselves good and true lovers of cinema. Films that belong to "the canon" are secure in continued cultural relevance even decades after their premiere.    Any person's chosen reference for the canon will certainly vary between which list they believe carries the most authority (AFI Top 100, IMDb Top 250, The Academy Awards), or just as likely will synthesize a number of sources, but however any one person defines it, the canon is real, and it demands to be recognized.            It will surprise some, baffle others, and offend others still, to think that  Walt Disney Animation has its own film canon of sorts. Belonging to this selective society come with some very specific be...

REVIEW: SCREAM VI

       Ever since Sidney Prescott asked audiences nearly 30 years ago "how do you gut someone?" with such disgust, the "Scream" franchise has forced a stab-hungry audience to question how they could ever entertain a ritual so violating as the gruesome act taking someone else's life.  Last year, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett delivered arguably the franchise's strongest offering yet. Strong because the film played its game very well. These guys also know that subversion in film is fun, certainly, but also that films which sell themselves on their subversion tend to be very hollow. You need a strong thematic lifeblood and a cast of characters to root for. If your audience is more excited about the cut-up bodies than the victors, you have a problem. This is where the newer films, including this most outing, have found their strength. Scream VI sees the survivors of the last installment making a fresh break in New York City. Sam, Tara, Mindy, and Chad a...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

    This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence.      But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else.  Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism.     On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 2

    As we discussed in the last section , Disney Princesses are often held accountable for things that did not actually happen in their films--things they did not do. I feel like a part of this is the means by which said scrutiny typically takes place.       There is, after all, a sort of stigma around watching "cartoons" as an adult, especially "princess cartoons," let alone watching them intently. And so I feel like a lot of the conclusions people come to about Disney Princesses comes either entirely from second-hand sources, like the memes, or from having it on in the background while babysitting as they scroll through their phone.      I'll use an anecdote from my own history as an example: my very first week of film school, the professor drifted to the topic of female representation in the media. This professor dropped a sort of humble-brag that he had actually never seen Disney's Pocahontas , but that he didn't consider this a terrible ...

The Many Fathers of Harry Potter

     Despite being a Harry Potter fan for most of my life, I didn’t make it to "Harry Potter Land" at Universal until November of 2019.      Some relatives invited me on a SoCal theme park tour, a trip which also saw my last visit to Disneyland before the shutdown. And when you and a bunch of other twenty-somethings are walking through a recreation of Hogwarts for the first time, you inevitably start playing this game where you call out every artifact on display and try to trace it back to whatever movie or even specific moment the mise en scene is trying to invoke:           There’s the greenhouse from "Chamber of Secrets." Now they’re playing the “Secrets of the Castle” track from "Prisoner of Azkaban." Here we are loading in the Room of Requirement from "Order of the Phoenix." From start to finish, the attraction, like the franchise from which it spawned, is just one giant nostalgia parade.     See, t he Wiza...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

          Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it.       Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate.    So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

Wicked vs Maleficent

  “Witch” has historically been used as a pejorative for a non-conformist woman, someone who does not obey the expectations of her culture. It’s little wonder, then, that a society with more progressive mores would commandeer the witch archetype into a warrior for social justice, or that the most famous witch of them all would spearhead this retyping.      Yes, I am thinking of a certain Broadway musical and a fiery, green-skinned, justice-bent rebel-rouser.  Wicked is a stage musical that follows the infamous Wicked Witch of the West as featured in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz . By shedding light on what happened before Dorothy dropped into Oz, Wicked recasts the witch as not a villain, but a misunderstood heroine. The show has been defying gravity on Broadway for coming on twenty years now, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.   When Disney’s Maleficen t came along a little over ten years later, the shorthand description of the film was basic...