Enchanted

I meant to get two reviews in today of two different kind of movies, with the second one being “Lars and the Real Girl” since both came in at 107 minutes, which I thought was, if anything, ironic, seeing they probably were nothing alike. But alas, I ran out of time. I didn’t get to watch the movie and now I’m running behind as it is. So for today’s review:

Title: Enchanted
Studio: Disney
Director: Kevin Lima
Writer: Bill Kelly
Starring: Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Susan Sarandon
Time: 107 minutes

I saw a preview for this a few weeks on a DVD of another movie I was watching, and thought, “Hmmm. That might be cute.” The story is of a Cinderella-Snow White character (Adams) who is thrown out of her cartoon world into the real world by the evil stepmother-queen (Sarandon), because her stepson-prince (Marsden) has fallen in love with the girl. In the real world, the girl encounters a divorce-attorney (Patrick Dempsey), who is enchanted by her, along with the rest of New York, it would seem, as she charms rats, pigeons and other various and sundry creatures to clean his apartment and musicians in Central Park to come along and play for her while she sings a love song.

So was it cute? Yes, it was cute and funny, in a harmless kind of Disney way. My only complaint was that the first 10 to 15 minutes, which were set in the cartoon world, seemed to go on too long, but as my wife mentioned it was necessary to set up the story.

On one of the extras on the special features on the disc was shown how different scenes paid tribute to classic Disney animated features. Evidently, if you have Blu-Ray, you could see those classic scenes as the movie played, but since we don’t, we didn’t, but for me, it was enough to realize the tributes, the tip of the hats, that the animators had put into the movie.

All in all, a good film, one good for the family, of course, but also for any lover of classic Disney animated films.

Final analysis: 8/10, two points off for the extra-long cartoon sequence in the movie, which dragged a bit, but luckily didn’t drag the movie down as Adams’ singing sequences, especially, buoy the rest of the movie.