Saturday, May 02, 2015

(Spoilers) Enchanted Review

***SPOILER WARNING: Spoilers may be found in the post below about VARIOUS ITEMS. And I'm going to add in a bit of filler text here to limit how much of the main article gets shown in a preview. That should take care of most of it. Hopefully. And away we go. SPOILER WARNING. ***

Another Amy Adams movie.

Overview
A princess (Amy Adams) and other fairytale characters who end up in New York City in the modern, real world. Disney movie. Sort of rom-com?

Good or Bad?
One of the television shows on my "must watch" list is Once Upon a Time, which has a similar type of story but very different. Very different. Enchanted was a very fun movie about an actual Disney princess, her prince, and an evil queen who all ended up in New York City. Unlike the television show, all of these characters were fresh from fairytale land with little knowledge of the "real world." They retained their penchant for singing, dancing, magic, and getting married to princes or princesses. Once Upon a Time tried to make everything more serious, dramatic, and believable with characters who were already versed on reality. This was classic Disney cartoon meets real life. How could that be anything but weird or awkward?

I saw a lot of Disney movies as a kid and loved them. Probably all the big, important ones. That was probably one to two decades ago. If forced to, I could probably sing some of the songs. Not sure if I can sit through them on my own anymore. How'd I do with this? There was a cartoon portion in the beginning of the movie showing all the Disney characters in their native environment. Then Amy Adams' cartoon fell through a portal and into a dark sewer before emerging in, I think, Times Square. That sudden transition from cartoon to real Amy Adams won me over pretty quickly. Then she and "real life" lawyer, Patrick Dempsey, got into shenanigans.

It was a very interesting and entertaining movie. The amount of detail they used in the costumes, makeup, and the acting looked excellent. I thought they did a great job of answering the question of what real Disney characters would be like in reality. They even managed to work in singing and dancing. Not to say there weren't parts that were awkward for a fully grown adult watching a movie probably meant for kids.

Things were good, if not great, on the acting front. Amy Adams was very charming and portrayed a Disney princess accurately, as I knew them, from mannerisms to personality to appearance. Patrick Dempsey made a good co-star and worked well with Amy Adams', not from this world, character. The interactions between "real-life", cynical lawyer and fairytale princess were half the fun of the movie.

Overall, I found Enchanted to be very good and the nostalgia factor made it even better. The only thing that bugged me was having to sit through the cartoon part. Does that even count? And the aspect ratio for the cartoon portion in the version I saw required black, vertical bars (i.e. not widescreen). Great effect for contrasting, if that was the reason, but non-widescreen felt so old tech.

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