Mockery, not parody, of classic Disney tales

Rating: Null/10 (4 October 2009)

If you've ever seen Disney films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella, you may appreciate the many references to these classic tales in Enchanted. However, if you enjoyed the older films for what they were: timeless fairy tales with archetypal characters, battles of good versus evil, and a moral, you will be greatly disappointed with this film.
Enchanted is by no means a traditional fairy tale. It starts off with an animated story of a maiden, Giselle, who is the archetypal Disney princess. She is rescued by Prince Edward from a ravenous troll and the two fall instantly in love. Before the couple is married, the wicked Queen Narissa transports Giselle to the "real world", New York city, where she gradually becomes modernized. The way in which she loses her storybook likeness is subtle, but it involves meeting unfriendly types, seeing a couple on the verge of a divorce, and going out on a "date" at a pizza place with a divorced lawyer who has taken her under his wing. When Prince Edward finally locates her, instead of being thrilled to go back to her animated, storybook world, she has one request. She asks to be taken to a real-world ball, where her lawyer friend and his fiancée happen to be going as well. At the ball, the evil queen intervenes, giving Giselle a poisoned apple. After taking a bite, she falls into a deep sleep, only to be awakened by true love's first kiss. In what seems like an unbelievably out-of-character twist, Giselle's true love turns out to be the lawyer and not Prince Charming. How she could have been so thoroughly transformed after only a few days in New York city so as to disdain her former life and fiancé is a mystery.
Besides having to swallow this strange plot twist, we also witness the lawyer's fiancée, Nancy, falling for the prince. This is after Giselle has heard countless warnings from denizens of the real world against love at first sight. Apparently, Nancy has never heard these warnings, because she falls madly in love after hearing Prince Edward introduce Giselle as "my heart's true desire". "So straightforward. Not a hint of irony" is her response, and that's all the reason we're given to believe she will leave her life and career and go back to fairyland with Prince Edward. Finally, when all hope of a reasonable ending is lost, we must witness a chipmunk single-handedly vanquishing the evil queen who has transformed herself into a dragon.
Besides these atrocities, there is also much mockery of the traditional fairy tale. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines postmodernism as "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions." Enchanted fits this description by making a fairy tale character gradually wake up to the conventions of her fantasy world. If you're looking for a dose of reality, you may enjoy this film. But the film's title and animated introduction are misleading. The story is not Enchanted, but Disenchanted. It forces us to see the traditional world of make-believe from the modern, grown-up perspective. It is not a story for children, or those who truly enjoyed the earlier Disney classics.