Enjoyable fairy tale frolic, if you're not too cynical or damning...

Rating: 6/10 (6 February 2011)

New York City divorce lawyer and single dad Patrick Dempsey chances to meet distressed storybook princess Amy Adams, a once-animated maiden who has become mortal after being pushed into the real world by a wicked queen. Instead of a fish-out-of-water fairy tale from Walt Disney Pictures, we get a cartoon character turned three-dimensional...add songs, homages to Disney classics, plus a computer-generated squirrel (for slapstick value) and you've got the makings of a pleasant, if top-heavy, romantic comedy for eleven-year-old girls. Some of the humor is a bit too outrageous (I could have done without the bathtub-scrubbing cockroaches), but Dempsey and Adams really put their hearts into this sugar-coated scenario and give us an attractive, appealing couple worth swooning over. The animated prologue is fun, and Susan Sarandon is a perfect villainess, although Bill Kelly's screenplay is a little short on genuine supporting characters: the entire picture seems to take place in a vacuum, with the Big Apple residents (minus one ticked-off bus driver) under some sort of catatonic spell. **1/2 from ****