'Enchanted' is unique because it's the first Mouse-made movie to poke fun at the company's royal mythos.
Roger Moore | Sentinel Movie Critic
November 18, 2007
Enchanted is a movie musical totally unlike any Disney has done before.
It has a handsome prince and a lovely would-be princess, rendered in gorgeous "classic" Disney animation.
It has songs by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz, big romantic orchestral numbers of longing, romance and hope.
And it makes fun of every single thing that makes a Disney musical so Disney.
"This is Disney having the confidence to make fun of itself," says James Marsden, Prince Edward to Amy Adams' Giselle in Enchanted, which opens Wednesday.
"I've heard people describe Enchanted as a movie that teases Disney's whole princess thing," says Adams. "I disagree. I see this as one person's story. This is just Giselle's journey, to me. She's a Disney princess who makes a journey from Ariel (pining away, waiting for a man to restore her "voice") to Belle (more emancipated) and on to well, Mulan. Picking up a sword!"
Enchanted takes a fairy-tale princess, prince and wicked stepmother (Susan Sarandon) out of a Disney animated magical kingdom and into modern-day New York. It required not just the good singers and voice actors of a typical Disney 'toon -- it also called for a couple of hoofers. And in Adams, who played a wide-eyed innocent in Junebug, and Marsden, an ex-X-man who showed his song-and-dance chops this summer in Hairspray, they got them.
"I started as a hoofer!" Adams exclaims. "I did dinner theater! I can dance! Well, not tap. Horrible tap-dancer. But I did lots of shows -- A Chorus Line, Anything Goes. . ."
Marsden sang a few times on the last season or so of TV's Ally McBeal. But The X-Men movies (he played Cyclops) made people forget that. Adam Shankman, director of Hairspray, was the first to be reminded.
"He was not on my radar at all," Shankman says. "But my casting director insisted I watch his tape. You can see he's just gorgeous. But then, that voice! It's a hard role to sing."
It took more than singing and dancing to make their Enchanted roles work. Both Adams and Marsden say that the way to make a fantasy spoof come off is to not let on that you're in on the joke.
"If you want to play innocence, you have to not wink at the audience," Adams says. "You have to be as serious as the character herself would be, if she were real.
"That's not to say my character couldn't be played with a healthy ego, OK, VANITY," laughs Marsden. "He's written that way. Checking the hair, showing the teeth. But all of his narcissism comes from an innocent place, a place of sincerity."
Adams, who admits going through "my Cinderella phase long before there was a Disney Store" (she's 33), "loved the idea of taking this two-dimensional character, literally, and turning her into a three-dimensional young woman, somebody who realizes who she really is, what her capabilities truly are."
Marsden, 34 and a father of two, relished "getting to be a kid again. Having kids, I know all those Disney classics by heart. I mean, what kid wouldn't want someone to spend months and months and months animating 'me'?
"I feel sorry for the poor animators, but they do an amazing job of capturing a likeness but still making him a classic Disney prince. Which I'm not."
What did the animators get right?
"When you see Giselle pick up her big dress and run?" Adams says. "She's slightly pigeon-toed. That's directly from me! When I run, I am so pigeon-toed."
Adams has made something of a niche for herself, playing na�ve, trusting but always hopeful on the big screen. Her turn in Junebug, as a pregnant, chatty open-faced force of nature, earned her an Oscar nomination.
"I can't help it. My eyes are that wide! And I come off easily awed because I'm just immature."
And Marsden, thanks to a scene-stealing turn as Corny Collins in Hairspray, is finding fun "in playing it big, playing it broad. But I was at a real crossroads with this Edward character, on top of a bus in a Disney prince outfit in the middle of Times Square. Felt pretty silly.
"And I thought, 'I can go down the nightmare road or I can roll with it, think 'When am I EVER going to get the chance to do this again?' So I went with it. I took out my sword, and I stabbed that bus! Like I meant business , too." _________________ When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.
--Walt Disney
Joined: Nov 09, 2005 Posts: 494 Location: In the middle of the magic!
Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 5:01 pm Post subject:
FINALLY DISNEY MUSICALS ARE BACK!!!!!! _________________ Attention travelers, please remain seated. Your vechile will be rotating backwards. -Spaceship Earth
Joined: Nov 09, 2005 Posts: 494 Location: In the middle of the magic!
Posted: Thu Dec 06, 2007 4:12 pm Post subject:
WDWFan wrote:
Does a single movie qualify as a comeback?
I meant that know Disney is back in the game of musicals, they might continue to increase. Like Little Mermaid, once that was made some of the best Disney musicals came out of the ground _________________ Attention travelers, please remain seated. Your vechile will be rotating backwards. -Spaceship Earth
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