Disney Swirled

The opening sequence of Disney's "Enchanted" is a typical piece of Mouse House fluff. The fair maiden Gisele (voiced by Amy Adams) sings a song about finding "true love's kiss", calling upon her animal friends to help construct a mannequin of her dream prince. It's classic, kid's-movie hokum, animated in the throw-back, hand-drawn style of "Snow White", "The Little Mermaid" or, more recently, straight-to-DVD-animated-sequels. But something feels different about the scene. The onscreen characters, as they go through their cutesy jumping about, seem oddly self-aware - as though they realize "you just can't make 'em like this anymore." And the old school animation has a soothing quality - like a balm for the rampant CGI of our time. Of course, Gisele's animated world isn't all dwarves and singing chipmunks. There's the obligatory wicked Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon, having a blast) bent on keeping Gisele from marrying Prince Edward (James Marsden, amazingly playing this part for the first time) and stealing her crown. In order to keep the two love birds apart, Narissa casts Gisele into a strange, mysterious world full of all manner of wondrous creatures: New York City.

Not an animated New York City, mind you. The real thing. And Gisele isn't animated anymore either. She's now Amy Adams in the flesh.

The conceit of "Enchanted" is that the film switches to live action when the characters hit Manhattan, and the script by Bill Kelly ("Premonition", but we'll ignore that) has a lot of fun tweaking fairytale tropes in a realistic environment. Watch as sidewalk musicians break into a full-on production number or as rats and pigeons help clean an apartment.

As Gisele, Ms. Adams pulls off the near-impossible. Given the unenviable task of evoking complete sincerity with zero irony, the actress is a delight from start to finish. Like good champagne, she's perfectly bubbly without ever being sickly sweet. "Enchanted" lives or dies by her performance, and she knocks it out of the park. This is a star-making turn; it's safe to say there's a new female lead in town.

As for the rest of the cast, they all prove to be up to the challenge. Patrick Dempsey is perfectly cast as a jaded - but non-threatening - New York divorce lawyer. Though how we're supposed to believe that he takes a strange woman in a bridal gown back to the apartment he shares with his 6-year-old daughter is beyond me. But maybe I'm exactly the type of hard-hearted New Yorker the film is poking fun at. Ok, you got me.

The world, "Enchanted" would have us believe, has gotten so bitter, so ironic, that it has lost the meaning of true love. Comparisons to "The Princess Bride" are inevitable but not quite fair. "Enchanted" never hits the glorious comedic heights of that Rob Reiner classic, but it also never reaches for them. For all the fun it has with Gisele's naiveté, the film is an old softy at heart. It's less a satire than a tribute to the Disney films of old. Though the message that comes out between the lines - Gisele needs to learn the anger of the modern world in order to open her eyes - may not be exactly what they had in mind. But despite its ham-handed ending (the less said about that the better), "Enchanted" is a simple, relentlessly charming fairytale with some real, old-fashioned movie magic. And that's enchanting.