Have you been 'Enchanted'?

It's pretty hard to put my finger on exactly why I didn't hate this movie. It's cheesier than a pound of stilton, sicklier than a vat of Haagan Daaz and even more ridiculous than Amy Winehouse's recent blonde crop. But there's something about Enchanted that shakes all those niggling, knowing thoughts out of your head as soon as you think them, leaving only a feeling of... well... enchantment?

Ok, so the first 12 minutes are a saccharine sweet, 2D Disney cartoon that'll make you glance sideways at the man you've dragged along, only for your fears to be realised - (he'll have his head in his hands and his eyes shut). But unlike other storybook based animations, this movie doesn't take itself seriously at all. By the time our cartoon heroes are thrust from the fictional realm of Andalasia and out onto the streets of Manhattan, it's plain to see that for all of its sugar-coated stupidity, Enchanted is an intelligent spoof of all those childhood tales that shaped your dreams and captured your imagination, whether you realised it back then or not.

The female lead in Enchanted, Amy Adams, looks eerily like the mum of Borat's baby, Isla Fischer. But in true fairytale fashion, this movie's set to springboard this Mormon girl from Colorado straight to the end of the Hollywood rainbow, hopefully bypassing bad comedies and grisly deaths in cheap horror films en route to her next big hit. She plays Giselle - a fairytale princess who skips about with her cutesy animal pals, dreaming of "True Love's Kiss". When her handsome Prince Edward (James Marsden) comes along, they fall instantly, inevitably in love; only on their wedding day (the day after they meet, obviously) the even Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) pushes her down a well and sends her to a place "where there are no happily-ever-afters".

After entering Earth via a manhole in Times Square and stumbling around rainy Manhattan in a real word she doesn't understand, the ditzy princess, clad in a meringue style wedding dress, is rescued by the hotter-than-hot Robert (Patrick Dempsey) who takes her home at the demands of his whinging six year old daughter. Cue an hour and a half of jolly singing (the Mary Poppins style "Happy Working Song" is a work of genius, seeing Giselle clean a Manhattan apartment with the help of pigeons, cockroaches and rats), a jealous girlfriend, over-the-top dance routines in Central Park and yup,... falling in love.

Of course, as with any fairytale, there has to be a happy ending. And we won't ruin it, on the off chance that you might not guess. But although it's a pleasurable enough journey, watching Giselle find her true "Prince Charming", there's an underlying irony in that she finds him in the real world only after her loveable innocence and wide-eyed wonder has more-or-less evaporated. By the time Giselle finally receives that long-awaited "True Love's Kiss" she's not the person she once was, having had her original dreams crushed by the bitter and unforgiving machine that is modern day, corporate America.

Still, Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz (who've worked together on Disney classics Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame) bring five original tunes to the score, that'll have you humming all the way to the car park. A chatty chipmunk who loses his voice once he leaves Andalasia provides some cracking comedy, and the CGI effects throughout are yet another reminder of how fairytales can come to life these days, in ways you never would have imagined when you first sat down in front of Dumbo.

When you smile at the talking animals, laugh at a grown man in a medieval costume exiting a manhole, or wish you too could participate in an impromptu musical dance of massive proportion in the world's most famous park, Enchanted undoubtedly achieves what it first set out do. It takes even the most hardened of us society-beaten adults back to a time when anything seemed possible. Even if it only lasts until you can't get out of the car park.

If you haven't seen Enchanted yet, catch it while you can!
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