You know, I really liked ENCHANTED. I thought Amy Adams was delightfully charming as a naive waif, without coming off cloying or annoying – which is a hard feat indeed. Everyone else in the cast – from Susan Sarandon vamping it up as the villain, James Marsden as the goofy Prince, and Patrick Dempsey Dempsey-ing it up – were all game as well. Even the love story that blossomed between Dempsey and Adams was sweet and believable (even though the very end where Dempsey's fiance just immediately falls in love and marries Marsden's Prince Edward the moment she meets him was…weird and kind of inconsistent to the theme), but otherwise it was a nice, fun little fantasy movie.
However, Disney being Disney, they can't leave well-enough alone and have decided to make a sequel called DISENCHANTED (how clever. Not sure if I'm being sarcastic or not…) It's going to be directed by ROCK OF AGES helmer Adam Shankman, with the hope of bringing back the original cast.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the plot of DISENCHANTED is:
10 years after the first movie, with Giselle finding herself questioning her happily ever after, and accidentally triggering events that make everyone's lives turn upside down in both the real world and in the animated kingdom of Andalasia.
Hmm. I might've sounded skeptical at the beginning of the article, and I still kind of am, but the idea of "questioning happily ever after" is a good one, and a theme I haven't seen explored much in Disney films (though it does sound eerily similar to the plot of SHREK 4…don't ask me how I know that). I also haven't seen any of the Disney direct-to-DVD films that Michael Eisner shat out during his tenure in the early '00s, so I don't know if any of those films tackled the inevitable ennui of post-honeymoon bliss or not. Either way, it's something I think could be worth exploring, especially since Amy Adams' character is supposed to be a "prototypical" Disney Princess, and seeing how she handles the realities of marriage, stress, bills, etc. has the potential to be pretty fun.
No release date has been officially set, but Disney is hoping to start rolling on principle photography next summer.
So what do you guys think? And how would you rate the Disney princesses?