100 Disney Things [017]: Review of Disenchanted (2022)

[chacusha]

100 Disney Things [017]

I could have put this with my other movie reviews, but I felt I had enough to say about this movie that I could make it a post for this series. I guess there were other Disney films in my other review post that I could have split out this way too, but this one interested me the most whereas the other films were just kind of meh.

This film is the direct-to-streaming sequel to the 2007 film Enchanted. I have mixed feelings on this one. The film as a whole is thoroughly mediocre, including its musical numbers, which is a pretty serious issue for a movie like this.

It has some interesting ideas, though. The notion that Giselle, if the world is operating by fairy tale logic, is perfectly poised to become an Evil Stepmother is quite interesting, as is Morgan entering a teenage phase where she's more independent, a bit jaded, and certainly now too old for the "princess mania" phase (Disney's cash cow that it's also vaguely embarrassed by and constantly feels like it has to subvert) she was going through during Enchanted and which was the basis of the meet cute between Giselle and Robert. It is understandable that someone with Giselle's personality specifically would have the a lot of difficulty dealing with Morgan's transition to adolescence, which is an interesting idea! Especially because you can have conflict between Giselle and Morgan and the family unit as a whole without villainizing either Giselle or Morgan (or... well, Giselle can certainly go into Evil Stepmother mode but in a way that you know doesn't represent the real her and the kind of mother she'll end up being). Not to mention, all this builds on themes from the first movie of the tension between fairy tale idealism and cynical big city realism.

Unfortunately, though, the movie doesn't quite deliver on these ideas. It's a bit frustrating because the first ~20 minutes or so of the movie does a great job of establishing all these dynamics and setting the groundwork for all these themes, and then the next hour and a half is a bit of a meandering mess that doesn't quite lean as hard into the "trouble in paradise" and broken family themes as it should. There's just a bit too many new characters here; old characters get a little too little to do (especially bad with Robert; I get that his character arc drove the first movie and is now complete so there's not much more to do with him at this point, but he's given embarrassingly little to do here and is embarrassingly out of touch with what's happening in his own family, even though his character is in a prime position to at least try to mediate the breaking-down relationship between Morgan and Giselle); this movie also frankly has too many villains and too many magical mechanics to keep track of.

Like a lot of Disney sequels and remakes, this basically seems like content made and pushed out in order to pad a streaming website's offerings, a business strategy I'm quite dubious about. And like a lot of movies/shows recorded during COVID, I feel like there's just something lackluster about the whole film. Amy Adams is another actor I think is very underrated and always quite good in whatever she does, and she seems to be having fun (and does a good job) flipping between sweet ingenue and evil villain, but she really can't save this movie, especially when so much else in it seems phoned in. See: Idina Menzel's song that is titled "Love Power" -- no, the song itself isn't any better than its title. We certainly don't have a "Defying Gravity" or "Let It Go" on our hands here. 😭

That said, the one thing I felt unambiguously worked in this film was the costumes, especially for Giselle and Malvina (the other characters... not so much). This is probably best illustrated with this music number, which I also think was the only music number worth watching / which wasn't incredibly boring. It's not a particularly great number, but the song got stuck in my head for a couple of days after:

Watch on YouTube

The echoes of the Evil Queen and Queen of Hearts here while being clearly new designs is just great. By contrast, I feel like Nancy and Morgan's styling in the movie is pretty atrocious and wish they'd gone for something different.


Like... I don't think this looks good or works for the actors.

I don't really have time to propose detailed rewrites to this movie like I did with Wish, but I think there are a lot of ways it could be fixed up to deliver on / lean into its premise better -- cutting down the cast to focus on the central characters, giving Morgan actual friends who influence who she is and who she's closer to now than Giselle, giving Morgan more teen angst and a look that works for her that isn't the typical Disney princess look, etc.

There are some unexpected and good ideas here, though, like the pulling in of fairy tale mechanics and wishes, the sprinkling in of animated sequences, and the focus on a stepmother/daughter relationship as the emotional core to the film here.

Overall, it feels like this movie was rushed out the door / like the story went through a lot of rewrites with each draft playing with a different set of ideas, before someone had to make the call that it was "good enough" and kick production into gear. So... mixed feelings on the potential of this film and the delivery thereof!

---

You can suggest topics for future posts for this meme over here.