As an animated comic evolutionary narrative Enchanted responds to the series of
animated fairy tale features that have been part of Disney fare since 1937’s Snow White. In Enchanted, as in Snow White,
Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella, the female protagonist, Giselle
(Amy Adams), follows a comic evolutionary narrative that maintains an
interdependent relationship with nonhuman nature.
In the animated space of the film’s opening, forest
animals from blue birds to rabbits and an owl follow the pattern of the earlier
Disney films and help prepare her for marriage by replicating the figure of a
prince (James Marsden) whom Giselle encounters in the forest and then, after
she and the prince are engaged, coifing her hair and dress on the way to the
wedding.
In the live-action world Giselle enters when pushed
into a well, she establishes a similar interdependent relationship with
nonhuman nature, but she is now in an urban setting and summons pigeons, rats,
and cockroaches instead of woodland creatures when she hums her working song.
The animals help her clean her new friend’s (Patrick Dempsy) apartment in a
scene that comically points out the ridiculous nature of this conceit.
When mice and bunnies become rats and cockroaches,
they no longer meet the “cute” standard of Disney films, but they serve a
similar ludicrous role—serving a Princess-in-Waiting by cleaning her house and
sewing her clothing.
Yet in Enchanted,
nature and culture, nonhuman and human nature, meet head on and, in fantasy,
demonstrate the effectiveness of comic evolutionary narratives based in
interdependent relationships. Enchanted
demonstrates how a mix of animation and live action may also point to the
necessary alliance between the worlds of nature and culture.
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