Enchanted (and Lessons Learned)

Yesterday, as part of my birthday festivities, we took the kids to see Enchanted. Despite our hesitancy about taking Molly to a movie, it turned out really well, the kids enjoyed themselves, and Macy and I never even had to leave our seats. (Note: if you don't want to know how it ends, skip the fourth paragraph).

It's never a sure bet taking little kids to a live-action show, given the twin risks of boredom and inappropriate content, but Enchanted mostly passed both tests. Lucy ended up a bit bored in the middle (starting, incidentally, right around the time the lead admitted that she wasn't yet a real princess, I believe). Also, if you've heard any gripes about some barely subtle consumerist messages, you heard right. But overall it's a pretty good flick.

Giselle, an animated maiden who embodies everything the classic Disney Princess stands for (fawning romantic fantasies, scores of loving animal companions, unalloyed feminine perfection, and a set of pipes straight out of Broadway) ends up in live action New York City, with predictable, but endearingly quirky results. Fortunately, the movie skips a lot of the fish-out-of-water tropes (she just knows how to work the shower and the dishwasher, rather than spending time comically oohing over technology). There's still plenty of boring culture conflict, seen mostly in the hard bitten New Yorkers who are so disgusted at the naive fantasy transplants. But this premise sets up one of the movie's big strengths, which is Giselle's ability to live by fairyland rules while in the real world. The animals still come help her clean and sew, and people still know how to join in on her big musical set pieces. That was a great idea, and works really well.

The ending is weak, but the acting is really great, so it's worth seeing if you have any kids lying around that need to be dusted off for an outing. Just be forewarned that there are messages in this movie that your kids will perceive. Both Rex and Lucy learned lessons from this movie, one good and one bad. As you might have guessed for a self-aware and post-modernly droll movie, every effort is made to put Giselle on par with the males in her life, in terms of self-defense and actualization (and yes, I do think that's a good thing, although sometimes these movies seem to wear that a bit more like a marketing device than a nonchalant part of the plot). {SPOILER} To that end, the movie culminates with Giselle defeating the evil queen and saving her prince. {END SPOILER}. This did not go unnoticed. As we walked out of the theater, Rex turned and said "Wow, I didn't know a princess could kill a dragon!" Macy and I smiled to see both Rex's initial notion, and that he was reconsidering it.

We did not smile at Lucy's response to Giselle. For all her perfection, Giselle is missing one virtue: Modesty. Her wardrobe in the climactic scene was a pretty revealing little strapless number more at home in New York than in fairy tale land. Macy and I discussed that a little bit on the way home, noting that Disney was trying hard to look innocent, but modesty is apparently not important enough to parents anymore for Disney to make much fuss about it. Soon after we got home, some nearby families came over with their kids for my birthday party, and Lucy ended up playing dressups with her best friend Jane. Sure enough, Lucy ended up in her frilly mermaid dress, only instead of putting on the sleeves as usual, she left them hanging at her sides, with the dress neckline staying at her armpits. It was our Lucy's first strapless gown. We tried to ignore it for a minute, but it became so painful to think how quickly she had integrated that message and was now acting it out, that we had to force her to put the sleeves on and cover up. I sure hope that's the last battle we have on that issue, but my gut tells me it's not.