Enchanted

[Daniel]

Another song sampling:



Nice so far. Sounds very much in keeping with the original with a little Mary Poppins influence. Can't wait to hear it in its entirety.

[Ben]

I’m keeping Disenchanted-free for the next week on clips like this. I want to come to it clean next weekend. I haven’t seen or heard anything other than the two trailers, and really want it to be good, though I’m still apprehensive…!

[Daniel]

Another short clip:



The hand gesture continues what I've been saying from the start, this looks very WandaVision-esque. Wishing for a fantasy life as an escape from ones hardships, an entire town changed and controlled by a magic spell, triggered by a red head in a red outfit... I could go on. I'm lovin' it!

[Farerb]

Wanda Vision is a good description, but I was thinking more about Once Upon a Time.

[Ben]

The first one still holds up as a modern classic, which our crowd enjoyed at our screening last night. So many nice little touches, and a nice "small" production when it needs to be. I’m hoping this new one doesn’t go too big and too much, and hoping for the songs to be as good, not only melodically but in the lyrics. Watching the first one again last night proves this has a lot to live up to, though we’re all excited for next Saturday night!

[Daniel]

I'm planning on watching the original soon too. There's a couple of showings on the telly this week, Disney Channel, Freeform and the broadcast premiere on ABC this Thursday. Even with Disney+ I'll probably catch it there!

[Farerb]

‘Disenchanted’ Producer Barry Josephson On Why ‘Enchanted’ Sequel Went Straight To Disney+ – Crew Call Podcast
https://deadline.com/2022/11/disenchant ... 235174622/

[Ben]

That’s just kinda dumb!

Oh well…maybe hopefully Re-Enchanted will get a big screen showing…

[Bill1978]

Listened to the soundtrack on the way to work this morning. First impression, the songs aren't as catchy as the first film but I do look forward to see how the visuals contribute to appreciating the songs. The songs are definitely more musical theatre than what we got from Encanto and especially Frozen II.If it were eligible for the Oscars, not sure it would get any noms. Not because the songs are bad but none jump out as a pick-me song. Main disappointment is the cut songs included on the soundtrack, they sound incredible and would have loved to see the visuals to go with it.

[Ben]

Oh! Had no idea they would even bother with a soundtrack, let alone a CD release…which already seems to be out of stock at the Amazons…

[Bill1978]

The physical release isn't until December. Maybe that's why its already sold out??

The big disappointment of the soundtrack is that Menken's score is reduced to a one-track Score Suite.

[Ben]

Ah, okay, cool. Yeah, that’s usually an Amazon placeholder. I’d expect it to available again before or on the release date. Thank goodness Menken and Schwartz' clout means their deals probably contracted a physical release. I would imagine the "suite" is basically the end credits arrangement, or an extended version of that. Kind of a shame, yes, but fun that we do get deleted song demos, or a soundtrack release at all.

[Ben]

Well… Yeah…

Colour me disenchanted alright.

Totally lacking the charm and wit of the original, Disenchanted has an idea of what it wants to be, but no idea of how to be it.

The animated opening looks much better than the animation in the trailer — mostly because that animation comes from a later scene which looks totally different and less refined, as if it was dropped in late and had to be completed quickly and cheaply. But the opening stuff looks fine…until a series of still drawn images makes one wonder, if this had truly been a theatrical experience, if it would all have been animated.

That’s a fairly early warning that, despite the money clearly thrown at this, that it’s still going to feel cheap and strangely small, mostly down to it’s almost just two locations: the town on Monroeville and Giselle's new house within it.

First off, Amy Adams isn’t really Giselle herself. This is an older, not particularly wiser (despite ten years in NYC) and still kind of annoyingly childish version of the character that seems to have regressed even from how we left her at the end of the first film. Yes, she’s a little heavier, too, which gives her a Momsy, even sometimes matronly, appeal, but also comes off as someone older trying to cling to the whimsical notion of youth, and like most of this film, it’s an odd fit.

Disenchanted rushes as much as it goes along at a leisurely pace. So we're away from NYC and off to Monroeville — whose name and history doesn’t really make any sense, not that it really matters — before you can wish upon a star, after which everything gets bogged down for a stretch while Giselle and Morgan work things out. At the moment, the movie isn’t "bad", but it’s aimless and you kind of want it to get going.

So then Edward and Nancy arrive from Andalasia and offer Giselle the way out with a magic wand, just because. In perhaps the sweetest new song, she sings about her hopes and fears, though instead of a nice and restrained performance, someone here dictated that EVERY song must be a belter, so it starts off in a high register and Adams must sing her lungs out by its end, even though this should be a small and intimate moment.

Next morning is arguably the "best bit" of the whole movie, where her fairytale wish comes true and everything is skewiff to comical and musical effect. However, this also shows up the film's major problem that the first avoided. Whereas Enchanted was a loving nod and a wink to Disney tropes, Disenchanted wants to lampoon them outright, making stereotypes out of spontaneous singing people, animals and furniture to the point that we're essentially watching a repeat of the portion of the Family Guy episode where Stewie and Brian travel through the "Disney universe". And, sadly, it’s a paler, less sharp version of that scene.

From this point, the films is a series of half scenes and plotting, where Giselle — inexplicably without any reasoning or context that Disenchanted seems unwilling, unable or unbothered to explain — starts to become an evil stepmother, although most surprisingly of all, Adams doesn’t seem to have the chops to pull off the subtleties between the personalities and the constant flip-flopping between them doesn’t work as a consequence. Like a lot of this movie, maybe they just left it an inch too long and she’s lost the magic spark to perfectly recapture Giselle, and therefor then be able to play an alternate version of her.

I don’t think the script and direction help. It’s always disappointing when a film gets held up and help up, because "we wanted to get the script right", and then said script turns out to be a crushing bore, but Disenchanted is just a series of disjointed, open-ended scenes that simply seem to thrown in a dissolve (although, it’s quite nice to see such a huge number of dissolves back in a modern film!) as a way to move along or get to the next scene. Character motivation is a non-starter, with many suddenly just doing things because they have to — Maya Rudolph, I’m looking at your role here.

The whole Monroeville setup doesn’t make a lot of sense, but again it feels small. She’s supposed to already be a dominating force, but she’s not a villain per se, and the one time this could have been setup adequately they then again dissolve away to something else. So here she is, apparently running the town named after her (?), but it’s just her and two cronies. And she hardly seems to be recognised or acknowledged as such by anyone else around? Oh, okay…

It’s all so half-baked and not seen through, while at the same time spending tons of time on unimportant moments that just seem to drag this out to feel way longer than the already too long two hours, or thereabouts, that it runs for. Not helping this are the songs, pretty much all of which sound like "jokes". And I don’t mean that in particularly fun way; let me explain…

You know those commercials, comedies, improve shows and the like where people mock Disney tropes and musicals in general by SINGING EVERYTHING EXUBERANTLY in over the top, almost melodramatic fashion, as a signpost toward the exact kinds of thing they are mocking? Well every song in Disenchanted is like that. Now, a couple *are* supposed to be taken that way — or at least their openings — but then they just continue, earnestly and tunelessly to the point where we think, oh, it’s not actually a joke and these characters are supposed to be sincere. Huh.

Now I’m pretty good at picking up a tune and being able to hum it back at you right after the fact. But, one of two motifs aside, I couldn’t hum you any of the songs from Disenchanted right after the movie, let alone even the next day when the e had a chance to bed themselves in. Sadly, it all adds up to being yet another of these reunion type movies that come along way too long after the fact, where almost everyone is a little too older, everything's a little too slower and the spark of magic is a little too faded to make it all happen again.

Nowhere here is a Love's True Kiss, with its heartfelt approach, or a Happy Working Song, with its brilliant lyric, or How Does She Know, with its catchy melody, which were essentially only three songs in the original and yet stuck out because they were so special as a result. Here, everyone keeps singing their improv comedy made up songs, aimless and tuneless. And way too many of them, including a big moment for Nancy just because she’s now Adele Dazeem and needs to try and steal the show by belting out a huge number because, well, just because.

It doesn’t work, diverts the action away from what we should be focused upon, and really does feel shoehorned in just to give her something (else) to sing. But we haven’t really been conditioned to her character and, at this point the focus has become *so* small and focused *only* on Giselle and Monroe's villain-off, that we now have too many characters in the mix and the plot doesn’t have anything for Edward or Robert to do, so they're just hanging around and literally just waiting for nothing to happen.

So Nancy's late-minute "intervention", where again she doesn’t actually *do* anything other than ground things to a halt for a while to screech a bit, comes too late and without any emotional pull, leaving Morgan to predictably wrap things up because, well, again, just because she suddenly can. Not that we really care, because Monroe was never that much of a villain (despite being able to conjure up magic!?) and Giselle never really tuned that much to the dark side or became truly evil/irredeemable/unstoppable to the point of raising any perilous stakes.

So this strangely small feeling film, which ultimately does sadly feel like a lavishly budgeted Disney Channel movie, comes to an end, a feeling of disappointment rippling through our audience last night. My first words were, "well, that was messy", which basically was agreed to sum it all up. A couple of people nodded off for a little while through it, and one other said that if she’d just been alone at home watching it she would have turned it off halfway through. Ouch!

I didn’t feel it was that "bad", and we did have a fun discussion on how it compared to the strange and bizarre Pinocchio that we ran a couple of weeks ago, but that’s not a good benchmark to be measuring anything against!

Disenchanted is a misfire, no two ways about it, mostly because it just feels so lacklustre, despite the colors, plenty of too many songs, and trying but only so-so performances. Best of the pick is Patrick Dempsey, throwing himself into his reconceived Edward type role with gusto and going for broke with some of the over the top aspects, even if this then does replace Edward as a personality figure and lead to his being made redundant in the second half to the point where he literally just says "you go ahead, I’ll wait here" because he has nothing now to do or offer the character dynamics.

15 years after the fact (or even the ten that have passed in movie years), and Enchanted 2 has come along too late, too small, too cheap-looking (especially in some of the Beauty And The Beast stage show knock-off costumes) and too undercooked, though overwrought, in the screenwriting department. It’s such a shame, since in a way it really does end up somewhat tarnishing the memory of the original, which is never a good thing.

Maybe they saw the way it was going early on and made the decision to switch to a D+ release, marking it up again as yet another addition to the service that just doesn’t reach those kind of quality highs that a true theatrical might have achieved. Yes, it might have had a reasonable opening weekend for the nostalgic fans that have patiently been waiting for it to come along, but ultimately on reflection having now seen it, it would have been crushed by the other bigger ticket options out this month.

Maybe we’ll get a Re-Enchanted down the line, or more probably a D+ series that just stretches it all out further. No doubt this will get big viewing figures for then, but my advice is to just stick to the first film and retain that memory. As someone else in our audience last night said, "well, I don’t need to ever see that again", which was certainly not the reaction to last week's show of the first film.

So stay Enchanted, and skip being Disenchanted. It’s just not worth it.

[EricJ]

15 years after the fact (or even the ten that have passed in movie years), and Enchanted 2 has come along too late, too small, too cheap-looking (especially in some of the Beauty And The Beast stage show knock-off costumes) and too undercooked, though overwrought, in the screenwriting department. It’s such a shame, since in a way it really does end up somewhat tarnishing the memory of the original, which is never a good thing.

Again, you have to go back to a prehistoric pre-Tiana, pre-Rapunzel, pre-Ralph or Elsa twilight-of-Eisner 2007, when their last-minute watered-down anti-princess joke was the ONLY bona fide audience hit Disney thought they'd had for...what, seven years?
Obviously, they were going to hitch a theatrical sequel to the one horse they thought they owned, until the Lasseter automobile came along and made it obsolete.

Here, like Hocus Pocus 2, they're trying to re-stoke fan nostalgia for something that's been on and off the radar for years, and through a dozen story treatments, until they get to the point that they're so busy marketing the Nostalgia Icon, they forget what was the appeal or zeitgeist of the original back in the day, let alone whether that still existed today.

It's sort of cringey to go back and look at fan buzz for the original ("The opening is going to BRING BACK traditional animation!" "The 'That's How You Know' number is such a slam at Disney musical numbers, they totally deserved it!"), but those days have moved on.