Judging by the collective age of the audience around me as I settled in for a Saturday evening showing of Disney's Enchanted, I wasn't the only person who was there for a dose of bizarre nostalgia. My childhood in the late 80s and early 90s had been happily punctuated every so often by the adventures of a series of warbling cartoon princesses, the last of whom was 1995's Pocahontas. After her eponymous film, I graduated from the genre, having moved on to Austen and Bronte novels and Anne Sexton's twisted fairy tales.
In high school and college, I began to truly understand just how much those magicians at Disney had cleaned up the detritus of fairyland. In the medieval folk versions of these tales, Cinderella's sisters get their toes chopped off and Sleeping Beauty's new mother in law, if I'm not mistaken, tries to boil her grandchildren for dinner. I also learned that according to standard feminist interpretation, when Snow White's virginal mother pricks her fingers and suddenly dies, only to be "replaced" by a wicked stepmother, they're actually the same woman. It's an allegory for how the onset of sexuality turns innocent women into competitive, murderous narcissists (damn that mirror on the wall!).
After these revelations, not even the supposedly empowering Mulan could tempt me back to Happy Princess land. But last weekend, my fellow theatergoers and I flocked to see Enchanted for its obviously mocking reference to Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, twirling around their cozy huts and innocently crooning in chorus with a host of furry creatures. And indeed, the early minutes of Enchanted lived up to expectations, offering a parade of visual in-references to woodsy cottages, romantic melodies, wishing wells and of course, vicious old hags. It managed to send up the absurdity of the genre without ruining its inherent sweetness.
But when Enchanted transferred its heroine to live action New York, I got worried. As Patrick Demspey's single dad character hands his daughter a book about great women in history (which recalled to me about ten books I got as birthday presents over the years) and she groans in frustration, I feared that the movie's message might be retrograde, painting this "I want to raise a strong woman" dad as a controlling creep. Why couldn't these kick-ass women's history books coexsist beside the Brothers' Grimm in this heroine's bookshelf? They certainly did in mine.
Thankfully, Enchanted manages to walk a tightrope with grace. The book ends up converting Giselle, Amy Adams's naif of a princess, who marvels at the intelligence and spunk of famous female leaders as she flips through the pages of their history. Meanwhile, her unfettered optimism softens tough New Yorker Dempsey, and love is in the air. When her cartoon prince, revealed to be somewhat vapid himself, comes to rescue Giselle and expects her to join him in a duet, she responds by staring at him in wonder--she is thinking instead of singing. It's a validating moment for princesses everywhere, second only to the climax, when Giselle has to grab her sword and save her man from the dragon's clutches. Of course, the whole stepmother-as-dragon thing is a holdout from fairyland's misogynist tradition, but that's another story.
Enchanted's glib espousal of both feminist pragmatism and feminine romanticism suggests that the balancing act facing modern women is as simple as, well, as a song and dance routine might be for a cartoon heroine. That idea is a fairytale in and of itself: balancing society's expectations is extremely difficult in a world where women are supposed to have it all and do it all. But as myths go, the film sends girls a better message than falling into a hundred-year swoon.
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Posted December 4, 2007 | 05:51 PM (EST)