An overly literal fairy tale turns parents into monsters

Not all magic works as it should, and not all fairy tales have tidy endings. Families are not very different. While not the most consistently enchanting film, Skydance animations Netflix offer Enchanted tries to bring magic and family together to conjure up a story of healing that fits our present moment.

It’s Princess Ellian’s (Rachel Ziegler) 15th birthday. Even though she should be out celebrating with her friends, she’s stuck inside the Lumbrian castle, carefully parenting the king and queen (Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman), who were turned into monsters by a dark curse. With the help of her royal advisors (Jenifer Lewis and John Lithgow), she has kept everything a secret for over a year, but now things are looking bleak.

She has only one hope left: The Oracles (Nathan Lane and Titus Burgess). But despite her pleas to them to use their magic key fob to switch her parents back, this is not a curse that can be easily undone. She and her parents must make the treacherous journey through The Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness and rebaptize themselves in the Lake of Light before the curse becomes permanent.

Although Lauren Hynek, Elizabeth Martin and Julia Miranda’s script is literal to the point of redundancy – a dark forest that nurtures dark emotions – the design within Enchanted is a bubbling cauldron of chimeric elements. In this bright, twinkling, pastel world, everything is mashed up with something else: cat and bird, deer and horse, frog and Uber. Yet this interplay between being has little significance to the story, which is solely focused on light vs. darkness. The binary history and tangled ecosystem never complement each other. The diverse elements of a self-serious, straightforward plot and maximalist creature design hold up Enchanted feels kiddywampus, oscillates between clumsily obvious sincerity and confusing complexity.

However, this should come as no surprise Enchanteds queer elements are best to straddle the world and story. Lane and Burgess star as Luno and Sonny, the oracles of the moon and sun – gay uncles to the universe. The film is at its clearest when Lane and Burgess break into song to help Ellian deal with her dark emotions by “finding the light”. Songwriters Alan Menken and Glenn Slater try to include twinkling elements in all their tracks, but The Oracles’ tune is the most magical. Lane and Burgess’ voices are a perfect match, and theirs are the only characters who seem acclimated to the film’s monstrous world, planting little beacons of irreverence in a sea of ​​sentimentality. When they go Enchanteda light goes with them.

The other joy of Enchanted comes from a character less attuned to the mixed realities of the kingdom. As head of communications for the palace, John Lithgow’s Bolinar has vowed to do whatever it takes to help his “benevolent coup” come to fruition. However, in the confusion of the film’s magical beings and sentient substances, Bolinar is transferred into the body of Ellian’s purple pet rodent, Flink. The result is classic body-cross comedy, with Lithgow delivering one wry laugh after another and complaining about the ridiculousness of the world in the audience’s place.

Because, well, when Oscar winners like Bardem and Kidman voice babbling monsters that are somewhere between pets and children, the world feels weird. When King Solon and Queen Ellsmere were human, they would argue so much that it caused a dark cloud to turn them into monsters. As the story opens, all they can do is hiss and growl. But as their journey with Ellian continues, the trio slowly learns to be a family as the king and queen regain their consciousness – their “light” – like children learning to speak. Ellian will use most of it Enchanted keeping a watchful eye on his parents and teaching them how to properly engage with the world around them. That words can sometimes hurt and that actions have consequences. Often caught between them, Ellian’s circumstances will feel familiar to any child of divorce or toxic parents.

All a child wants is to be believed, to hear their parents admit their humanity and say, “you’re right.” Enchanted directs its magical fob at these basic desires with a post-millennial perspective that emphasizes self-healing and actualization over a sense of familial duty. The nuclear family is still restored, but in a slightly less traditional way. Things cannot go back to how they were even after the curse is reversed. The problem is that these mature messages get lost in filmmaker Vicky Jenson’s all-too-literal magical world that can’t separate metaphor from reality.

Still, Jenson is right to try out these ideas and take us on a journey from “my parents are monsters” to “these monsters are my parents.” It doesn’t take a wizard to see how it can cast a spell. Culturally, we’ve spent the last decade or so filling our imaginations with anti-hero origin stories that reveal humanity in a maligned figure. In that time we have come to hope the same for our families. Movies like Enchanted are extensions of that desire. They give us a fleeting, if messy, hope that behind a sometimes monstrous exterior is a complex person capable of empathizing with us.

Director: Vicky Jenson
Author: Lauren Hynek, Elizabeth Martin, Julia Miranda
Cast: Rachel Zegler, John Lithgow, Jenifer Lewis, Tituss Burgess, Nathan Lane, Javier Bardem, Nicole Kidman
Release date: November 22, 2024 (Netflix)