Enchanted

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

Enchanted begins by giving Giselle (Amy Adams) the tidy emotional grammar of a storybook: a woodland meeting, a prince, a villain whose power depends on preventing a wedding, and a promise that the next day will settle everything. The movie then changes the rules around her. When Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) sends Giselle through a well into Manhattan, the hand-drawn kingdom gives way to live-action streets, apartments and strangers with complicated schedules. The shift is more than a visual trick: a heroine built to sing openly has landed in a place where people have learned to disguise what they want.

Banished from animated Andalasia, Giselle arrives in New York and finds shelter with divorce lawyer Robert and his daughter Morgan. Her intended husband Edward follows, while Queen Narissa sends Nathaniel to kill her. Giselle's growing affection for Robert changes the promised romance. At a ball, Narissa poisons her; Robert's kiss wakes her when Edward's cannot. Narissa becomes a dragon and takes Robert to the roof, where Giselle rescues him. The queen falls to her death. Giselle stays with Robert and Morgan and starts a business; Edward and Nancy marry in Andalasia. The ending rearranges the fairy tale around the relationships its characters have actually formed, rather than sending everyone back to the original pairing.

Amy Adams makes the clash between those worlds feel like a clash of habits rather than a contest between intelligence and stupidity. Giselle's directness can be awkward, but it is active: she asks questions, attempts solutions and expresses feelings other people have learned to conceal. Her certainty is gradually tested without making her capacity for delight an embarrassment that must be cured. That balance gives the performance room to be funny and emotionally persuasive at once. The heroine learns that affection takes knowledge and choice, while the film leaves her openness intact as something valuable she brings into her new surroundings.

Patrick Dempsey's Robert provides a recognisable kind of resistance. A divorce lawyer's professional experience gives him reasons to distrust promises that seem effortless, particularly when he is responsible for a child. His caution is therefore more than a modern joke about someone who refuses to sing. It establishes a position that has to be understood before it can change. Giselle's presence makes him reconsider the difference between being sensible and being closed off. Their romance becomes convincing within the film's heightened rules because each has something to learn: she needs discernment, while he needs room to imagine an outcome other than disappointment.

James Marsden's Edward occupies the same contrast from another angle. Confidence that would belong naturally to a drawn prince becomes unusually conspicuous in a real street. His grand gestures remain sincere, but sincerity no longer guarantees that they answer the situation before him. The humour depends on a change of context rather than an exposure of secret malice. Edward can be unsuitable for Giselle without being a villain, which makes the rearrangement of the romance warmer than a simple defeat of the wrong suitor. Idina Menzel's Nancy likewise has more to do than stand between the central couple and a happy ending. His generosity at the romantic turning point allows that comic confidence to develop into a capacity to recognise another person’s choice.

Music gives the film a way to stage Giselle's power without treating it as literal magic. In "That's How You Know," a walk through the park swells into a public musical number, drawing passers-by into her open-hearted performance. The scene is exuberant, but it also changes the city around her for a moment: strangers participate in the kind of shared fantasy that urban life often teaches people to ignore. Robert's discomfort gives the number a second rhythm, so the spectacle can feel joyous and socially awkward at once.

The change from animation to live action makes the film's ideas immediately visible. Andalasia supplies a world whose appearance seems to agree with its inhabitants' expectations; Manhattan puts a fairy-tale figure among surfaces and routines that resist her. Costume becomes particularly expressive because Giselle's storybook silhouette can look glorious and impractical in the same moment. The later return of magical danger prevents the city from becoming merely a classroom in realism. Both settings continue to contribute to the resolution. Modern experience does not cancel fantasy, and fantasy does not remove the need to notice what other people actually want.

The blend of animation, live action, musical comedy and romantic plot makes form part of that argument. Andalasia can draw a feeling into song immediately; Manhattan makes the same feeling pass through traffic, embarrassment, work and other people's decisions. Amy Adams plays Giselle's sincerity as active curiosity rather than blankness, while Marsden's Edward supplies a useful comic counterpoint. Menzel's Nancy matters because the ending gives her an emotional life beyond being an obstacle. Together, those choices make Enchanted's fairy-tale affection feel most persuasive when it leaves room for adult uncertainty.