Enchanted changed how Disney makes movies — which doomed Disenchanted

It’s not easy to be a film critic in 2022. With the endless surge of sequels, reboots, and remakes being churned out, there are only a few dozen ways to express “The latest installment in this series lacks the magic of the original movie.” Disney’s live-action fairy tale The Disenchanted, a sequel 15 years in the making, is no exception: The critical consensus says it fails to equal the standard set by its predecessor, 2007’s Enchanted. Hey! Most online word processors at least have a synonym generator that critics can use.

Maybe one. The Disenchanted failed to recapture the public imagination is that it’s trying to succeed in a media landscape heavily shaped by the impact of the original Enchanted. That movie’s success acted as a litmus test for Walt Disney Pictures during a period of dramatic change for family entertainment, and it greatly influenced Disney’s creative choices in the succeeding years. The formula was not the only thing that worked. EnchantedThe Disney trademark has been a bit worn after being repackaged, applied to film after movie for more than a decade. Many reasons can explain why. The Disenchanted You missed the point. The first being the fact that it can be very difficult to remember the name of Andalasia, a fantasy kingdom, if you hear it 500 times in just 45 minutes. However, the core of the problem is back to Enchanted’s origin story.

Enchanted began its journey to the big screen in 1997, when budding screenwriter Bill Kelly wrote the first draft and pitched it to executives as a “collision between fairy-tale romance and modern cynicism.” While the finished movie is a family-friendly Disney romp, the early draft of Enchanted was a far more adult affair, combining the spirit of late-’90s raunchy sex comedies with a satirical pastiche of the Disney movie formula. Director Kevin Lima later recalled that version as being “kind of snide” and “more along the line of films like Shrek.” One notable scene involved the oblivious Andalasian princess Giselle (eventually played by Amy Adams) arriving in New York and being hired to pop out of a cake at a bachelor party, where she’s then mistaken for a stripper. There were no animated sequences or big-budget musical numbers in Kelly’s original version.

Photo: Walt Disney Pictures

Disney was intrigued enough to buy his script, but the risqué content, combined with the film’s blatant lampooning of the company’s entire canon, made producers nervous. At the time, Disney was still riding high on the Disney Renaissance era, which resurrected the fairy-tale musicals of the company’s golden years, reinvigorating a company that had been struggling with its identity and direction since Walt Disney’s death decades earlier. It seemed counterintuitive for the studio’s next project to shamelessly mock the blueprint that saved its neck.

Disney faced serious competition from narratively mature and more self-aware family entertainment. Following a public spat with Disney CEO Michael Eisner, chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg left the company in 1994 to co-found DreamWorksAnd spearhead the company’s animation department. Four years later, DreamWorks hit Disney with two hugely successful animated releases in the space of six months — Antz and The Prince of Egypt. “Easily a match for anything Disney has released in the last decade,” critic James Berardinelli wrote about The Prince of Egypt, “an impressive achievement which uncovers yet another chink in Disney’s once-impregnable animation armor.” For the first time since the release of The Little Mermaid, Disney’s reign as the peerless ruler of the animation industry was under threat.

Shrek’s release in 2001 was a particularly devastating blow. Disney was forced to confront his own truths by this story about a subversive fairy tale ogre, and a rebellious Princess who have an unexpected happy ending. Shrek not only handily beat out Disney’s animated feature of that year — the intended company game-changer Atlantis and The Lost Empire — but it did it while taking obvious, deliberate potshots at Disney’s reputation and iconography. There’s been plenty of unconfirmed speculation that the villainous, short-statured Lord Farquaad is based on Michael Eisner. But I’m talking about that scene where Princess Fiona uses her Snow White-esque vibrato to blow up a songbird, then fries its eggs for breakfast. Or that sequence introducing Farquaad’s land of Duloc as a saccharine, picture-perfect pastiche of Disneyland, complete with costumed character mascots and squeaky-voiced animatronics, à la the “It’s a Small World” ride. It must have been painful for Disney.

The time had come to deal with the cultural reset, and move on with the program. Kevin Lima (director of Disney’s 1999 animated feature TarzanThe film, often referred to as the “last movie of Renaissance era”, was made when the need for change became evident. “There had to be this level of cynicism,” he told Den of Geek. “It had to perform as Shrek performed in order to connect.” Suddenly, that script gathering dust in a filing cabinet about a Disney Princess being lured into stripping for a bachelor party seemed like a valuable asset.

Photo: Walt Disney Pictures

Disney brought in Lima, an experienced studio veteran and director, after many failed starts. Kelly returned to the script revision phase, drawing on ideas provided by the interim writers. Lima insists on reducing the absurdity of earlier drafts from the beginning. He suggested that it was possible to harness the profits of parody, without having Walt go into a cryogenic grave. “Let’s embrace who we are and make it a love letter to Disney,” he told executives, according to that Den of Geek interview. “There are hundreds of thousands of people who love this material. Let’s not wreck it for them.”

Shrek won its audience’s favor by having the titular character mock Disney’s “storybook opening” trademark by using storybook pages as toilet paper. It still allowed the filmmakers to enjoy the nostalgia-related dopaminergic effects. Enchanted invites its audience to remember the childhood wonder associated with Disney movies — but also feel a little smug about being older, wiser, and capable of appreciating the irony of Giselle hypnotizing woodland creatures into performing manual labor.

EnchantedThe story begins with an unspoiled opening by a pessimistic evil. It’s set to a sweeping orchestral melody, courtesy of Disney Renaissance-era maestros Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. This prologue is set in Andalasia’s traditional animated land. It celebrates all of the Disney classic tropes and characters. When Princess Giselle is thrust into the neon-lit streets of New York, the spirit of Andalasia goes with her, and Lima and Kelly are careful not to completely discredit the dreams-come-true ethos it represents — that is, the Disney brand.

Save for a few moments reminiscent of the biting satire in the original script, Giselle’s eternally sanguine aura overpowers the stark reality surrounding her. She’s even able to goad New Yorkers into performing an elaborately choreographed song-and-dance routine about love. Lima’s calculated course between adult cynicism and childhood simplicity paid off: The film was a critical and financial success, proving Disney could safely regurgitate time-honored plot themes and imagery like the coma-curing true love’s kiss, so long as it included a dash of subversion and self-awareness that could keep post-Shrek audiences intrigued.

Disney was aware of something it could use Enchanted’s approach, and it’s unsurprising that under the leadership of Bob Iger — the former Disney CEO who recently returned to the position, replacing his appointed successor, Bob Chapek — Disney would fix its sights on acquiring more intellectual properties it could revise and expand for adult viewers. Disney had the freedom to acquire Pixar Lucasfilm, Marvel, 20th Century Fox, and almost all of its beloved franchises that they recalled as children. Even Disney’s animated features with original stories and characters started to take lessons from Enchanted, countering Disney’s nostalgia upcycling with wink-to-the-camera meta commentaries. Take a look at Elsa. Frozen, lecturing her sister Anna about how irresponsible it would be to marry a prince she’s just met — and then, with adult cynicism satisfied, promptly building an entire ice castle with magic, while singing a Broadway-worthy show tune.

Yes, of course The Disenchanted isn’t going to pack the same punch as EnchantedIn 2007, it did. We didn’t really wait 15 years for an Enchanted sequel: We got one every time Disney relied on the subverted-fairy-tale-classic recipe that served it so well during the ogre uprising of 2001. It’s not that people won’t watch The Disenchanted — mixed reviews and disappointed fan reactions aside, the film has become one of the top-streamed films in the U.S. since its release on Nov. 18, becoming the second most-watched film across all platforms a week later. Its nostalgic value, strong cast, and position as new holiday-ready family entertainment guarantees that millions of people will still watch it, just as they consistently watch Disney’s little-loved live-action remakes.

That’s how it works for me. A few months back, I subscribed temporarily to Disney Plus to see the critically-acclaimed remake of my favorite movie. Pinocchio. The long sequence of cuckooclocks with Disney-movie egg designs was so frustrating that I found it hard to concentrate on what kind of cross-branding game they were playing. (And wondering why they hadn’t yet sent lawyers to Geppetto’s house to issue a cease-and-desist order.) Yet mere minutes later, I was getting teary as Cynthia Erivo launched into the opening bars of “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Because for a blissful, fleeting moment, I was back to being a carefree 5-year-old who didn’t know climate change existed.

Remakes and reboots that make use of the theme have made Disney billions. EnchantedRecipe, it has probably still plenty of time for it to be exploited, in order to keep the big bucks rolling in. What about when? Enchanted’s own sequel is exposing early signs of wear and tear in the system, it’s probably time to figure out a new game plan before the wheels fall off completely. Each era ends. The Disney Renaissance, invincible as it seemed, wasn’t impervious to the shifting zeitgeist. Giselle recognized when it was necessary to abandon her Andalasia lifestyle and embrace New York. Disney may soon follow her lead.