Enchanted

Enchanted is the 2007 film include live-acton, traditional animation, and computer-generated imagery

Plot
Giselle lives in Andalasia, an animated fairy tale world with talking animals, characters breaking into song and "happily ever after" a foregone conclusion. Prince Edward, her designated true love saves her from a troll and they plan to get married the next day. Queen Narissa, Edward's evil stepmother, schemes to protect her throne. She throws Giselle into a portal that transports her to a world without "happily ever afters" -- modern (and live-action) New York City.

In New York, Giselle soon meets Robert Philip, a hardened divorce lawyer. At his daughter (Rachel Covey) Morgan's insistence, he lets Giselle stay at his apartment. Giselle, following the ways of her fairy tale world, recruits urban animals—pigeons, cockroaches and rats to clean his apartment while she makes a gown out of his curtains. Robert's fiancé, Nancy (Idina Menzel), misunderstands the situation and begins to argue with Robert.

He decides to part with Giselle at Central Park, but rejoins her after seeing her give the money he gave her to an old woman. During their walk through Central Park, Giselle questions Robert on how he displays his affection for Nancy and spontaneously starts the musical production number "That's How You Know" with many performers in the park joining her. Giselle helps Robert reconcile with Nancy by sending an apology on Robert's behalf, along with tickets to the King's and Queen's Ball.

Meanwhile, Queen Narissa's henchman Nathaniel follows Edward and Pip, a speaking chipmunk who is friends with Giselle, who have journeyed to New York to save Giselle. They stop at a motel, where Nathaniel questions his relationship with Narissa after watching a soap opera. He sneaks out to give Giselle a poisoned apple. Pip is unable to speak coherently in this world and has a frustrating time alerting the Prince of the minion's intentions. When Nathaniel fails twice to poison Giselle, Narissa becomes infuriated.

As Giselle and Robert spend more time together, Giselle discovers that the real world is much more complicated than she realized, while Robert is affected by her optimism and idealism. Edward continues to look for Giselle and eventually finds her at Robert's apartment. While Edward is eager to take Giselle home, they go on a date around New York at her insistence. To Nancy's chagrin, Giselle and Edward attend the King's and Queen's Ball. After Nancy and Edward pair off to dance, Giselle dances with Robert. During their dance, Giselle realizes that Robert is her true love as he, very softly, sings the lyrics of the song to her. Unbeknownst to them, Narissa has traveled to New York from Andalasia. Under her old hag's disguise, she manages to successfully poison Giselle, but is stopped by Edward before she can escape with Giselle's unconscious body.

A remorseful Nathaniel reveals Narissa's plot, admits his deeds and reveals that the spell of the poison apple has to be broken before midnight or Giselle will die. Robert realizes that only true love's kiss can revive Giselle, but it doesn't work for Edward. Desperate, Edward begs a hesitant Robert to try. Nancy gives her consent and Robert kisses the sleeping Giselle. Giselle awakens to Robert's kiss. Narissa uses the distracting moment to break free. She transforms into a dragon, deciding to write her own ending to the story. Taking Robert hostage, she lures Giselle out the window and up to the top of the Woolworth Building. With help from Pip, Narissa falls from the roof to her death, exploding into magic dust at street level. Giselle catches Robert, and they manage to keep themselves from falling off the roof. Edward and Robert are praised as heroes.

Nancy goes with Edward to Andalasia and marries him. Giselle opens a boutique in New York City, where she is assisted by both humans and animals. Both Nathaniel (in New York) and Pip (in Andalasia) become successful authors. The last scene shows Giselle, Robert, and Morgan playing together and living happily ever after as a family.

Development
The initial script of Enchanted, written by Bill Kelly, was bought by Disney's Touchstone Pictures and Sonnenfeld/Josephson Productions for a reported sum of $450,000 in September 1997. However, it was thought to be unsuitable for Disney because it was "a racier R-rated movie". To the frustration of Kelly, the screenplay was rewritten several times, first by Rita Hsiao and then by Todd Alcott. The film was initially scheduled to be released in 2002 with Rob Marshall as director but he withdrew due to "creative differences" between the producers and him. In 2001, director Jon Turteltaub was set to direct the film but he left soon after, later working with Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer on the National Treasure franchise. Adam Shankman became the film's director in 2003, while Bob Schooley and Mark McCorkle were hired by Disney to rewrite the script once again.[18] At the time, Disney considered offering the role of Giselle to Kate Hudson or Reese Witherspoon. However, the project did not take off.

On May 25, 2005, Variety reported that Kevin Lima had been hired as director and Bill Kelly had returned to the project to write a new version of the script. Lima worked with Kelly on the script to combine the main plot of Enchanted with the idea of a "loving homage" to Disney's heritage. He created visual storyboard printouts that covered the story of Enchanted from beginning to end, which filled an entire floor of a production building. After Lima showed them to the chairman of Walt Disney Studios, Dick Cook, he received the green light for the project and a budget of $85 million. Lima began designing the world of Andalasia and storyboarding the movie before a cast was chosen to play the characters. After the actors were hired, he was involved in making the final design of the movie, which made sure the animated characters look like their real-life counterparts.

Filming
Enchanted is the first feature-length Disney live-action/traditional animation hybrid since Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988, though the traditionally-animated characters do not interact in the live-action environment in the same method as they did in Roger Rabbit; however, there are some scenes where live-action characters share the screen with two-dimensional animated characters, for example, a live-action Nathaniel communicating with a cel-drawn Narissa, who is in a cooking pot. The film uses two aspect ratios; it begins in 2.35:1 when the Walt Disney Pictures logo and Enchanted storybook are shown, and then switches to a smaller 1.85:1 aspect ratio for the first animated sequence. The film switches back to 2.35:1 when it becomes live-action and never switches back, even for the remainder of the cartoon sequences. Lima oversaw the direction of both the live-action and animation sequences, which were being produced at the same time. Enchanted took almost two years to complete. The animation took about a year to finish while the live-action scenes, which commenced on location in New York City during the summer of 2006 and was completed during the animation process, were shot in 72 days.

Animation
Out of the film's 107 minutes of running time, ten of the approximately 13 minutes of animation are at the beginning of the film. Lima tried to "cram every single piece of Disney iconic imagery" that he could into the first ten minutes, which were done in traditional cel animation (in contrast to computer-generated 3-D animation) as a tribute to past Disney fairy tale films such as Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was the first Disney film theatrically released in America to feature traditional cel animation since Pooh's Heffalump Movie (2005). This film, although very, very different in terms of plot from any previous Disney film, also contained obvious homages to other Disney films of the distant past, such as Old Yeller, The Shaggy Dog, Swiss Family Robinson, Bon Voyage!, and Savage Sam. As most of Disney's cel animation artists were laid off after the computer graphics boom of the late 1990s, the 13 minutes of animation were not done in-house but by the independent Pasadena-based company James Baxter Animation, which was started by noted lead animator James Baxter. Baxter had previously worked for Walt Disney Feature Animation, bringing to life many memorable Disney animated characters like Jessica Rabbit (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), Belle (Beauty and the Beast), Rafiki (The Lion King), and Quasimodo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame).

Although Lima wanted the animation to be nostalgic, he wanted Enchanted to have a style of its own. Baxter's team decided to use Art Nouveau as a starting point. For Giselle, the 2D-animated character had to be "a cross between Amy [Adams] and a classic Disney princess. And not a caricature." Seeing Giselle as "a forest girl, an innocent nymph with flowers in her hair" and "a bit of a hippie", the animators wanted her to be "flowing, with her hair and clothes. Delicate." For Prince Edward, Baxter's team "worked the hardest on him to make him look like the actor" because princes "in these kinds of movies are usually so bland." Many prototypes were made for Narissa as Baxter's team wanted her face to "look like Susan's. And the costumes had to align closely to the live-action design."

To maintain continuity between the two media, Lima brought in costume designer Mona May during the early stages of the film's production so that the costumes would be aligned in both the animated and live-action worlds. He also shot some live-action footage of Amy Adams as Giselle for the animators to use as reference, which also allowed the physical movement of the character to match in both worlds. Test scenes completed by the animators were shown to the actors, allowing them to see how their animated self would move.

Live-action
Principal photography began in April 2006 and ended in July 2006. Because of the live action sequence setting, all live action work was filmed in New York City. However, shooting in New York became problematic as it was in a "constant state of new stores, scaffolding and renovation".

The first scene in New York, which features Giselle emerging from a manhole in the middle of Times Square, was filmed on location in the center of the square. Because of the difficulties in controlling the crowd while filming in Times Square, general pedestrians were featured in the scene with hired extras placed in the immediate foreground. Similarly, a crowd gathered to watch as James Marsden and Timothy Spall filmed their scenes in Times Square. However, the scene Lima found the most challenging to shoot was the musical number, "That's How You Know", in Central Park. The five-minute scene took 17 days to finish due to the changing weather, which allowed only seven sunny days for the scene to be filmed. The filming was also hampered at times by Patrick Dempsey's fans. The scene was choreographed by John O'Connell, who had worked on Moulin Rouge! beforehand, and included 300 extras and 150 dancers.

Many scenes were also filmed at Steiner Studios, which provided the three large stages that Enchanted needed at the same facility. Other outdoor locations included the Brooklyn Bridge and The Paterno, an apartment building with a curved, heavily embellished, ivory-colored façade located on the corner of Riverside Drive and 116th Street, which is the residence of the film's characters Robert and Morgan Phillip.

Costume Design
All the costumes in the film were designed by Mona May, who had previously worked on Clueless, The Wedding Singer and The Haunted Mansion. To create the costumes, May spent one year in pre-production working with animators and her costume department of 20 people, while she contracted with five outside costume shops in Los Angeles and New York. She became involved in the project during the time when the animators were designing the faces and bodies of the characters as they had to "translate the costumes from two-dimensional drawings to live-action human proportion". Her goal was to keep the designs "Disneyesque to the core but bring a little bit of fashion in there and humor and make it something new". However, May admitted this was difficult "because [they're] dealing with iconic Disney characters who have been in the psyche of the viewing audience for so long".

For the character of Giselle, her journey to becoming a real woman is reflected in her dresses, which become less fairy tale-like as the film progresses. Her wedding dress at the beginning of the film directly contrasts her modern ball gown at the end of the film. The wedding dress served to provide a "humongous contrast to the flat drawings" and to accentuate the image of a Disney Princess. In order to make the waist look small, the sleeves were designed to be "extremely pouffy" and the skirt to be as big as possible, which included a metal hoop that holds up 20 layers of petticoats and ruffles. Altogether, 11 versions of the dress were made for filming, each comprised 200 yards (183 m) of silk satin and other fabric, and weighed approximately 40 pounds (18 kg). On the experience of wearing the wedding dress, Amy Adams described it as "grueling" since "the entire weight was on [her] hips, so occasionally it felt like [she] was in traction".

Unlike Giselle, Prince Edward does not adapt to the real world and James Marsden, who plays Edward, had only one costume designed for him. May's aim was to try "not to lose [Marsden] in the craziness of the outfit... where he still looks handsome".[29] The costume also included padding in the chest, buttocks and crotch, which gave Marsden the "same exaggerated proportions as an animated character" and "posture - his back is straight, the sleeves are up and never collapse".[29]

May was delighted that Lima "went for something more fashion-forward" with Susan Sarandon's Queen Narissa. She decided to make her look like a "runway lady", wearing something that is "still Disney" but also "high fashion, like something John Galliano or Thierry Mugler might design". Since Narissa appears in three media: 2D animation, live-action and computer animation, May had to make sure that the costume would be the same throughout in terms of "color, shape and texture". The costume for Narissa consisted of a leather corset and skirt, which looked "reptilian", as well as a cape. Working with the animators, May incorporated parts of the dragon's form into the costume; the cape was designed to look like wings, the layers of the skirt wrap around like a tail and a crown that would turn into horns during Narissa's transformation into a dragon.

Music
The film's score was written by accomplished songwriter and composer Alan Menken, who has worked on a number of Disney films previously. Fellow composer Stephen Schwartz wrote the lyrics for six songs, also composed by Menken. Menken and Schwartz previously worked together on the songs for Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Menken became involved with the film in the early stages of the film's development and invited Schwartz to resume their collaboration. They began the songwriting process by searching for the right moments in the story in which a song moment was allowed. Schwartz found that it was easier to justify situations in which the characters would burst into songs in Enchanted than in other live-action musicals as its concept "allowed the characters to sing in a way that was completely integral to the plot of the story." The three songs Giselle sings contain references to earlier Disney films. The first song played in the film, "True Love's Kiss", was written to be "a send-up of, and an homage to, the style of those Disney animated features", namely, "I'm Wishing" (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and "A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes" (Cinderella), during which Disney heroines sing about the joy of being loved. It posed a challenge for Menken and Schwartz because of the "many preconceptions with that number"; it had to be reflective of the era of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Cinderella. Accordingly, Amy Adams performed the first song in an operetta style in contrast to the Broadway style of the later songs.

Both "Happy Working Song" and "That's How You Know" also pay tributes to past Disney songs. "Happy Working Song" pays an homage to such songs as "Whistle While You Work" (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), "The Work Song" (Cinderella) "A Spoonful of Sugar" (Mary Poppins) and Making Christmas (The Nightmare Before Christmas) while "That's How You Know" is a self-parody of Menken's compositions for his Disney features, specifically such big production numbers as "Under the Sea" (The Little Mermaid) and "Be Our Guest" (Beauty and the Beast). To achieve this, Schwartz admitted he had to "push it a little bit further in terms of choices of words or certain lyrics" while maintaining "the classic Walt Disney sensibility". However, Menken noted that the songs he has written for Disney have always been "a little tongue-in-cheek".[32] As the film progresses, the music uses more contemporary styles, which is heard through the adult ballad "So Close" and the country/pop number "Ever Ever After".

Out of the six completed songs written by Menken and Schwartz, five remained in the finished film. The titular song "Enchanted", a duet featuring Idina Menzel and James Marsden, was cut from the movie.

Effects
The majority of the visual effects shots in Enchanted were done by Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, who contributed a total of 320 shots. These shots involved virtual sets, environmental effects and CG characters that performed alongside real actors, namely the animated animals during the "Happy Working Song" sequence, Pip and the Narissa dragon during the live action portions of the film. CIS Hollywood was responsible for 36 visual effects shots, which primarily dealt with wire removals and composites. Reel FX Creative Studios did four visual effects shots involving the pop-up book page-turn transitions while Weta Digital did two.

Out of all the animals that appear in the "Happy Working Song" sequence, the only real animals filmed on set were rats and pigeons. The real animals captured on film aided Tippett Studio in creating CG rats and pigeons, which gave dynamic performances such as having pigeons that carried brooms in their beaks and rats that scrubbed with toothbrushes. On the other hand, all the cockroaches were CG characters.

Pip, a chipmunk who can talk in the 2D world of Andalasia, loses his ability to communicate through speech in the real world so he must rely heavily on facial and body gestures. This meant the animators had to display Pip's emotions through performance as well as making him appear like a real chipmunk. The team at Tippett began the process of animating Pip by observing live chipmunks which were filmed in motion from "every conceivable angle", after which they created a photorealistic chipmunk through the use of 3D computer graphics software, Maya and Furrocious.[35] When visual effects supervisor Thomas Schelesny showed the first animation of Pip to director Kevin Lima, he was surprised that he was a looking at CG character and not reference footage.[37] To enhance facial expressions, the modelers gave Pip eyebrows, which real chipmunks do not have.[36] During the filming of scenes in which Pip appears, a number of ways were used to indicate the physical presence of Pip. On some occasions, a small stuffed chipmunk with a wire armature on the inside was placed in the scene. In other situations, a rod with a small marker on the end or a laser pointer would be used to show the actors and cinematographer where Pip is.

Unlike Pip, the Narissa dragon was allowed to be more of a fantasy character while still looking like a living character and a classic Disney villain. The CG dragon design was loosely based on a traditional Chinese dragon and Susan Sarandon's live-action witch. When filming the scene which sees the transformation of Narissa from a woman into a dragon, a long pole was used to direct the extras' eyelines instead of a laser pointer. Set pieces were made to move back and forth in addition to having a computer-controlled lighting setup and a repeatable head on the camera that were all synchronized together. In the film's final sequence, in which Narissa climbs the Woolworth Building while clutching Robert in her claws, a greenscreen rig was built to hold Patrick Dempsey in order to film his face and movements. The rig was a "puppeteering" approach that involved a robotic arm being controlled by three different floor effects artists.

Reception
The film received very positive reviews from critics. The movie review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes tallied the film at an overall 92% approval rating (based on 156 reviews, with 144 "fresh" and 12 "rotten"), while Metacritic gave it a 75% rating based on 32 reviews. Rotten Tomatoes ranked the film as the ninth best reviewed film in wide release of 2007 and named it the best family film of 2007.

Positive reviews praised the film's take on a classic Disney story, its comedy and musical numbers as well as the performance of its lead actress, Amy Adams. Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four, describing it as a "heart-winning musical comedy that skips lightly and sprightly from the lily pads of hope to the manhole covers of actuality" and one that "has a Disney willingness to allow fantasy into life". Film critics of Variety and LA Weekly remarked on the film's ability to cater for all ages. LA Weekly described the film as "the sort of buoyant, all-ages entertainment that Hollywood has been laboring to revive in recent years (most recently with Hairspray) but hasn't managed to get right until now", while Todd McCarthy of Variety commented, "More than Disney's strictly animated product, Enchanted, in the manner of the vast majority of Hollywood films made until the '60s, is a film aimed at the entire population - niches be damned. It simply aims to please, without pandering, without vulgarity, without sops to pop-culture fads, and to pull this off today is no small feat." Enchanted was the Broadcast Film Critics Association's choice for Best Family Film of 2007, while Carrie Rickey of The Philadelphia Inquirer named it the 4th best film of 2007.

Rolling Stone, Premiere, USA Today, and The Boston Globe all gave the film three out of four, while Baltimore Sun gave the film a B grade. They cited that although the story is relatively predictable, the way in which the predictability of the film is part of the story, the amazingly extravagant musical numbers, along with the way in which Disney pokes fun at its traditional line of animated movies outweighs any squabbles about storyline or being unsure of what age bracket the film is made for. Michael Sragow of Baltimore Sun remarked that the film's "piquant idea and enough good jokes to overcome its uneven movie-making and uncertain tone", while Claudia Puig of USA Today stated that "though it's a fairly predictable fish-out-of-water tale (actually a princess-out-of-storybook saga), the casting is so perfect that it takes what could have been a ho-hum idea and renders it magical."

Amy Adams herself garnered many favorable reviews. Reviewers praised her singing ability and asserted that her performance, which was compared by some to her Academy Award-nominated performance in Junebug, has made Adams a movie star, likening it to Mary Poppins' effect on Julie Andrews' career. Similarly, film critics Richard Roeper and Michael Phillips, who gave the film positive reviews on At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper, emphasized the effect of Adams' performance on the film with remarks like "Amy Adams is this movie" and "Amy Adams shows how to make a comic cliché work like magic." However, both agreed that the final sequence involving the computer-generated dragon of Narissa "bogged down" the film.

Empire stated that the film was targeted at children but agreed with other reviewers that the "extremely game cast" was the film's best asset. It gave the film three out of five.[63] Time gave the film a C-, stating that the film "cannibalizes Walt's vault for jokes" and "fails to find a happy ending that doesn't feel two-dimensional". Similarly, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian commented that the film "assumes a beady-eyed and deeply humourless sentimentality" and that Adams' performance was the "only decent thing in this overhyped family movie covered in a cellophane shrink-wrap of corporate Disney plastic-ness". Bradshaw gave the film two out of five. Some fans noted that Enchanted did to Disney fairytales what Hot Fuzz did to police buddy action movies. Other fans noted that it was a Disney Princess version of the likes of Ali G Indahouse, Elf, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan and Bruno.

Trivia

 * The film have several similarities with other films, like Sleeping Beauty, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
 * The storybook opening pays homage to a couple of Disney films as well as foreshadowing A Christmas Carol