Ella Enchanted Movie Review

As anyone who has ever chuckled at the name Puff the Magic Dragon can tell you, enter-tainment initially intended for children can some-times attract a different kind of audience when showcased in dorm rooms or basements filled with peculiar, scented smoke. To these viewers, candy-colored images become even brighter, fantastical narrative events achieve maximum inscrutability, and submerged, subtextual messages float to the surface. The whole experience is, like, totally far out.

In the way it spices up old fairy-tale conventions with modern humor and attitude, Ella Enchanted is no doubt meant to recall similarly sassy, family-friendly fables like Shrek and The Princess Bride. But on a deeper, more satisfying level, the film can be aligned with The Phantom Tollbooth or the cult TV series H.R. Puffnstuff—diversions that started out their life cycles engaging tots and eventually convalesced as head-trip allegories for older, pharmaceutically-savvy viewers.

Ella Enchanted may be too clumsy and scattershot to legitimately succeed as a good film - the performances are all over the map and the “Once upon a time…” setting is never plausibly established - but, as psychedelic novelty, it never fails to amuse. Mixing garish musical numbers, a diverse collection of creature characters, farfetched plot turns, awful jokes, and left-wing political sentiment, it’s one of those movies that, incongruously, is at its most riveting when it lapses into wild incoherence.

The story itself (adapted by five credited writers from the award-winning children’s novel by Gail Carson Levine) is a patchwork pastiche of elements taken from well-known yarns. The basic conceit - a young girl bullied into subservience by a wealthy stepmother and snooty stepsisters - is straight out of Cinderella.

But in one of the story’s many calculated twists on ancient folklore, heroine Ella of Frell (Anne Hathaway) is obedient because she literally has to be; as an infant, she was given the curse of having to do everything that anyone ever asks of her, no matter how silly or unpleasant. Once new matriarch Dame Olga (Joanna Lumley) and her sniveling daughters, Hattie (Lucy Punch) and Olive (Jennifer Higham), discover Ella’s unique condition, they exploit it to the fullest.

Yearning for true independence, Ella embarks on a treacherous journey to find the fairy (Vivica A. Fox) that gave her the curse of obedience and make her take it back. Armed only with a book of knowledge that contains her nanny’s boyfriend’s imprisoned soul (don’t ask), Ella comes across friendly giants, ogres hungry for human flesh, and a nebbish elf (Aidan McArdle) who wants to be a lawyer even though the kingdom has decreed that all elves must be entertainers.

Most importantly, though, she runs into Prince Charmont (Hugh Dancy) - Char to his friends - the heir to the throne, who makes most teenage girls swoon.