Of course, as the Disney version, this is the best-known, most-loved, most stylised and standardised of all the adaptations. As far as I know, it was likely my only source of the story for a good chunk of my life, and by that I mean, I don’t even remember reading or being read the book (_sniff_ lol): I only realised this past week reading the first of the books that parts of this and the other adaptations, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee for example, were in fact taken from “Through the Looking Glass” which I’ve yet to read. In this version, in fact, they even pull in a couple of elements from Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”, as well as throwing in some genuinely clever characters and lines of their own (“You gave me quite a turn!” “She’s stark raven mad!”) ... all in 70 minutes. I still prefer the Fiona Fullerton version by a smidgen, and who knows what Tim Burton’s going to deliver, but this is one of Disney’s best, it’s eyepoppingly colourful particularly when you consider the year it was made, and the character designs etc certainly stick in one’s memory.

I remember being surprised by this the last time I watched it (alas, another review seems to have vanished), and my heart leapt as it hit its stride this time around when I remembered Jim Hawkins is voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt I guess I wasn’t such a fan of his the last time I watched. He along with Emma Thompson, David Hyde Pierce, Laurie Metcalf and Martin Short among others make for a great voice cast for a movie populated by more speaking characters, I noticed this time around, than you can shake a stick at.

It’s the “hand-drawn” (mostly) Disney animation feature I forget about most often, and that’s a shame, because considering how late in the game it came for them, it’s actually probably among my favourites. Going back to Gordon-Levitt, it’s right they should have someone so cool voicing this hero – I think I’ve said a number of times how badly the Disney males have sucked (and not just in my general, admittedly sucky, “most males do anyway,” way, lol) ... but second only perhaps to Tarzan, Jim Hawkins is really startlingly endearing. I love when the one song moment here comes seemingly out of nowhere triggering a flashback to Jim’s father leaving, and you just get all of his hangups thrown at you like a slap to the face, so when you see him slump against John Silver’s chest and start crying, you’re just completely with him.

To counter all of this is the feisty back and forth humour between Thompson’s sexy feline captain and Hyde Pierce as, well, as always something approximating Niles from Frasier never fails, lol. There’s the cute Morph, Michael Wincott’s spider thing, Martin Short’s B.E.N., and some gorgeous visuals. It’s a surprisingly ambitious project, one that really in the midst of Home on the Range, Brother Bear, etc, makes me once again wish they’d kept on with the handdrawn* – I noticed looking at the big list of the Animated Classics that it came out the same year as Lilo & Stitch, which clearly overshadows it … perhaps that’s why it’s so forgettable. Like I said, it’s a shame, ‘cos it’s one that makes me smile and laugh and cry everytime I see it.

* I wrote most of this review a couple of days ago now – since then I’ve been reading all kinds of amazing things about what Glen Keane is doing with Rapunzel ... there may be hope … it’s not hand drawn, but damn, finally somebody realises what computers can do …

“I’m only 6.”
“You won’t always be.”

I’ve waited far too long to see this one and the longer I waited and the more excited I got about it, the more scared I got of how I’d react to it. That signpost quote above as to where the movie might be going told me that this dread wasn’t going to let up until the very closing scene. That it started up so much like the glorious Elf (which I’m amazed doesn’t dominate most reviews, btw, so glaring are the similarities) gave me hope … but egh, let’s just start with that beginning animation, shall we?

At one point Patrick Dempsey (as a quite typically joyless New York single father man man) tells Amy Adams (as the angerless Disney Princess Giselle recently transformed into a human in a very rushed set-up), “It’s like you escaped from a Hallmark card or something,” – and that’s what the animation at the start here resembles more to me than the classic Disney style one would think they were trying to emulate.

It amazes me that so many people have felt nostalgia for the classics watching these early scenes; have they even watched them since they were 6? It’s like the years of producing second-rate sequels (don’t get me wrong, some of them are good as I’ve said time and again; but notice how few of them feature human characters …) have blurred the old style out of the animators’ muscle memory. The animated opening feels more like another studio, like Fox or Dreamworks, doing a very corny and tired mickey-take of everything everybody always thinks is “wrong” with the old Disney animations. If this is what Disney animations would look like were they still producing theatrical hand-drawn pictures, then I’m honestly kinda glad they stopped.

Though I’ve always jokingly said, “It’s all Disney’s fault,” when it comes to the subject of depression and woes of the world etc; I did it only last week, in fact, watching a show about self-help books – like, Disney told a whole generation, or two, or even three, that “dreams came true if you follow your heart” and, yes, in most cases that’s just not true and such lofty ideals can lead to crushing disappointment. Don’t even get me started on, “what if the dreams your heart contains don’t fit society’s pre-ordained plan for your demographic?”

But more recently, I’ve gotta say, I’ve started to believe even more that the failing is really just in people at large following the same rules and making the same mistakes that society jokingly excuses as the unavoidable norm. That old thing that we’re beautiful and perfect little children and then we grow up and that there’s no reclaiming innocence once it’s lost so you might as well just accept misery as a fact of life. I no longer buy it – humans are much more capable than that if – like a better movie Bridge To Terabithia, which I watched for the umpteenth time just last night, says – they just keep their mind open. The moment where Giselle fails to sing back to the Prince here made me feel like I was dying inside because the movie was suddenly taking just exactly that horrible turn I’d feared from the start. It’s amazing to me that a movie like this takes such a stance while even a movie like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the one praising the power of the imagination to overpower every sad restraint the world can impose on us.

Enchanted certainly has its moments. I can’t deny Amy Adams’ wondrousness, even though it all gets mostly stripped away in the end; like my mum gasped, “she looks so … ordinary ...”; Giselle seems “happy enough” as do Morgan and Robert in the end. But, and I apologise to those who will surely think I’m overthinking this and desperately looking for a problem, for me it’s all just too real; dare I say even, too “mature”. Do we really want Disney suggesting that “happy enough might be as good as it gets” as someone said in that show I mentioned earlier? Like the opening animation, it all just feels horribly revisionist (not “delightfully” so as one review I’ve read put it): like Disney is “correcting” things that other people told it were mistakes in its past work. Nothing needed revising here; the girl saving the day isn’t a challenging surprise anymore in 2007 … at least, it shouldn’t be. Disney really shouldn’t be so ashamed of their dreaming in the past, and I’m worried they may have ruined their whole catalogue of classics for the current generation of children exposed to this cynical ribbing of the formula.

I’m sure others will think the exact opposite; that this approach is probably a good thing; and I guess they’re probably right, since in the world as it is, it probably, unfortunately, is the most lucrative option. Me, I’ll follow Idina Menzel and the Prince back down the manhole anyday, thanks kindly. Honestly I wish the movie could’ve convinced me that “getting real” was a thing worth doing … but personally I wanted to be more, I don’t know, enchanted? Was that a weird thing to expect given the title? Now I have to wait 20 years for a Girl on the Bridge type sequel. Let’s call it “Disenchanted” ... wherein Idina and the Prince come back from Andalasia just in time to rescue poor Morgan about to jump off the Empire State such woe is future modern life. Can we please start telling our children they can change this nightmare instead of just training them to put up with it? A credit card as fairy godmother? It’s a cute gag, and I laughed, so great is Rachel Covey’s delivery … but thinking back on it, I find it deeply troubling.

What is there to say? This is just a straight continuation of the story in Parent Trap III and as such just as avoidable. One thing I didn’t write in my review there was what I think is these two installments’ biggest failing – they focus way too much on the adults. I guess maybe they were trying to make the movies “grow up” with the fans of the first sequel (which, one supposes, was made since the video generation had just come across the original) – it’s still way too stuffy, even with Hayley Mills still floating around. Glenn Shadix (*Beetle Juice* and Heathers) provides some relief I seem to recall (writing up long after watching again, sorry), but it’s still really sad, even for a TV movie.

Eep. I didn’t need my full attention on this one to know from the start my pleasant surprise at part two wasn’t gonna last long. Threequel means we get triplets – well done – but clearly they cast the only triplets they could find, who all look (ok that’s redundant) like Amy Fisher, and basically this movie serves as a reason why you shouldn’t cast triplets as triplets unless you’re making a porno. They’re bad – and I’m not just saying that ‘cos they’re not cute as Hayley and Lindsay and Carrie etc … but for the record, they’re not

Hayley fares better here than in part two, it’s gotta be said – but that’s perhaps only ‘cos alongside the girls and Barry Bostwick, the frustratingly brief scenes with her simply carry the class she brings to everything she’s in. She even sings a few notes late in the game – okay, it’s about as pointless as Julie Andrews’ singing in Princess Diaries 2 but sometimes it really is the little things, lol. When I realise I’d rather be watching an episode of “Saved By the Bell” ... that’s when a movie is really not good.

This is one of those movies where if I tried to put into words how low my expectations were, it’d still be an understatement. I didn’t even know Hayley Mills had starred in the Parent Trap sequels until just recently; much less that there were three of them … I must have stopped even noticing let alone watching at part III, lol. Even knowing she was in it, I put it on purely because I knew it’d be an easy watch and I could get on with other things while it was on.

In short … it’s really corny, pretty much a retread of the same plot … but, hey, I wasn’t massively keen on the original so there was a lot of room for improvement; and frankly, though of course the Lindsay Lohan version is the one to see, I can see myself coming back to this one far more often than is probably healthy.

Though Hayley Mills somehow manages to look even older here mid-Eighties than she has recently in ITV’s “Wild at Heart” (which, incidentally, she’s so good in that she makes it worth watching), not to mention gagh! the accents … the two girls who set the traps this time around are if anything even more wonderful than she was in the original – I was about as surprised to see Carrie Kei Heim (Santa Claus: The Movie and very little else) as Mills’ daughter here as I was to see Tom Skerritt as the romantic interest, lol. I’m cuckoo when it comes to completely generic little girl activities and from the completely impossible marshmallow and jellybean cookie mix, to blowing bubblegum bubbles on the phone, to laying face down on the bed wiggling feet in the air while blasting the neighbourhood with Eighties sounds, this movie has it all. To say it won’t be to everyone’s taste would be understatement of the week, but for me it was a pleasant surprise and I can only hope the other two sequels are as fun.

I guess the one thing that surprised me most here was how non girly it was. The last comment I saw on the IMDb was like this feminist tract “in defense of girl movies” assuming that all penis-bearers are fatally averse to seeing anything that didn’t portray women as nothing but sex on a stick, which obviously peeved me just a little. This movie contains a song called “Femininity” and that makes it even more astonishing how level-headed it is on the gender divide. And, like I even need to say it, it’s all thanks to Hayley Mills. There’s a wonderful scene where she starts a game of croquet with a young couple and wins it, but only because the young couple clearly have other things to do. “I won!” she yelps after them, then, seeing them off disappearing into the crowd, “I won?” I personally found it more about growing up – or not – than anything else. It’s just light Disney live-action, what else is there to say? All I really feel like repeating is, after Evening – trust me – this is most certainly not girly.

This is overlong and overslow as anything I’ve whined about this past year, but really, how can you argue with such a simple glass-half-full (or rather, glass is full, half of it just happens to be invisible is all, silly!) message delivered by the simply adorable Hayley Mills? There isn’t even a dodgy accent to get in the way. Watch this to see just why the attempts to get Mills to do accents in later productions was so utterly pointless. If you find yourself questioning her natural British one here, why, then you’re just looking for the bad in things