Ella Enchanted is the ideal title for a film intended for those of us who are dis-enchanted by Disney.
What Disney realized long ago, and the public realized only recently, is that the fantasy film is the perfect genre for layering a movie with symbolically coded ideologies.
Miramax, which is only quasi-Disney, codes its children's film Ella Enchanted with a decidedly alternative philosophy from the reactionary one we've come to expect from the House that Mickey Built.
Unfortunately, director Tommy O'Haver's film is affected by that strange gravity that keeps all children's films under the 100-minute mark. Can you imagine if Peter Jackson had only 95 minutes to tell one of the Tolkien stories? You certainly wouldn't see the same depth with those films if they were cut in half (again).
Nevertheless, O'Haver is forced to race through the exposition of Ella Enchanted at such a breakneck pace that he pays little, if any, attention to detail and nuance in the storytelling. Wisely, he cast Anne Hathaway as Ella, the Cinderella figure, who is stricken by a spell that makes her obedient.
Her electric charisma more than accounts for the lack of dimension written into her character.
Meanwhile, the self-contained fantasy world of Ella Enchanted features the quirkiest, most inventive production design I've seen in a Hollywood movie since 2002's Minority Report.
There are also some hilariously potent pop-culture jokes amidst the piquant scenery, particularly when Ella's stepmother tries to look younger for the big ball by getting a "Bat-ox" injection to remove her wrinkles.
The most interesting thing about Ella Enchanted is its underlying Marxist slant. The ogres, giants and elves in the film all complain of unfair discrimination and exploitation by the Kingdom, which is run by an evil Cary Elwes (though this adjective is becoming redundant for the actor) and his accomplice Heston, the slyly named talking snake.
For Ella, a zealous liberal despite her curse, championing the minority cause is her primary motivation; her romance with the handsome, if clueless, Prince Charmont is decidedly secondary. Eventually, she leads the oppressed wage slaves in storming the castle in an action that, while bloodless martial arts fun, can't help but resemble a Marxist coup.
Tied in with both motivations, however, is the existential challenge posed to Ella by that nasty old curse, which gets her into serious, as well as hilarious, trouble when she takes what people say too literally.
Ella Enchanted's not a great movie. For one thing, its musical sequences are lazy, contrived attempts to mimic Shrek, something the rest of the film does a good job of avoiding. Using contemporary rock music anachronistically has almost completely exhausted its novelty by now, and the sooner filmmakers realize this, the better. Some of the jokes fall flat, too, but enough of them work to get by.
Besides, regardless of the humor content, Ella is still consistently energetic, unpredictable and extremely fun to watch. For once, the twists in a fairy tale caught me by surprise -- probably because I was busy admiring the set pieces and marveling at the story's rich subtext -- and the surprises kept coming, never shifting into Hollywood auto-pilot.
So, go see Ella Enchanted. Seriously. And drag a date or an economic conservative along with you.
