Enchanted

The most recent hybrid film, Enchanted was released in 2007, directed by Kevin Lima. Starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Timothy Spall, Idina Menzel, and Susan Sarandon, the film grossed $340.5 million. It also won the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards for Best Family Film and the Saturn Award for the Best Fantasy Film.

In the animated land of Andalasia, Giselle (Adams) falls in love with Prince Edward (Marsden) and are to be wed the next day. But Queen Narissa (Sarandon) doesn’t want to surrender the thrown and throws Giselle down a portal to live action New York City.

Enchanted is quite an interesting film, especially where it makes fun of and deconstructs many of the tropes found in the princess genre. Calling all the native animals to help clean the apartment comes to mind. No one seems to mind when it’s birds, rabbits and cute mice helping you out. But when it’s hamsters, rats, and cockroaches, there’s a bit of a problem there. It also deconstructed true love far before Frozen ever did too, noting just how absurd falling in love in a matter of seconds is.

But there’s more than just parody, there’s clever nods to other movies. When Giselle is looking at a fish tank in Robert’s office, his secretary is played by Jodi Benson. Edward watches a soap opera staring Paige O’Hara. The Italian restaurant Giselle and Robert eat at is La Bella Notte. Narissa.

But the biggest issue with this film is Giselle’s character. She’s far too… happy. So happy that it’s kind of nauseating. And she doesn’t execute the “fish out of water” trope well. But whenever the scene isn’t focused on her, the film is really good.

#59, narrowly avoiding the Edge of Satisfaction. Thanks Giselle. 

Ratatouille

The eighth Pixar film was released in 2007, directed by Brad Bird. Starring Patton Oswalt, Ian Holm, Lou Romano, Brian Dennehy, Peter Sohn, Peter O’Toole, Brad Garrett, and Janeane Garofalo, Ratatouille grossed over $600 million. Nominated for 58 award it won 38, including The Academy Award for Best Animated Film, The Annie Award for Best Animated Feature, The Golden Globe for Best Animated Film, and the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack.

A rat named Remy (Oswalt) has a highly developed sense of taste and smell and is dissatisfied with eating garbage. Winding up in Paris, he gets the chance to be a cook at the restaurant founded by his idol, Auguste Gusteau (Garrett). However, he must do it by making a deal with the restaurant’s garbage boy, Linguini (Romano) who has been mistaken for a cooking genius.

Ratatouille is an incredibly fun film that has an interesting antagonist while also featuring side characters that have a side story that’s actually engaging.

A rat that can cook and wants to subvert humanity’s perception of his species. It seems like an odd concept, but so does every other Pixar film. Remy and Linguini make an interesting connection that lets the two fool nearly everyone into thinking the latter is actually a master chef. And then there’s Skinner who continually comes off as more and more insane as the film goes on.

But Skinner’s not the main antagonist, that role falls to Anton Ego. And while making a food critic seem like a terrifyingly sadistic person seems hard, Pixar pulls it off. It certainly doesn’t help that he finds a weird enjoyment in providing negative reviews and making restaurants suffer.

And then there’s the side story romance between Linguini and Collette. While an idea like this could seem, and most often is, incredibly cliché, it works for this movie. Mainly because when she storms off, she comes back not because of something Linguini or Remy said, but because she recalls that Gusteau believed artists can come from anywhere. What Gusteau meant by that is also a clever way for Ego to soften.

#12

Meet the Robinsons

In 2007, the first film to be released under the direction of new CEO John Lasseter hit theaters. Starring Jordan Fry, Wesley Singerman, Harland Williams, Tom Kenny, Steve Anderson, Angela Bassett, Laurie Metcalf, Adam West, Tom Selleck, and Nicole Sullivan, Meet the Robinsons grossed $169.3 million worldwide. It also got its own video game.

Twelve year old orphan inventor Lewis (Fry) is attempting to find a family. However, he has a breakthrough that allows him to invent a machine that can illustrate forgotten memories. However, a tall man in a bowler hat (Anderson) breaks and steals the machine, which leads Lewis to travel into the future to meet the Robinsons (Singerman, Anderson, Sullivean, Williams, Bassett, Metcalf, West, Selleck, Ethan Sandler, Paul Butcher and Don Hall).

With this film, the darkness of the Eisner era ended and the Lasseter era begun. And what a film to start off with.

Meet the Robinsons  is basically what Chicken Little should have been, with humor that has good follow up, fun characters and story with quite a bit of heart.

The film, while not a straight up comedy, has lots of humorous moments, with some of the funniest involving Little DOR-15. Possessing the Frank Sinatra frog and the T-Rex is great in and of itself, but the joke that comes from it where what Bowler Hat Guy (BHG) doesn’t’ think his plans through is perfect. And nearly all of BHG’s mannerisms have their ways of getting at least a chuckle.

The humor is also what makes the characters, and their quirks, so much fun. An interstellar pizza guy? Life size toy trains? Wooden puppet wife? Teaching frogs to sing? Every Robinson has a quirk and while there are time where it’s overdone, those times are few and far between. Fact is, this is one of Disney’s best character driven films.

And the characters and their interactions with each other is what gives the story so much heart. The family congratulating each other in their failures and helping Lewis to realize that failure isn’t the end, but just a way to not do something was a theme long missing in Disney lore until now. In fact, this film’s story in and of itself could possibly be an apology from the studio about everything it released post-renaissance up til this point in time.

#8