Ella Enchanted

Ella Enchanted is a movie I saw a few too many times when I was younger. Having 3 sisters, one of them having read the book about a billion times, really enjoyed watching this movie. Now I haven’t seen it in several years but as I was watching it, I kept on getting flashbacks and déjà vu to certain scenes and just inflections of dialogue that I remember seeing when I was younger. It was kind of a weird experience because I do not know the movie that well at all but every so often, certain parts would sneak their way into my consciousness and it was actually really entertaining for me

But what is Ella Enchanted about?

Ella Enchanted is basically the story of Cinderella… sort of. It’s your typical set up, girl grows up with a happy family, the mother unfortunately dies, the father remarries a woman for her money and that step mother and her horrible daughters make the girl’s life a living hell. However, the story takes a little bit of a turn when the main conflict is that Ella was blessed at birth with the gift of complete obedience. If someone tells her to do something, she does it right away. In the movie its really played off as sad but a little funny at times. However, after watching Jessica Jones, I can’t help but feel there was a darker cut of that story that we really, really don’t want to see.

The main story is Ella (played by Anne Hathaway) going on a journey to find the fairy godmother who gave Ella the gift of obedience, and get her to reverse it. Along the way she is accompanied by a talking book, an elf that wants to be a lawyer, and a handsome prince. All the while the country she travels through is going through cute fantasy politics and Ella turns out to be just the right person with the right amount of heart to turn the country around.

Now I’ve never read the book so I don’t know how closely the movie follows the source material. I don’t know if the book was as self-aware as the movie was but I imagine the movie had to draw inspiration from something. The movie is aware that its retelling a classic fairy tale but with a twist. The thing is, even in 2004, retelling Fairy Tales with a twist wasn’t anything new. Shrek had done it already and Shrek 2, which I think did it a lot better came out the same year. (I don’t know which one was first). Especially now where Fairy Tales have been twisted and shaped every which way, it’s almost refreshing to get a movie like Cinderella which came out last year that actually remains true to the source material in a pretty straight forward way. This isn’t to say the story is bad, the way its executed is just very indicative of the times and I don’t think it aged that well.

And that’s partly because the setting itself is also not that great. Now I remember watching it as a kid and remember seeing this fantasy world that wasn’t quite modern but had a lot of modern things in it, like an escalator. Now the escalator is run by hand cranks but if you’re not really paying attention you’ll just think there’s escalators in a fantasy world. Furthermore the way they talk is very modern and the issues Ella brings up are very modern issues. It’s not the same backwards thinking that you would think people would have in a fantasy world.

Here’s my issue: you can tell they didn’t have much of a budget with this film.  I mean yes this was the early 2000s and CGI was still finding its place in the world so that’s going to be a little shotty, but even the sets just looked cheap. I understand that they wanted to get a modern yet fantasy like feeling to the movie but some of the sets looked very cheap and obviously a set piece and it obviously looked out of place. Furthermore, the costume design is also not really impressive looking and it really looks as though something a community theater could create.

I hate to keep on comparing this movie with Shrek but the interesting part about the comparison is that they are essentially doing the same thing. Its modern people set in a fantasy setting and making jokes about our society in that fantasy world. The thing is, Shrek was able to do it better because it was animated. They were able to create a larger world and yet keep it modern and keep it very tongue and cheek. Ella Enchanted just looks a little cheap and something you might see in a play and not in a movie.

But that’s just the setting, all of that can be put aside if the story is good right? Well I already mentioned that this movie is another one of those stories that takes a fairy tale and puts a twist on it. Instead of Ella singing with birds and wishing for her prince to come, she’s a strong independent woman with liberal ideas compared to the establishment of the country. Now, she’s like that… to a fault. At a certain point she definitely falls in love with the Prince and it kind of seems like she goes off and does her princess thing and doesn’t exactly continue her activism. Sure she might have changed the ideas of the Prince but it kind of seems like she gives up all those beliefs once she puts on a pretty dress.

And Ella isn’t the only character who is really surface level. The entire cast seems very upbeat and happy almost to a point where it’s kind of annoying. I’m not saying the movie needed to be more dark and gritty, it just had a definitely campy and upbeat theme that was definitely meant for kids, especially young girls.

And then there’s the songs. I’m not totally sure why this movie is a half juke box musical because the music is really inconsistent. The majority of the movie is just a fairy tale with a twist but then they throw in some modern rock song like Somebody to Love or Don’t Go Breakin my Heart. And it wouldn’t be that bad if it wasn’t so obviously dubbed over. For Hathaway, this movie is definitely a few vocal sessions before her Fantine performance in Les Miserables. It’s not horrible, it’s just definitely dubbed over and edited to sound perfect for a campy movie like Ella Enchanted.

Speaking of Hathaway, you can definitely tell this was one of the last straws for her before she did Havoc and tried to make herself be taken more seriously as an actress. The script for this movie is kind of painful at times but Hathaway does her best to make it work and commit to it.

That is not really the case with a lot of the actors in this movie including Hugh Dancy and Minnie Driver. A lot of the actors in this movie a just phoning it in for the paycheck because they understand how campy and cheap this movie is.

The biggest contrary to that statement is Cary Elwes. I swear, it doesn’t matter how cheesy, how campy something is, Cary Elwes always brings it. You can tell he’s having fun with being the obvious bad guy.

Overall, if you go into Ella Enchanted knowing that it’s going to be campy, it’s probably made for kids, and you’re not expecting too much. But as a movie, it’s nothing thought provoking and what it’s trying to do has been done better and will be done better in the future as well.

It’s unfortunate because if I recall correctly, the book of Ella Enchanted is a pretty well-known and well written book. I could see this being a lot cleverer of a movie if more time and money were put into it. But for what it is, I think it’s entertaining enough. It’s cheesy, it’s campy, it’s ridiculous and it’s not for everyone.

If you have kids there are probably better films out there you can show your kids than Ella Enchanted and if you’re an adult, Ella Enchanted isn’t really for you. It’s not the worst thing to ever happen because the movie can be fun, but overall it’s kind of cheap and not as ground breaking as I think it thought it was at the time.

But what do you think? Did you see Ella Enchanted? What did you think of it? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your thoughts for future requests I should do. If you follow me on Twitter you can also get updates on future movies and TV shows I review on this site.

I'll leave you with this. You can definitely see that Anne Hathaway has come a long way from her performance of Somebody to Love in Ella Enchanted. Here is her singing I Dreamed a Dream from Les Mis. Enjoy!