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The driving force behind Enchanted
3 May 2008 02:09 pmEnchanted came in the mail finally a few days ago - it's only been released on DVD in Finland for about a week - and I watched it with great joy. No question that it was my favourite movie of this last year. In an email exchange on the subject, Daddy excited my indignation by saying he wasn't enchanted by it (badum-ching) because he doesn't like embarrassment humour. I consider the embarrassment humour in it quite small - it relies almost 100% on incongruence for its humour, or as Wax called it, "fusion humour" - the meeting of two incompatible worlds and two incompatible worldviews, with lots of misunderstandings and confusion on both sides.
There's little we humans like to laugh at more than at other people's ignorance of our own cultures - most people find this funny even in the case of, for example, exchange students, who have no earthly reason to know anything about it in the first place. A lot of the scenes in Enchanted with Giselle are oddly like Data and Spock scenes in Star Trek. In fact, the resemblance is strong to the numerous Star Trek episodes where they're flung back in time to the contemporary world, like the one with Gary 7 and his shape-shifting cat-woman, or of course, like Star Trek IV. ("He took a little too much LDS in the sixties.") Most of the screentime, in those cases, is filled with a kind of tour of everyday places and situations to allow for the maximum opportunity for the aliens (or the Men from the FUTURE!) (or the, er, characters from a Disney fairytale movie) to react wrong.
Of course, Enchanted is also not only a parody, but an affectionate parody. There are parodies that are capable of standing on their own, like Get Smart and Inspector Gadget, but if you're going to see, oh, Austin Powers without knowing Bond, or "Mathnet" without having seen Dragnet, a great deal of the humour is probably going to be lost on you. If you're of my generation, or younger, then the odds are that you've been over-exposed to Disney movies whether you like it or not. These are shown to children constantly at school, at daycare and aftercare, at summer camp, at birthday parties, so that I've memorized huge chunks of ones that I have not once seen voluntarily. People with my over-exposure are naturally more appreciative of parodies of Disney movies than people who are less familiar with the source. They weren't forcing sprogs to sit still and look at the VHS when my Dad was a kid because they didn't have VHS back then.
And, likewise, if you hated the genre with a fiery passion, the unmistakably affectionate tone of the parody might be off-putting. I read reviews from a few disappointed movie-goers who had apparently anticipated, against all reason, that Disney was going to release a gigantic multi-million dollar parody of the genre that they themselves invented and continue to profit from that would be a scathing social commentary and end by rejecting the Disney aesthetic. Not bloody likely, fools.
There's little we humans like to laugh at more than at other people's ignorance of our own cultures - most people find this funny even in the case of, for example, exchange students, who have no earthly reason to know anything about it in the first place. A lot of the scenes in Enchanted with Giselle are oddly like Data and Spock scenes in Star Trek. In fact, the resemblance is strong to the numerous Star Trek episodes where they're flung back in time to the contemporary world, like the one with Gary 7 and his shape-shifting cat-woman, or of course, like Star Trek IV. ("He took a little too much LDS in the sixties.") Most of the screentime, in those cases, is filled with a kind of tour of everyday places and situations to allow for the maximum opportunity for the aliens (or the Men from the FUTURE!) (or the, er, characters from a Disney fairytale movie) to react wrong.
Of course, Enchanted is also not only a parody, but an affectionate parody. There are parodies that are capable of standing on their own, like Get Smart and Inspector Gadget, but if you're going to see, oh, Austin Powers without knowing Bond, or "Mathnet" without having seen Dragnet, a great deal of the humour is probably going to be lost on you. If you're of my generation, or younger, then the odds are that you've been over-exposed to Disney movies whether you like it or not. These are shown to children constantly at school, at daycare and aftercare, at summer camp, at birthday parties, so that I've memorized huge chunks of ones that I have not once seen voluntarily. People with my over-exposure are naturally more appreciative of parodies of Disney movies than people who are less familiar with the source. They weren't forcing sprogs to sit still and look at the VHS when my Dad was a kid because they didn't have VHS back then.
And, likewise, if you hated the genre with a fiery passion, the unmistakably affectionate tone of the parody might be off-putting. I read reviews from a few disappointed movie-goers who had apparently anticipated, against all reason, that Disney was going to release a gigantic multi-million dollar parody of the genre that they themselves invented and continue to profit from that would be a scathing social commentary and end by rejecting the Disney aesthetic. Not bloody likely, fools.
