Fairy tales always end right after the wedding, so I was curious what Enchanted would do with a story that kept going past "happily ever after."
Giselle is a princess-to-be in Andalasia, living in a hand-drawn animated world where everything follows fairy-tale rules, true love's kiss solves everything, animals talk, and villains are easy to spot. On the eve of her wedding to Prince Edward, his stepmother, Queen Narissa, shoves her down a wishing well to get rid of her for good, and Giselle lands somewhere fairy-tale logic doesn't apply at all, New York City.
The fun of the movie comes from watching her try to function in a world that refuses to cooperate. She meets Robert, a divorce lawyer who's built his whole worldview around the idea that fairy-tale romance is a lie kids grow out of, and his daughter Morgan, who still wants to believe otherwise. Giselle moves into their apartment, and there's a standout scene where she tries to clean the place the way she would back home, calling on animals for help, except in New York that means rats, pigeons, and cockroaches showing up instead of woodland creatures.
What makes the movie work is the slow tug-of-war between Giselle's certainty that true love is simple and instant, and Robert's belief that real relationships take work and rational compatibility. Neither one fully wins the argument, they just start meeting somewhere in the middle.
Back in Andalasia, Edward sets out to rescue her, chipmunk sidekick Pip in tow, while Narissa follows them into New York herself, unwilling to let Giselle return and threaten her rule. Things come to a head at a ball, where Narissa reveals her true colors and transforms into a massive dragon right in front of everyone, climbing a building with Robert in her grip.
What gets me about the ending is that it's Giselle who goes after her, not Edward. She's the one who climbs up after Robert, and it's her resolve, not magic or a prince's sword, that ultimately brings Narissa down. Robert ends up with Giselle, Edward finds his own unexpected love back in the real world, and even Nancy, who Robert was seeing before all this, gets swept off to Andalasia herself, which feels like a nice way of giving everyone their own ending instead of just one couple's.
What stuck with me is that the movie doesn't mock fairy tales, it just lets two very different ways of seeing love bump into each other and sees what survives. If you want something funny, warm, and a little self-aware about its own genre, Enchanted is worth the watch.