The place with no happily-ever-after endings

Student: Busto Daniela

Is our world a "place where there are no happily-ever-after endings"? At least Susan Sarandon as the wicked stepmother in the movie “Enchanted” thinks so.

“Enchanted” is a 2007 American film, produced by Walt Disney. The plot deals with Giselle’s story (Amy Adams). She is a girl who lives in Andalasia (a fairy tale world) waiting for a man that truly loves her. Giselle’s life starts to change when she thinks she has met her true love, Edward (James Marsden) who fortunately is a prince. Queen Narissa (performed by Susan Sarandon) Edward's stepmother is committed to maintain the throne she currently occupies. So, in order to prevent Edwards’s marriage, she enchants Giselle and sends the poor girl to an awful world, where suffering and anger exist, and where there are a lot of problems. Well, what is that? That is our world.

After some misadventures in this crazy world of stress and shallowness, Giselle runs into Robert (Patrick Dempsey), a lawyer and single parent who lives in New York with his six-year-old daughter. Noticing Giselle so disoriented, the child asks her father to let the strange girl stay in their house. Once the girl from Andalasia is established in this new world, she realizes that she doesn’t like this awful place, so she tries to find the way to make it a better one and fortunately succeeds in doing that. In short, “Enchanted” portrays our world as a horrible place where problems and unfortunate situations exist but telling children, (and adults, why not?) that they can still believe in happy endings.

To the delight of optimistic people, the movie takes negative everyday situations and turns them into positive ones. We know, for instance, that there are big amounts of disgusting insects everywhere; but when Giselle recruits cockroaches to help her clean Robert's apartment, it makes you think they are not so bad. Despite the fact that you are not going to use these little creatures to clean your house, and you know that this is a typical fairy tale situation, you can feel that the film producers are telling you “come on, don’t be negative. Do your best and turn ugly things into nice ones”.

Take, for example, the scene when Giselle experiments anger for the very first time. She tells Robert that she is angry because people in “the new world” are negative and they don’t even try to find a solution to their problems; they just complaint about them. She concludes asking “Why are you like that?” and starts to laugh because she is felling something new. Although the felling is a negative one, she celebrates the fact that she can become more familiar with her current surroundings.

“Enchanted” second attraction is the parallelism presented between the Fairy tale world, Andalasia, and our real world. Every Disney Princess sings accompanied by her friends, which are lovely singing animals. Well, in this case Giselle is joined to street musicians who become her friends and help her perform “That’s how you know”, a song that tells us about the joy of being loved.

It can be said that beasts are compared to buses because of their size or the noise they make. But we can say also that this comparison is just a joke directed to buses drivers who feel that in the concrete jungle they are the most powerful. But, what about the fairy godmother? There’s no woman with sweet face, grey hair and shiny dress who is the person that makes the princess wishes come true. In her place, we have a flat plastic rectangle called “Credit card”, that is what helps Giselle to look amazing for the King's and Queen's Costume Ball. It’s well known that credit cards don’t grant us things just because; we have to pay for them when bills come. But in a way “the plastics” are what can save you in a fashion emergency just like fairy godmothers do.

Everybody knows life in our world is difficult. There are problems and very unpleasant situations everywhere and every day. However, it’s not fair to say that happiness does not exist. The thing is that our lives are quite different from the ones presented in fairy tale stories. Despite the fact that we can’t ask cockroaches to help us cleaning our houses, we can do our best to turn negative situations into positive ones in order to manage them as good as possible and to have our own happy endings. Yes, with problems and everything.