Monday, December 6, 2010

Beauty and the Beast: Enchanted Christmas

Perhaps one of the most frustrating things about Enchanted Christmas is largely the fact that it is a Midquel. Taking place just after Belle tries to run away, but before she goes to save her father we find that she decides to try and reintroduce Christmas back to the castle. I'm just going to set aside how destructive the whole story is towards the timeline in the movie, lest I rant endlessly.

Moving along! The story actually starts with Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs. Potts and Chip as they try and remember who it was that saved Christmas. Both Lumiere and Cogsworth argue about it until they finally settle on having poor Mrs. Potts tell the story of what really happened. Upon viewing this I noticed how villainous Cogsworth looks as a human. I personally think it's the mustache.

As the story is retold, we are introduced to a host of brand new characters. Some new friendly characters include Bernadette Peters as Angelique, the castle decorator and a talking axe who frustrates both myself and Belle with his dialogue. We also encounter Fife, who doesn't realize at first that he's a good guy and works with the villainous Forte, the court composer and is played by Tim Curry.

All told, we get two passable characters and two clunkers. The story itself seems to drag on quite a lot and filled with many events that supposedly only take place over the course of a couple days. It probably takes a lot of skill to make a short movie drag on, yet Enchanted Christmas does it wonderfully. The visuals and songs are alright, obviously having nothing on the original film but there is at least signs that Disney put effort into this film unlike later "cheapquels"

The movie itself is probably best left to the hardcore fans, even then most hardcore Disney fans share a disdain of any sequel, or to the rather young. The one other sign that shows how much work Disney put into this was the fact that they hired back all of the original voice actors for their characters, save Maurice who I believe had no dialogue but is seen briefly. The one small thing that rather disturbed me was during the end as Beast destroys Forte (who was turned into a huge organ). This really made me stop to wonder what Forte looked like after the spell was broken. Did he stay as an organ, or did he turn back into a human just....dismembered? Also. What did they do with "the body" and why are they so unfazed by the fact this guy isn't alive anymore? You could watch the first film to try and find out, but due to the laws of "Big Lipped Alligator Moment" the characters can't talk about it.

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