Pity poor Princess Giselle. She comes from a world of talking animals and singing princes and everybody lives happily ever after. But evil Queen Narissa has banished her to a strange and terrifying world far beyond her wildest nightmares: New York City.
Fantasy collides with reality in Disney's Enchanted, starring Amy Adams as the beautiful but naive Giselle, X-Men's James Marsden as her handsome true love Prince Edward, Susan Sarandon as the vile, shape-changing Narissa and Patrick Dempsey as Robert Philip, the fuddled city attorney who aids Giselle, who in turn falls in love with him.
"It isn't like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where it's a combination film," says hand-drawn animation supervisor James Baxter. "We aren't animating over live-action plates. There are animated sequences that take place in an animated world, and then live-action sequences that take place in a live-action world."
But who would animate Giselle's world? When production began in 2005, Disney had already dismantled its traditional hand-drawn animation department. Despite the box office and DVD successes of Lilo & Stitch ($145.8 million gross in theaters alone) and Brother Bear ($85 million), the Michael Eisner administration closed the studio's facilities in Paris, Sydney and Orlando, and switched the animators in Burbank to CG production. With no functional pipeline in place, Disney had to look elsewhere for hand-drawn animation.
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