The familiar sound of Amy Adams cooing, lilting her Disney princess “oohs…” and “aahs…,” and then speaking to the animals on a balcony: Finally, the world seems right again.
Of course, as with everything in life, things are quite different now than they were in 2007, when things seem decidedly more…Enchanted.
The first trailer and a slew of preview photos of the new Disney sequel Disenchanted arrived Friday evening.
When we’re finally reunited with Adams’ Giselle, she’s no longer an endearingly naive princess from the kingdom of Andalasia. She’s living in New York City with her unexpected Prince Charming, Patrick Dempsey’s Robert, a cynical divorce attorney whose heart she melted, and their children. The balcony she’s singing from: that of a Manhattan apartment.
In the trailer, Giselle seems to want to show her family a bigger, more “enchanted” home: A dilapidated country house that needs some love…and Giselle’s optimism. “That’s not an adventure, that’s a landfill,” her step-daughter says. “A land filled with adventure,” Giselle corrects her.
The new family receives a visit from their old friends, Idina Menzel’s Nancy, who used to be Robert’s girlfriend, and James Marsden’s Prince Edward, who went back to live in Andalasia together at the end of the events in Enchanted, whirl in for a visit and are slightly mortified by what they see. Marsden, Hollywood’s O.G. himbo (sorry, not sorry, to Channing Tatum), says, “Once your peasants have dug out the moat and added a turret and a balcony from which you can sing. I can see it now.”
Eventually, the fixer-upper becomes too overwhelming. “In Andalasia, the hardest part of life is finding your happily ever after,” Giselle confides in Nancy. “This world’s very different.” Prince Edward’s advice: “If the world is not to your liking, then you must change it.”
Giselle resorts to wishing again, and things start to spiral. At first, everything seems magical. The house becomes a castle. Everyone in the neighborhood becomes some sort of Disney trope of a character. But things devolve. The magic does dark things. Giselle, it seems, is fighting off a transformation from heroine to wicked step-mother. “I wished for a fairy tale life and it’s all gone terribly wrong…” and then, as her voice adopts a dastardly dark tone, “...or terribly right.”
We get first glimpses at Maya Rudolph’s new evil character, as well as new ones played by Yvette Nicole Brown and Jayma Mays.
Famously, Amy Adams should have been nominated for an Oscar for this first Enchanted film. (A hill we will die on.) A hotly anticipated sequel that we’ve waited 15 years for is the consolation prize we deserve.
Disenchanted premieres on Disney+ on Nov. 24.
