#also if you've never read the ella enchanted book and you're someone who likes fantasy coming of age stories

[magicgills]

was just thinking about everything wrong with the Ella Enchanted movie as far as being a book adaptation and I realized that one of the most bizarre changes was how much added male presence there is in the movie where there previously wasn’t any. Like, this is what I can recall from memory (I read the book once in sixth grade so bear with me):

Slannen was only in the book for like 2 pages as a (reasonably) flat side character who gives Ella some needed essentials on her journey to track down Lucinda (which, by the way, isn’t the driving plot of the book) instead of a supporting character who’s there the entire story and has his own arc.

Char didn’t have an evil uncle in the book. There actually wasn’t any plot to remove Char from the line of succession because the story was about, uh, Ella. There wasn’t really a main antagonist but rather a set of obstacles the Ella had to overcome to free herself. The main one being the curse, but also several others that were usually presented by her own family. There wasn’t any need for a random scary man to come into play.

The magic book ( (the one that movie wrote as a man who got accidentally turned into a book) didn’t have any sentience in the original story, it was just a book. It basically existed as a convenient wikipedia that shows Ella anything she wanted or needed to see, and absolutely never talked.

This isn’t necessarily an “addition” but the change to Ella’s father as a character is also strange. In the movie he’s portrayed as a loving father who knows Ella’s (non-curse related) situation is shitty but encourages her to make the best of it for her own benefit. But in the book he’s callous, having only married his first and second wives for money and only sees his daughter as something to be sold off to any wealthy man who wants to marry her. The only affection he ever even shows Ella is when the curse has caused her to be mindlessly and happily obedient.

There’s a lot of things that went wrong when Ella Enchanted was adapted into a movie. I just find it particularly interesting that while the book was about a young girl who had to (on her own) find a way to free herself from the curse of obedience and learn self-sufficiency, the movie makes it that she needs the help of men in the story and feature them more heavily in narrative.

One of the aforementioned men (+ Char, to some extent) gets a storyline that crowds around Ella’s and makes the story much less her own, which I think is ultimately what takes the heart out of the story and turns into a cheap knockoff