#and yeah i found Fairest inferior to Ella Enchanted because the plot wasn't as tightly textured

[whetstonefires]

Ooh do you have a pent up rant on Ella Enchanted? I loved that movie as a kid and tried the book when I got older, but I didn't like it (I loved Fairest, which was set in the same universe by the same author so 🤷‍♀️). I'd love to hear any thoughts you have on it!

Hahaha 🤘 okay going for it! I’m specifically of the age that Ella Enchanted was one of my top five reread books as a child and I was in high school when the movie came out, so.

Among other things I think reading the book when ‘older’ is a funny idea because. It’s a children’s book. How old were you when you saw the movie for the book to be later?? I guess it is appropriate for fairly little kids, come to think about it, although small-child me would not have liked it. On its own merits, without taking its failures as an adaptation into consideration.

And okay, queue the salt. The Ella Enchanted movie is such a bad adaptation. Record-setting. It contains none of the significant themes, worldbuilding, or basic narrative content of the book other than item: attend a giantish wedding, and only about 4% of all characterization.

The titular enchantment isn’t even the same--movie Ella effectively has superpowers as a result of her curse, since telling her to ‘freeze’ actually stops her midair etc. The fact that book!Ella doesn’t have superpowers of any kind but if you order her to do something impossible she’ll be compelled to try anyway, and keep trying until released or dead even if her body breaks in the attempt, is one of the underlying threats driving the fear of her curse that hangs over the whole story.

Obviously, the film people took it a different direction. I guess feeling that ‘the helpless anxiety of being at the mercy of others’ is not a child-appropriate subject despite being relevant to the experience of basically all children ever.

And it’s not even like, a sincerely bad adaptation! It’s solidly kitsch, cynical to the bone, a deliberate series of decisions to be as screamingly shallow as humanly possible to maximize marketability over all. This is by rights a soulless B-movie with the budget of a god.

It’s really an incredibly terrible adaptation of the book, which is a slow, thoughtful, character-driven work whose final act in particular is highly psychological. (By the standards of children’s literature, obvs.) With a main romance that develops through several stages over a number of years based on personality and respect foremost, and several other key relationships that all have their own unique tone and process, mostly with women. The fairy godmother--the actual one, not that terror Lucinda--is one of the main characters and they cut her from the film entirely because no part of her was compatible with the kind of flash and glitz story they were telling. It is really a masterwork in ‘not actually adapting this material in any meaningful way.’

The fact that this towering stack of complete corporate-workshopped disaster nonsense manages to be pretty fun to watch even as someone with an attachment to the book (i get mad about the ogre and elf writing choices but for their internal inconsistencies rather than wrt the book) is really a testament to the passionately hamtastic performances of the whole cast, and Anne Hathaway in particular. She’s just very capable and I respect both her talents and her work ethic.

Also the editing team did an excellent job; the pacing is so tight in just the way you need in a comedy. And everyone involved in the visuals, actually; I don’t think they made the right movie but the movie they made is visually cohesive in a satisfying way.

The script is such incredible horseshit though, I cannot. 😂 But, I mean, in a way it’s good they bolted out the gate with inanity, once your expectations are on the floor you cannot be disappointed. (This is I think the principle the new Batman film employs with the 500% cheese opening voiceover; it works.)

The Ghibli Howl’s Moving Castle (another childhood favorite) actually wound up bothering me a lot more because it started out as a reasonable adaptation more or less and then lost all the significant themes and story beats as it went. When the key strength of DWJ’s writing style was how it would start out meandering and low-stakes, and then tighten into a needlepoint as you got to the end.

But that is the wrong salt! Lmao.

So yeah I’m not mad about the movie--well, a little right now, because making a movie that wildly different from a book creates that exact phenomenon you describe, of people being disappointed by something really good because it’s nothing like its derived material.

But. Wow. Ella Enchanted. Did you ever see anything so Hollywood in your life.