Ella Enchanted (2004)

Ella Enchanted arrived in 2004 as a modestly budgeted satire of the fairy tale, adapted loosely from Gail Carson Levine's novel, and it sank at the box office before settling into a comfortable cult afterlife. The premise is a good one: a newborn receives the gift of obedience from a careless fairy and spends the rest of the film trying to shed it. Anne Hathaway sings, charms, and carries the whole contraption on her shoulders. The film is aware of its own silliness and mostly enjoys it.

The feminist reading here is not subtle, but it is also not scolding. Ella's problem is literalized as a curse that forces her to obey any command, and her liberation comes when she orders herself to stop. That is a clean metaphor for self-determination, and the film lets it land without a sermon. The Cinderella machinery gets rearranged: the prince is a decent sort, the stepfamily is petty instead of monstrous, and the rescue is self-administered. A closing toast about a new era of equality supplies the moral, delivered through a dance number, which is the correct delivery system for a moral.

The cast is noticeably multiracial in a way the film never announces. Vivica A. Fox plays the fairy godmother, Parminder Nagra is the childhood friend, Jimi Mistry spends much of the running time as a talking book, and Heidi Klum towers as a giantess. Nobody remarks on any of it, which in 2004 was its own quiet statement. A subplot about laws oppressing elves and giants gestures toward social allegory, though it keeps the argument safely inside the realm of fantasy species. The film has no interest in the bedroom, the climate, the economy, the body, or the mind. It wants to be a lark with a spine, and it succeeds at roughly that.