LIMA, KEVIN

Oct. 15, 2007

LIMA, KEVIN

by Ethan Alter

Disney cartoons have inspired numerous spoofs and parodies over the decades—the most recent being a series of YouTube videos featuring iconic characters like Simba and Winnie the Pooh singing along to the hit rap single "Crank That"—but the company's newest film Enchanted represents the first time that the House that Walt Built has taken satirical aim at itself.

An animation/live-action hybrid, Enchanted follows a typical Disney princess named Giselle (Oscar nominee Amy Adams in her first big-budget star turn) who takes a decidedly atypical journey from her hand-drawn fairy-tale existence to the all-too-real mean streets of New York City. There she learns how to lead a three-dimensional life with the help of Manhattan's version of Prince Charming—a dashing, well-off divorce attorney (played by Dr. McDreamy himself, Patrick Dempsey)—and his young daughter.

The premise allows the filmmakers numerous opportunities to poke fun at standard Disney conventions, like the characters' propensity for breaking out into song at random moments, as well as their absurd reliance on woodland creatures to help with the housework. But Enchanted director Kevin Lima insists that the ribbing is all in good fun. "It’s all done with a loving heart," he says on the phone from the airport, en route to San Francisco from his hometown of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where he was recently honored with a prestigious local artists' award as well as the key to the city. "It’s not at all mean-spirited and it isn’t cynical. I love Disney movies so much, I couldn’t help but love the material as opposed to just poking fun at it."

Lima is serious about his love for Disney movies. As a child, he dreamed of growing up to become an animator at the Mouse House, a dream that eventually became reality in the 1980s when the CalArts graduate joined the studio and cut his teeth on such productions as Oliver & Company and The Little Mermaid. In 1995, he got the chance to helm his own animated feature, A Goofy Movie, and his work on that film landed him a co-directing gig on Disney's 1999 summer blockbuster Tarzan. The following year he made the leap to live-action filmmaking with 102 Dalmatians and never looked back to his animated roots...that is, until he was offered Enchanted.

"It's a project that's been in development at Disney for about nine years," he remembers. "I read the script right after I did 102 Dalmatians and I knew immediately it was the movie for me. But at the time another director was attached, so it didn't work out. Then, about two years ago, I was doing some last-minute help on Disney's The Wild and they asked me, 'Do you want to do this movie for us?' and I was like, 'Of course!' It’s exactly the type of movie I’ve always wanted to do, in that it brings together all of the disciplines—CG animation, 2D animation and live action—I adore into one film. And that's just a big thrill."

As taken as Lima was with the idea of Enchanted, he felt the script wasn't quite where it needed to be. Like a lot of long-in-development projects, the screenplay had passed through numerous hands during its long journey to the big screen, eventually ending back on the desk of Bill Kelly, the writer who originally pitched the idea to Disney. Working with Kelly, Lima revised the script with an animator's eye towards the material. "I developed it as I would have developed an animated film," he says. "We storyboarded a lot, did a lot of visual exploration and came up with a lot of ideas that only happen because an artist puts a pencil to paper." Using this approach, Lima was able to ultimately present the studio with a clear idea of what the movie was going to be before he had even shot one frame of film.

Lima’s background as a veteran Disney animator came in handy in another important way as well. "Because I know the Disney iconography really well, I brought a whole sense of what it is to be a Disney production to the movie. I embraced the sense that this could be a Disney movie from top to bottom and there are major sequences that came out of that idea."

One such set-piece that draws on the director's encyclopedic knowledge of the Disney canon is what Lima calls the "Happy Working Song" scene. "It's a spoof of every princess with her furry friends song ever made," he explains. "What happens is that in the animated portion that begins the movie we see Giselle call out to her little bunny and chipmunk friends to help her clean up the house. Then in the live-action world we mirror that, but instead of bunnies and chipmunks, she gets rats and pigeons and cockroaches. It’s a great way to make fun of Disney while still winking affectionately." (Old-school Disney fans will also want to keep their eyes peeled for numerous references to the company's long history that have been strewn throughout the film, an idea that Lima says he came up with fairly late in the process.)

Perhaps Lima's biggest contribution to the script was establishing a consistent tone. "When we first wrote the piece, we had a few scenes that had a lot of innuendo in them. There were a lot of lines that played adult and childlike at the same time. We realized that it felt too mean-spirited and brought the material down in a way. It just set the wrong tone—you can't be cynical about the material and love it at the same time. It gets the audience expecting one type of movie—which we’ve seen already—when the heart of the movie is not that at all."

For Lima, the heart of the film really involves Giselle's physical and, more importantly, emotional transformation from a two-dimensional cartoon character into a flesh-and-blood woman. Her internal struggle is further complicated by the love triangle with Dempsey's lawyer Robert and Prince Edward (James Marsden), her animated betrothed who follows her into the real world and does battle with a New York City public bus to win her back.

Lima knew it was imperative to cast an actress who would be able to find these dramatic layers in a character that could just as easily be played as a caricature. As soon as Adams walked through the casting director's door, he knew he had found Giselle. "Amy was absolutely my only choice. The day she came in, I had a fever and was as sick as a dog, but during her audition she made me completely forget I was sick. In that, I knew I had the only person who could play this role. I also knew that I wanted to cast someone who was a relatively unknown actress, because I wanted the character to live first. If you have a big name in that role, you'll be watching the performance through the eyes of their personal lives. I’m constantly amazed by how finely tuned Amy's performance is. Whenever I watch the movie, I’m always finding new things—it’s not at all a surface performance and I think that’s what makes her shine in this role. It would have been very easy just to play the caricature and she refuses to do that."

Adams' subtle rendering of the heroine's transformation sets up the message that Lima hopes audiences take away from the film, one that tweaks another classic Disney convention, namely the "And they lived happily after ever" ending. "I think ultimately what the movie says is that happily ever afters can happen, they're just a little harder to have. You have to work for them in our world now and that's not a bad thing. Being able to work for your happily ever after is a very, very good thing and you don't have to change who you are to do it. That's a real lesson I've learned, that I have to be who I am. I don't have to toughen myself up in order to survive in the film business. It was a hard lesson to learn because you see there's so much success now placed upon the gritty or the ultra-unusual or the twist or the cynical. And I'm just not that guy.”

Lima continues, "I'm very fortunate in that I'm able make the kind of films that I would want to see. I don’t know how to make the other kind, to be honest with you. I don’t make a lot of movies, mostly because I don’t often come across material that I love. It’s been sort of a difficult road because of that, so finding this movie was really a blessing in many ways. The material came to me, I understood it and the studio believed in me and let me go in and work on it myself. And what I wanted more than anything was to make a classic Disney film. I would love for Enchanted to be called the modern-day Mary Poppins.”

With this experience under his belt, Lima hopes to exert even more creative control over his future projects, which could include a sequel to Enchanted, depending on the film's box-office performance. "I'd have a very hard time letting go. You become very attached to these things—in many ways, they're like children. In fact, I've already been tossing around a few ideas that go a little bit deeper into the Disney iconography."

At the same time, Lima is looking to develop some of his own original stories and not necessarily for Disney. While none of these films are animated features ("It would take a mighty great story for me to spend four to five years making a movie," he says), they do draw on his undying affection for the medium. "All the movies I want to make exist as if they were animated films in the real world. I've always carried that sensibility. Twenty years ago, the kind of live-action movies I want to make would have been impossible. But now with all this new technology, it's very possible to transport viewers to other worlds and create characters who couldn't exist here." And even the most jaded New Yorkers would have to admit that a fairy-tale princess wandering through Times Square isn't something you see every day.