Enchanted: Happily Ever After is Possible

By Hannah Goodwyn
CBN.com Producer

CBN.com - Amour. Amore. Love.

It is Disney’s hallmark to entertain audiences with an animated story about a young girl wishing for her Prince Charming. This time around the famous studio brings a unique twist to their classic tales by thrusting a cartoon princess into modern-day.

Giselle finds herself in a world far different from her fairy tale home in Andalaisa, a place where dreams come true. The reality of our world shakes her as she tries to understand the strange way we see love.

In fact, as Queen Narissa is casting her out of Andalasia, the evil villain says she’s sending Giselle to a place “where there’s no happily ever after” – Manhattan.

While here in our world, Giselle wrestles to grasp how we feel about true love. One moment in particular that catches her off guard is an encounter she has with a couple getting a divorce. Her mind doesn’t comprehend how two people who fall in love ever fall out of it.

She wonders how you can be married one day and not the next. Her shock gets to a point when she says, “What sort of awful place is this?”

To her, love is sacred, unwavering, and impregnable. You can fall in love one day, get marred the next, and then live happily with your prince forever after. In her mind, she’s confused by our tendency to give up on true love, asking “what could ever change that?” The very thought of love lost even brings Giselle to tears.

Welcome to our world, honey.

Love... It Ain't Easy

The cast of Enchanted understandably sides more with the movie’s portrayal of what love looks like in reality than with Giselle’s view. Patrick Dempsey, who plays Robert, a lawyer who helps Giselle when she first arrives to our world, shared his own thoughts on the subject in a recent interview with CBN.com.

“I think there is a true love,” Dempsey says. “I think there is a connection you find with someone. I don’t necessarily feel that it’s happy ever after; it’s just … a lot of work.

“I think it comes with a tremendous amount of work and understanding and sacrifice. It transforms you certainly. I’m a much better person because of my relationship with my wife and my children.”

Dempsey’s second wife and he have been together for nine years and have three kids.

His first marriage ended, but he says it was an interesting time that helped prepare him for his current relationship.

“I think it was a really valuable experience,” Dempsey says. “I don’t believe that it’s happy ever after, everything’s perfect. There’s no such thing as perfection. It’s the chasing of perfection that’s the fun part.”

Giving up on love isn’t an option in Giselle’s mind. You have to fight for love; this is the case in Enchanted. Susan Sarandon, who stars as evil Queen Narissa, agrees.

“Do I think it’s possible to walk off into the sunset? Yeah, but not without an effort,” Sarandon told CBN.com. “I don’t think it happens that easily. And one of the things in this movie that it says is that you need to work at it. You walk into the sunset and somebody gets stuck and you have to wait for them. Then, you go further into the sunset and wait for the next thing that happens. And I think that kind of start and stop walk into the sunset I believe.”

In Giselle and Prince Edward’s animated world of Andalasia, it seems that finding your Prince and spending the rest of your days happily in love is a given. Our world doesn’t hold this for many of us. But, it is possible. That’s the point of this film, according to director Kevin Lima (Aladdin, Tarzan).

“What I thought was important was to tell the story that you can have happily ever after in our world,” Lima says. “Maybe you can’t have it the same way you get it in a Disney cartoon. But, you can have it.”

There’s a condition to it, a part each of us plays in discovering and keeping that love alive.

“It takes some of the same values that Disney characters hold on to in order to get it. You have to have perseverance of spirit. You have to hold love in your heart. You have to have hope,” he says. “All of those things I thought were important and those were messages from the old Disney classics that I wanted to try and put into a contemporary setting.”

You've Gotta Fight for Your Prince

After Giselle begins to understand her place in our reality, she decides to stick it out and fight for her prince. If she was passive about it, she could have lost him.

Nothing in life comes easy, especially of all love. It’s worth fighting for. That’s what Giselle did. She held to her convictions that dreams really do come true, and love unexpectedly found her. Actress Amy Adams, who plays Giselle in the movie, isn’t married yet, but has advice for all the singles out there on finding love.

“Sometimes what we believe to be the fairy tale prince is not,” Adams says. “We get so fixated on what we think we want that we sometimes miss what we need.”

Once you have your prince, treasure and wholeheartedly commit to your relationship. True love is hard to find, and even though it is sometimes even harder after you are married to work through all the rough patches, endeavor to live a happy life together.

If you haven’t been swept off your feet yet, remember God has the best for you. He knows exactly what you need and when you’ll meet. It is not fate, it’s faith. Some day your prince will come.

Stay tuned for more Enchanted news, including a movie review giving you a sneak peek at this new Disney film.

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