Enchanted

Kevin Lima’s 2007 film drops Giselle out of drawn Andalasia into the middle of New York. The hand drawn opening was not made at Disney but at James Baxter Animation, because, Baxter says, the studio had by then totally dismantled its hand drawn pipeline. Giselle was drawn by essentially three people, Baxter, Mark Henn and Robert Domingo, and the design had to sit between Cinderella and Ariel while resembling Amy Adams enough for the crossing to read. Baxter photographed the actors himself. At the 80th Academy Awards three of the five Best Original Song nominees came from this picture: Happy Working Song, So Close and That’s How You Know, all with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz. Falling Slowly, from Once, took the award, leaving the film’s only category empty. A song Menken wrote for Edward and Nancy, also called Enchanted, was cut, and Idina Menzel sings nothing in the film. The Central Park number was shot in the park itself; Lima says the job nobody accounts for is crowd control in public. A good fit if you want a film that spends its opening stretch fully animated and then changes medium. Not for anyone who skips songs, since the Central Park number is a long unbroken set piece sitting at the midpoint.