Happily N'Ever After (2007)

Blu-ray

Happily N'Ever After offers an irony-laden spin on the typical fairy tale. Ella (Sarah Michelle Gellar) finds herself battling her stepmother Frieda (Sigourney Weaver) in a constant struggle for power in Fairy Tale Land. Sadly, Prince Charming (Patrick Warburton) isn't by her side, and she finds herself teaming up with people like Mambo (Andy Dick) and Munk (Wallace Shawn), who seem to hurt Ella more than they help her. With Frieda hoping to rewrite Ella's story, she finds an unlikely companion in Rick (Freddie Prinze). With the team somewhat firmly in place, Ella leads this band of misfits in revolt and we are treated to an interesting spinning of some of the most venerable fairy tales.

As you can guess, the story that the creators of Happily N'Ever After have chosen to hang their hat on is Cinderella. They then take other fairy tales that we might know and throw them in the pot. When it works, this tale plays like something of a mix tape, putting various elements in the creative pot to bring across something new. When it falters, this movie seems sadly disjointed and lacking the kind of cohesion this film wants to have.

Alternate Ending
While I don't want to spoil this Alternate Ending for anybody who hasn't seen it, just know that Ella and Rick join forces to create something. That is about as much I feel I can tell you without giving everything away. I found this scene to be okay but it's understandable why it wasn't used. Also (and this is probably because it wasn't used in the actual movie), the look of this seemed to be lacking compared with the rest of the film.

5 Games From the Department of Fairy Tale Security

Deleted Scenes
There are 7 of these in this section. They have titles like "Hiding" and "Prince or Rick" and they are of surprisingly good quality (much better than the way the Alternate Ending looks). These scenes were fun to go through but they seem to have been cut for time reasons. From what I know of the process, they don't tend to experiment a lot of when they are actually drawing the movie because that's too expensive. I get the feeling that they thought these scenes were going to be in the movie, and then all of the sudden realized that they really didn't service the story.

Featurettes
Of all the featurette sections that I have seen on all the animated DVDs I have reviewed, I think the Happily N'Ever After DVD has the best. There are three segments in total. They are:

- Journey of the Characters in the Enchanted Forest
- Creating the Happily Story: Bringing N'Ever After to Life
- From Storyboard to Fairy Tale: A Comparison

However, each of these sections is then broken down even further so that we don't have to absorb all the information in one shot. My favorite section was Journey of the Characters in the Enchanted Forest, because we get to see a hands on tutorial of how the animation process works. It is amazing seeing how the characters are constructed, drawn and then laid into the finished film. The other sections are interesting but as someone who has a personal interest in animation, I really appreciated how well put together (and technical) all of this was.

Commentary Track
Paul J. Bolger, the director of this film, handles the commentary duties in a very matter of fact manner. He discusses how this project was originally supposed to be 2D but eventually people realized it would be better served in 3D. He talks about the art direction of the film and how they wanted to make everything in the movie look handmade and twisted. Bolger goes on to discuss the characters, their motivations, and how he wanted to make even the most incidental characters not look generic. There wasn't anything about this track that I found overly illuminating, but it certainly is worth your time if you liked the film and the world that was created.

Having made my own animated movie (1985-1986), I have a great deal of respect of for the amount of time and work that seemed to go into Happily N'Ever After. The problem with this movie is that unlike Hoodwinked and Shrek, I didn't find that Happily N'Ever After took it's story beyond the idea that it was lampooning other films. It almost played like the second or third films in the Scary Movie franchise. The ideas were there but the films themselves just seem like a bunch of randomly associated moments that should be funny.

At the end of the day, Happily N'Ever After falters not because it is a bad film, but because it doesn't seem like its story problems were worked out before it was made.