Keeping charm alive

'ENCHANTED" FINDS Walt Disney dipping a toe in "Shrek"-infested waters of fairy tale satire.

This is a potentially sad event, indicating that perhaps even Disney is prepared to serve up irony to precociously jaded children who receive parody before they assimilate the real thing.

If Disney, the last bastion of enchantment, surrenders to the lure of being hip, is it over for Snow White? Not to worry. I saw enough fairy princesses on Halloween to know that among little girls, the dream is still alive.

And it turns out that "Enchanted," aimed at a slightly older audience of tweeners, uses its meta-fairy tale premise to defend Disney territory, not to cede it.

The film begins in an animated fairy realm where a wicked queen (Susan Sarandon) is seeking to block her son's marriage to the beautiful Giselle (Amy Adams), an event that will end her regency.

She banishes Giselle to a nether region, which turns out to be modern-day Manhattan, where the impossibly innocent would-be princess (Adams in the flesh) mingles with cynical New Yorkers.

She's taken in by a divorced divorce lawyer named Robert (Patrick Dempsey), who's about to remarry, establishing a comic contrast between Giselle's naive belief in the magical power of love and the lawyer's more pragmatic view of marriage.

Meanwhile, the prince arrives in New York to pursue her, and "Enchanted" alternates between the misadventures brought about by his out-of-place chivalry and the budding romance between Giselle and Robert.

"Enchanted" squeaks by on the charm of its performers, particularly Adams, who played another version of the daffy Giselle in "Junebug," for which she earned an Oscar nomination.

It will work for its target audience, but lacks the visual pizazz that might have made it a more memorable movie. The visual presentation is disappointingly prosaic, particularly for a movie that wants and needs to be a fable. *

Produced by Barry Josephson, Barry Sonnenfeld, directed by Kevin Lima, written by Bill Kelly, music by Alan Menken, Stephen Schwartz, distributed by Walt Disney Co.