Kevin Lima brings cartoon sincerity into live action with a welcome lack of embarrassment. We like his musical confidence and his faith in actors, though Enchanted shows how quickly his teasing can give way to convention.
Fi1m perspective
Enchanted (2007) sends Amy Adams's Giselle out of a manhole into Times Square in a wedding dress. Lima has brought a cartoon princess into live action without asking the actor to apologise for her. We laughed because Adams keeps playing the princess earnestly when her surroundings make that earnestness look absurd. That is where Lima is most persuasive: he trusts a performer to make a ridiculous premise work without signalling that everyone involved knows better.
His story credits on Oliver & Company (1988) and Aladdin (1992) came before he took charge of a feature. We found the former warm but slight, with a passive hero; the latter has Robin Williams's Genie and the songs to make its thin romance forgivable. These were collaborative jobs, so neither result belongs to Lima alone. That experience matters when Enchanted begins to tease the Disney storytelling habits he had helped sustain.
The move to directing came with A Goofy Movie (1995), followed by Tarzan (1999), co-directed with Chris Buck. Both gave him room to explore father-son relationships, an interest that helps explain the affection beneath his comedy. 102 Dalmatians (2000), with Glenn Close, took him into live-action features before he combined the two forms in Enchanted. The change of format makes sense for someone whose work puts such weight on performance and musical sequences.
Adams is the strongest evidence of his judgement. Lima chose her after extensive auditions, and she plays Giselle without once nudging us to share a joke at the character's expense. The songs are sung with conviction, and Lima keeps the early comedy brisk. Her performance keeps working after the central joke has worn thin.
The limit is his reluctance to push the mockery much further. Enchanted grows more conventional in its last half-hour, asking us to believe in the fairy tale it has been sending up, and it becomes less funny as a result. Watch it for Adams, rather than in the hope that Lima will pick a serious fight with Disney.
Biography
Kevin Lima is an American film director, animator and voice actor. Born on 12 June 1962 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, he studied film and animation at the California Institute of the Arts in the mid-1980s.
He began his career in animation, contributing to films including Oliver & Company (1988), The Little Mermaid (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1991), and worked as a story artist on Aladdin (1992). Lima directed A Goofy Movie (1995), co-directed Tarzan (1999), and directed 102 Dalmatians (2000) and Enchanted (2007), in which he also voiced Pip in New York. He has directed the television films Eloise at the Plaza (2003) and Eloise at Christmastime (2003).
Lima is married to animator and director Brenda Chapman.
