Enchanted quickly settles in to tell the story of Giselle and her budding and flowering relationship with Robert (a lawyer with a heart of gold borrowed from the same story department as hookers who refuse to be paid) and his daughter Morgan. This all unfolds rather predictably with a heart-broken single dad left to care for a charming little kid, a girl-bonding trip to a beauty salon, that costume ball, “love’s one true kiss,” and a rescue from great scary heights from the clutches of a big, not very scary, CGI dragon.

In spite of the overly familiar quality of all of this, some scenes still do shine. Alan Menken’s “Happy Working Song” is engagingly used when Giselle decides to tidy things up a bit. (What else do fairy tale future princesses do when faced with apartments badly in need of a woman’s touch?) And that kind of scary, CGI dragon scene is fun. It’s sort of like King Kong in reverse.

It is when Robert tells Giselle that he doesn’t like to expose Morgan to fairy tales that Enchanted most captured my attention. When Robert says he doesn’t want Morgan misled into thinking that dreams really can come true, is it just a bit of foreshadowing (as if anyone watching Enchanted holds any doubt that things will turn out magically and perfectly well for Robert and Giselle and Morgan)? Or is director Kevin Lima being just a tiny bit subversive?

In his extraordinary book The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim discussed the meaning and importance of fairy tales to a child’s development. He suggested that if children are allowed to read about the horrors faced by the heroes of fairy tales, this will better prepare them for their own lives. He went on to attack what Disney has done to cleanse and make palatable the tales by the likes of The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Gone are all the dark and scary and gruesome elements that Bettelheim suggested are of the greatest value to a child. (Did you know that Cinderella’s stepsisters originally had their toes chopped off to try to cram their huge feet into that tiny slipper?)

With its wall-to-wall happiness and lack of bloody stumps, does Lima feel that Bettelheim would have found little use for Enchanted?