This month, in search of something light, I decided to watch a fairy tale with my boys:

“Mama, what’s a magical kingdom? Why is the queen evil? Why will she lose her power if her stepson gets married? What’s true love’s kiss?” We were barely through the opening credits of Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007) and I had to pause for a quick fairy tale run-down. Of course, neither of my boys has any problem with some of the common elements of the filmed fairy tale, the richly animated world in which animals talk and plants participate in human life, and they are beginning to hear stories with good guys and bad guys. But the particular spin of a fairy tale, in which children are generally motherless, struggling to protect themselves against a new family member (the evil stepmother) was new to them, and troubling.

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