La Mamacita

In an effort to get my daughter to read SOMETHING besides Harry Potter, I pulled Gail Carson Levine's Newberry award winner Ella Enchanted off my 8-year-old's shelf the other day. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Potter fan myself, but when my daughter began reading the series for the FOURTH TIME I decided to step in to protect the sanity of the rest of the household. My daughter was a bit resistant at first, but she soon settled in to this clever take on the Cinderella story.

I was delighted. Ella, who is cursed by a fairy at birth with the "gift" of obedience, is smart, multilingual, and never needs to be rescued. Although bound by the curse, she uses her wits to get around it whenever she can, and her kindness, intelligence and sense of fun are what attract others, not her beauty. In fact, she and the prince strike up a friendship based on their mutual love of sliding down bannisters rather than dancing at balls. My favorite part of the book involves Ella, who has been captured by ogres, speaking to these people-eating monsters in ogre-ese and using their own gifts of persuation to talk them out of eating her. When the prince and his knights happen along and witness this, they are all impressed. In the end, (skip this next if you plan on reading the book!) she does indeed marry the prince, but theirs is an equal partnership based on mutual respect -- a model that's pretty rare in these kinds of stories.

Finally, I thought, an empowering fairy tale! My daughter, tom boy that she is, loved the fact that "this princess can have fun!" Grateful to Gail Carson Levine for creating such a brave, smart heroine, and excited after reading a favorable New York Times review, I put the movie version of Ella Enchanted at the top of my Netflix queue. We watched it for our most recent Family Movie Night and -- whoa. Boy was I unimpressed.

To be frank, I was distraught. This movie reverted in every way to the traditional fairy tales that have been thrown at my daughter since birth. Gone is the clever girl who runs away from finishing school, speaks many languages and uses her brain to get out of difficult situations. Instead, we get a pretty, lanky girl caught in a web of unfortunate situations and finally saved and married by, yes, the prince. What's worse, my daughter LIKED IT.

To be fair, the movie Ella is not AWFUL. She doesn't yearn to marry the prince or chase him around like her stepsisters do. But why, I want to ask Miramax, why did you have to take so much away from the heroine to make her appealing to a mass audience? Did you fear an intelligent, independent girl wouldn't seem prince-worthy? Or worse, would she bring to mind -- gasp! -- Hillary Clinton?

There are many movies I've loved as much as (Narnia) or almost as much as (Harry Potter) the books they were based on. Ella Enchanted is not one of them.