Does he leave a little note to tell you you are on his mind?

I just got back a few hours ago from the movie that's left me with the biggest smile and feel-good feeling since Hairspray: Enchanted. Yes, it's cheesy, it's girly, and its a total nostalgia fest that I'm pretty sure isn't designed just for today's young girls (or boys!) with dreams of princesshood but also those who grew up when Disney was actually making classic 2D animation films and still think back with fondness on them. And I loved it. Just about every second of it (there are a few moments near the end that didn't quite click the rest of the way the movie did, but at that point I would've forgiven the movie just about anything). Amy Adams, taking a break from winning critical plaudits for smaller films*, is perfect as an animated soon-to-be-princess who's pushed into our world by a jealous queen, where live action takes over. Speaking of Hairspray, we also get James Marsden, who out-cuted Zac Efron as Corny Collins in the aforementioned musical, as the prince and her fiancé who follows after her. Patrick Dempsey plays the man who, along with his young daughter, takes Amy in and soon--well, come on, you can guess from there. I'm embedding the scene from the movie that accompanies the song I'm posting below, but if you're definitely planning on seeing the movie, you might want to skip it just to save its adorableness for its in context movie moment.



That's How You Know--the scene this song accompanies is surely one of the most adorable musical sequences you'll get this year. The soundtrack version of the song I'm posting does (sometimes necessarily) miss out on some of the things that make the song in the movie so great, including Patrick Dempsey's adorable asides and expressions (yes, we're kind of used to this sort of thing now in the post-Shrek world, where one character stands off to the side and tries not to get caught up in the fairytaleness of it all, but he does it really well). Taking some influences from the Little Mermaid's "Kiss The Girl" in performance and Jamaican influence (among a bunch of other references you'll spot during the scene), "That's How You Know" is an adorable (yes, that word again--I can't help using it a bunch of times when talking about this movie) song performed by Amy Adams that starts out kind of traditional Disney song and then gets more fun and ebullient and irresistible as it goes along. It does sound like a song from a musical or movie, not the sort of thing you hear on the radio, but it's very much worth listening to on its own. And I promise you, the movie is even better than this makes it look (if you're worried that it's sickly sweet, it's not; it is very sweet, but it's also very well done).

To buy the soundtrack for Enchanted, go here (physical) or, if you live in the U.S., you can buy it from iTunes.

Next up: maybe an American singer.

*Though I just bothered to look it up and she's done a bunch of bigger films as well--I guess I just associate her with stuff like Junebug.