Watch a video interview with Enchanted director Kevin Lima

I haven’t been as delighted and surprised by an old-fashioned Disney tale since I was a child. Enchanted begins between the covers of a book. A fairytale princess warbles about discovering true love’s kiss to a ghastly chorus of twittering forest animals. The evil queen pushes Giselle down a wishing well before she can marry Prince Charming. And all of them, for one greedy reason or another, pop out of a pothole in Times Square, Manhattan. This is bliss.

Amy Adams, the confused princess, can’t understand why people want to rob or rape her. Her naivety about cars, traffic lights, and strangers at 4am in the pouring rain is not just fabulously naive, it’s totally precarious. She is plucked off the mean streets by a hunky divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey), who has a six-year-old daughter and a fiendishly needy girlfriend. Being a Disney princess with good manners, Adams can still muster the local wildlife to do her bidding when she sings. Sewer rats, cockroaches, flies, and pigeons clean up Dempsey’s Fifth Avenue flat and make breakfast the next morning.

At this point I realised that the film could do no wrong. I started crying when Adams waltzed through Central Park with a perfectly stressed Dempsey, who had no inkling why total strangers should start assembling a musical number around him. That kind of magic never knowingly touches real lives. Kevin Lima’s film does just that. Susan Sarandon is terrific as the Evil Queen; Timothy Spall pops up like a well-used wart; and James Marsden is the terrifically thick and handsome Prince.

PG, 107mins

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