The fully animated features such as Bee Movie, Beowulf and 101 Dalmatians that dominated the DVD sales charts earlier this year have given way to animated/live action hybrids such as Enchanted and Alvin and the Chipmunks. The latter film opened with the biggest first week sales of any DVD so far in 2008, easily eclipsing Sweeney Todd, the number two film from last week. Two weeks earlier it was another hybrid, Disney's Enchanted that ruled the charts.
Three films with IDW comic book adaptations have also done exceptionally well this year starting with I Am Legend, which, with over 4.7 million units sold, is the top DVD of the year so far. Also doing very well is Beowulf, the #12 DVD of the year so far with sales of nearly 1.8 million, while 30 Days of Night, which is based on an IDW graphic novel, is the #17 title with 1.15 million in sales.
While Alvin and the Chipmunks is the typical sort of animated/live action hybrid with its combination of animated and live action characters interacting in the same scenes, Enchanted, which actually topped I Am Legend during the week in which they both debuted and is the #3 DVD of 2008 so far, uses a fully animated prologue to set up a story in which animated characters from a Snow White-like Disney forest setting are forced to deal with twenty-first century life in New York City. Although the “live action” portion of the film does have a number of great CGI touches including a high-energy climactic battle with a dragon, it is the animated prologue that sets up this delightful film that graciously pokes fun at the Disney mythos.
Enchanted also benefits from the luminous performance of Amy Adams in the central role of Giselle. She carries the film with old-fashioned movie star charisma, while James Marsden as Prince Edward and Patrick Dempsey as the divorce lawyer who takes Giselle in, do a fine job of defining the two different worlds that Giselle inhabits during the film. The Enchanted DVD includes some deleted scenes and bloopers, but the most interesting extras are the featurettes describing how the filmmakers make the movie’s fantasy elements come to life.
While some will decry the fact that the Alvin and the Chipmunks DVD sold almost four times as many DVDs as Tim Burton’s adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd: TheDemon Barber of Fleet, it should be pointed out that the Sweeney Todd DVD sold nearly 900,000 units during its first week of release and earned one-third of its total domestic box office gross—not bad for a high brow musical.
Admirers of Tim Burton’s movies should not be put off by the fact that Sweeney Todd is a musical. It will turn out to be just as important a film in the
