First shot of animation: A storybook opens into pop-up pages

Elf was pretty great, what if you made an Elf that people could watch the other 11 months, down to the revolving door gag and our fish out of water hero cutting up stuff in the apartment overnight?

The prologue is a decent pastiche of the early fairytale films, but the Brooklyn-accented chipmunk and action scene wouldn’t show up in Disney-animated features until within 10 years of this. It wasn’t even animated in-house, but outsourced to a studio run by an ex-employee who wanted to stay in traditional animation rather than move to 3D.

The core of Giselle and Robert needing to meet in the middle works, but falls apart when extended to the rest of the movie. The evil queen is equally at home in both worlds, and she sucks. But this is another milestone in using the catalog as a content mine. Some good-natured ribbing, lots of callbacks for IMDb trivia, and pointing out getting married in less than a week isn’t realistic. Which will continue for the next 15 years and counting.

When James Marsden “slays” the bus there’s an ad for the Lestat musical behind him. It ran for less than 40 performances, so you can laser-target when they filmed in Times Square.