Kevin Lima

Ten minutes into Enchanted (2007), a cartoon maiden is pushed down a well by a cartoon queen and climbs out of a manhole into Times Square in her wedding dress. That shot is Kevin Lima's career in one cut. He spent years drawing for Disney and then filmed what happened when the drawings met the traffic. The joke is Disney sending up Disney, and for an hour it is a good joke, told briskly and sung as if everyone meant it.

He came up as an animator and character designer, on Oliver & Company (1988), The Little Mermaid (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1991), and did story work on Aladdin (1992). We rate Aladdin highly, though his part in it is not the kind that can be picked out of a finished cartoon. His first feature as director was A Goofy Movie (1995), a father-and-son road trip that asked Goofy to carry feelings, which some critics found an uneven fit. He co-directed Tarzan (1999) with Chris Buck, moved into live action with 102 Dalmatians (2000), Glenn Close as Cruella, and made two Eloise television films in 2003. Then Enchanted. Then, as far as the screen is concerned, a long quiet: projects shelved, years spent in development with his production partner Brenda Chapman.

What he does well is the join. He knows how a hand-drawn character moves and he can get an actor to move that way without turning it into mime. Amy Adams's Giselle is the proof, a cartoon princess in the flesh who never once winks at us, and Lima has said the film would be half of what it is without her. He is right. The musical numbers belong to their settings rather than stopping the film for them; the one in Central Park is the best of them. We went in braced for a corporate in-joke and laughed through most of the first hour, and the reason is that Lima plays the collision straight and lets Adams find the comedy in believing every word.

What he does less well is finish. Enchanted stops teasing in its last half hour and starts believing, and it is less fun once it has. The hybrid idea, clever as it is, gets set aside for ordinary plotting whenever the story needs to move, and some of the slapstick is pitched at the smallest children in the audience. The parent-and-child thread that runs through A Goofy Movie and Tarzan is his one recurring subject, and it is a soft one; he is fonder of his characters than he is hard on them.

He has said he loves the imperfection of hand-drawn animation, that those films breathe differently from computer ones. On the evidence of Enchanted, he does too. It has been a long time since anyone let him try again.