Every little girl with an overactive imagination and a penchant for bows and flounces shares the dream: to dress up as a Disney princess. And it’s a dream that the actress Amy Adams has realised in her latest film, a revisionist fairytale called Enchanted. She says of her costume: “The dress is enormous, and it’s deceptively heavy. To get it to stand out the way that they wanted, the hoops are steel. When you read in the script – she’s fighting a dragon, in her dress, in the rain, barefoot on the roof of a building – you don’t anticipate how tough it’s going to be.”

Adams plays Giselle, a cartoon princess who finds herself flung into the real world – specifically Manhattan – after being cast down a well by an evil stepmother with a grudge. It’s a world where bursting into song can get you labelled as a lunatic and the friendly woodland creatures are replaced by rats, pigeons and cockroaches. Adams had to film with live rats and pigeons, which, she assures me, were very well behaved and polite and not at all smelly. The cockroaches, fortunately, were CGI.

It’s a fresh new direction for Disney: part animated, part live action, it’s a playfully self-referential, gently self-mocking take on the classic Disney fairytale. “But,” says Adams, “it’s lovingly done. It’s not pointing a finger and laughing, but it’s definitely winking.”

In every classic Disney fairytale there’s a handsome prince. Or in this case, two. James Marsden plays Prince Edward, the cartoon beau who pursues his princess to Manhattan, while Patrick Dempsey is the jaded New Yorker who helps the maiden in distress. “In the end I have to choose between the real world and going back to my old existence, and between my two suitors. It’s such a lovely dilemma – Patrick Dempsey or James Marsden. Really, we should all be so lucky.”

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It’s not hard to see why Adams was chosen as the embodiment of the Disney ideal – an elfin, old-fashioned beauty, she has made a career out of playing sweet-natured, big-hearted, essentially decent characters. In Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, she dons a full set of dental braces for the role of the naive nurse who falls for Leonardo DiCaprio’s conman. And she was Oscar-nominated in 2006 for her turn in Junebug as the wide-eyed, innocent and heavily pregnant Ashley. In person, she’s bright, funny and impeccably well-mannered. She comes across as that rarest of creatures in the Hollywood shark pool: a genuinely nice person.

One of the attractions of the role for the girl who got her break on the Minnesota dinner-theatre circuit was that there was plenty of singing and dancing involved. She says: “I absolutely love it – I’m not as in shape as I once was, but it’s still a big passion of mine. I could smile and dance and sing and be as corny as I wanted to be.”

Then there was also the lure of getting her very own animated persona. Adams, who lists the Japanese animations Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle as two of her favourites, says of her animated self: “I’m a bit jealous of her, to be honest. She’s lovely. It’s a little weird, they did manage to capture a lot of my mannerisms and movements and quirks. It can make you a little self-conscious. But it’s also very flattering.”

With the role of Disney figurehead, she acknowledges, comes a certain responsibility. But she argues that her duty is to the young audience rather than to the corporate brand. “I’m more concerned about what impact my behaviour may or may not have on young girls. If I’m going to be in the public eye with a younger audience, I do think there is an amount of responsibility that comes with that.”

Disney has very little to worry about from Adams. The 33-year-old is not the kind of actress who is likely to be photographed tumbling out of a nightclub at 4am with her knickers in her handbag. As one of seven children of a Mormon family, the closest to a whiff of tabloid excitement in Adams’s CV is a brief stint as a waitress in the salaciously named restaurant chain Hooters.

Enchanted is just one of a string of enviable projects that Adams has completed since her Oscar nomination for the indie charmer Junebug. “I’m not sure if it was the nomination or the exposure it brought to Junebug, but I have had some really wonderful opportunities. I’m having fun, what I love to do is working and acting so it’s always a good thing when you get to do that.”

Forthcoming releases include Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, opposite Frances McDormand and playing the exuberantly named Delysia Lafosse, and the Mike Nichols-directed Charlie Wilson’s War, in which she co-stars with Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks. “I had worked with him before in Catch Me If You Can,” she says of Hanks, “so the shock had worn off but the awe remained. He’s the greatest human being.”

She also has high praise for the British actress Emily Blunt, her co-star in the forthcoming comedy Sunshine Cleaning. So is there anyone else she has particularly enjoyed working with? “I can’t think of anyone I haven’t enjoyed working with recently,” says Adams earnestly. And you know she’s not just saying it – she really is that nice.

Enchanted is at OWE2, Oct 20, 5.30pm; it is scheduled for release on Dec 14 Four festival films for all the family

Bee Movie

Jerry Seinfeld as small-town bee Barry B. Benson becomes a celebrity in this smart, funny Dreamworks animation.
Family Gala, Oct 28, OWE2, 3.30pm

Yobi the Five-Tailed Fox

A shape-changing creature takes human form in this animation from Korea.
Oct 20, OWE1, 3.30pm; Oct 23, NFT2, midday

The Substitute

Is stand-in teacher Miss Harms really a hideous alien?
Oct 28, NFT2, 12.30pm

The Thread of Life

Syria’s first animated feature shows young Alaa facing a difficult, magical choice that could answer everything or leave him with nothing.
Oct 20, Studio, 7.30pm; Oct 22, NFT2, 1.45pm

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