Film Research Study: Enchanted (2007)

Introduction

The topic that we chose to do a research on is a film named Enchanted. The film was released in 2007. Enchanted is a romance comedy film which contains live-action and animated fantasy. The film tells a story about a girl named Giselle. She was pushed into a magical well by her prince’s stepmother which brought her to the reality world, the modern New York City. She tried to coop with the new surroundings instead of living happily ever after in her fairytale castle with her prince. Giselle met Robert who helped her to face the reality of the world. Giselle learnt that true love is much more complicated that sharing only a “true love’s kiss” with her prince.

Our targeted audience are students studying in Tunku Abdul Rahman College, Penang Campus. We decided to target 25 males and 25 females which sums up to 50 students. The age of our targeted audience are mostly from 17 till 25. The students we targeted are studying in different faculty such as faculty of accountancy, finance and business.

The main reason we carry out this research is to find out if college student perceive Enchanted as children based movie or adult based movie.

Literature Review

Selection perceptive theory is the process where individuals perceive on what they want to see in the media while dismissing any negative viewpoints. In a broader term, it is where people tend to view things based on the concept of favoritism and their prefer frame of references. It is describe as categorize sensory information that favors one over the other, meaning selective perception is bias because we interpret message that goes against our beliefs and thoughts. Of course, this is only true when our perceive perception is counted as accurate. But if selective perception caused us to dismiss important points and information, this type of perception is highly detrimental.

This theory based on human judgment and decision making that is distorted by an array of cognitive, perceptual and motivational biases. There are evidences that suggests that people tend to recognize and even overestimate the operation of bias in human judgment except when that bias is their own. Aside from the general motive to self-enhance, two primary sources of this ‘bias blind spot’ have been identified. One involves people’s heavy weighting of introspective evidence when assessing their own bias, despite the tendency for bias to occur unconsciously. The other involves people’s conviction that their perceptions directly reflect reality, and that those who see things differently are therefore biased. (Emily Pronina, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Green Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA).

Another source of the bias blind spot involves the fact that others see things differently from ours. People are particularly likely to deny bias in themselves, whereas they will impute it to others, when those others have a different point of view and when they for example rebelled against their government policies and governance are then tend to imputed more self-interest biases than the government supporters. (48 G.D. Reeder et al., On attributing negative motives to others who disagree with our opinions, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 11 (2005), pp. 1498–1510.) Of course, there are least some evidence that that people are more likely to acknowledge their susceptibility to biases that are less undesirable. (E. Pronin et al., The bias blind spot: perceptions of bias in self versus others, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 28 (2002).)

Research

Research is the first management process to define the problem. The first step involves probing and monitoring knowledge, opinions, attitudes, effected by the acts and policies of an organization. In essence, this is an organization’s intelligence function. It provides the foundation for all the other steps in the problem-solving process by determining, what is happening now?

In this research, we used questionnaire method as our research. We chose this method because we think that it is easier to get feedback from the students. We have prepare 8 questions for the students to answer. Some examples of the questions are have you watch the Enchanted movie before, where do you watch the Enchanted movie and do you like the Enchanted movie. We then printed 50 copies to let the students answer it. We carried out the surveys in the canteen, new library and foyer in Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

FINDINGS

We created a questionnaire for mass media research in order to collect data about what TARC College students think about the movie Enchanted whether it is suitable for children. 50 of students completed the questionnaire between 12 November2014 and 19 November 2014.The results are recorded as below. In this research, we asked a variety of questions in which I think would be helpful when produce a children based movie.

As can be seen from the diagram above, majority of the TARUC students (100%) reported that they have watched Enchanted movie before. I was surprised that most of the TARUC students have watched Enchanted movie before. This helped us to find out more details about how do college students think about Enchanted whether it is a children based movie or adult based movie.

The survey shows that the highest percentage of students (38%) who watch the Enchanted movie through DVD. 32 % of students watched the Enchanted movie through cinema. The lowest percentage is 30% of students watched the Enchanted movie through Internet. With this question, it shows that majority of TARUC students would prefer buying a DVD to watch movie. I think that watching movie through DVD are clearer and can be a collection.

From the diagram above, A large proportion of students (86%) reported that they like the Enchanted movie. Minority of the students (14%) reported that they do not like the Enchanted movie. It shows that TARUC students are mostly interested in this movie. Some of the respondents said that they like the movie because they like the idea that there is an animation world that comes together with a realistic world. Some of the respondents said that they do not like the movie because it is a twisted fairytale and it is a boring movie.

From the questionnaire, this pie chart shows that an overpowering percentage of TARUC students (46%) watched this movie on once, it is a disappointing finding. 32% of TARUC students watched this movie on twice. Only minority of students (22%) watched this movie more than twice. It shows that TARUC students do not like to re-watch the Enchanted movie.

As is can be seen from the pie chart above, the survey shows that 64% of students think that the Enchanted movie is a children based movie. Only 36% of students think that the Enchanted movie is an adult based movie. It strongly shows that most of the TARUC students perceive Enchanted movie as a children based movie.

The following answer is based on targeted audience’s choice of answers, whether they think it is children based movie or adult based movie. If their answer is children based movie, it will proceed to question 6. If the answer is adult based movie, it will proceed to question 7.

As it can be seen in pie chart above, it shows that the reason why our target audiences think Enchanted movie is a children based movie. Majority of TARUC students (73%) said that the storyline is like fairytale which is the most popular answer. The next popular answer is ‘it contains traditional animation and computer-generated imagery’ from TARUC students. There is no student who choose the answer, ‘because of the stepmother’. Only 1 student chooses ‘other’, she said that the dialogue of movie is easy to understand so it is quite suitable for children.

This is a surprisingly finding considering the reason why TARUC students think Enchanted movie is an adult based movie, there is two equal answer of percentage (33%) which is ‘it contains live-action filmmaking’ and ‘it contains adult contents’. 28% of TARUC students think that it is an adult based movie because it is a romance movie. The minority of students (6%) was choosing others. According to one of the student, he said that he think this movie is an adult based movie because the idea of the movie may mislead the children growth and development.

According to the bar chart above, it shows that the review of the students to the Enchanted movie. 0% of student vote for 1. There is 2% of students vote for 2. 4% of students vote for 3. 8% of students vote for 4, 6 and 10 respectively. 6% of students vote for 9. 14% of students vote for 5 and 22% of students voted for 7. The highest voting is 8 which achieve 28% of students vote.

Conclusion

With the help of the research, we found of that students of Tunku Abdul Rahman College perceive Enchanted as a children based movie. They strongly believe that it is suitable for children. From the college students’ point of view, they believe that it is a children based movie because they think that the storyline of the movie is like a fairytale where there will always be a happily ever after ending.

In our opinion, we think that both answers chosen by the college students has its different perception. According to the theory that we used, selective perception theory, it is where people tend to view things based on the concept of favoritism and their prefer frame of references. Most of the time we will never get a 100% answer as different people have different views. Some people may choose to believe it is an adult based movie and some people might choose to believe it is a children based movie. It proves to us that people view things based on their own concept and thoughts.