Myth has always been one of the sources of the stories that we watch on screen, and fantasy and myth are closely linked. But their relationship is not always a comfortable one, and a couple of recent films point to the importance of getting the mythic elements of a story right when tackling tales with an element of the fantastic.

The Golden Compass had everything going for it before it reached the screen. An immaculate literary pedigree that had made Philip Pullman’s works popular among children and adults alike, a strong cast, and a big budget; all helped psyche people up for what could have been a wonderful trip to the cinema. So where did it all go wrong?

Fundamentally, the story – at least as portrayed on screen – lacks a mythic dimension. Oh, it’s got fantastic tropes by the dozen: parallel worlds; a heroine who’s that fantasy staple, a Chosen One; a magic device in the form of the Compass itself; tribes who are analogues for cultures in our own world; armoured bears; airships; and more besides. But for all that – and a lot of it looks impressive onscreen – there’s something missing. And that’s where contrast with Disney’s Enchanted proves useful.

Enchanted is a very self-conscious film, Disney creators having fun with the Disney way of doing things. The story starts off in traditional 2D animated style, but soon its princess heroine is transported into our world, along with her prince. Initially befuddled by the emotional and other complexities of this 3D place, and her first exposure to irony, the princess finds that this world as well as her own can be a place of romance, and wins the heart of the man who helps her survive in New York, whose girlfriend ends up disappearing with the fairytale prince back to his animated world. It’s a delightful tale that dances between traditional Disney values and the world its contemporary audience inhabits, and is a much more satisfying experience than the empty antics on display in The Golden Compass.

I knew something was wrong with The Golden Compass when its young heroine, Lyra, pulls the wool over the eyes of some of the bad guys with fast talk. Oh, it establishes something important about her character, but it felt like a scene out of a bad episode of a soap opera when what was called for was Lyra to display an element of the trickster. Only, none of the characters, not even the excellent Nicole Kidman as the villainous Mrs Coulter, were given dialogue that had any sense of the epic about it: the beats got you from A to B alright, but with no scope or depth in the process. Instead, it all seemed prosaic, even as armoured bears and flying witches battled warriors with wolves in the arctic wastes.

Enchanted, by contrast, was so secure in its grasp of the mythic that it could afford to play games with it to create a new kind of story that felt just as right as older ones, whether Disney or the ones they nod to. Its creators had the courage of their convictions to shape something that you’d never expect to emerge from Disney, by following its own emotional logic of combining the world we all inhabit with the world that Disney films are typically set in.

Emotional logic is the key phrase there. Where Enchanted shamelessly plays with your emotions, The Golden Compass barely registers a flicker, though by rights it absolutely should be pressing all kinds of buttons. Even with whole armies on screen, and the lives of experimented-on-orphans on stake, it was hard to feel much of anything in The Golden Compass. Whereas Enchanted had me as soon as its princess heroine appeared in New York, stranded in a world beyond her comprehension but still true to her desires and convictions.

On paper – although when I say that, I mean ‘in theory’ rather than ‘in the script’ – both films had plenty going for them. They certainly move their stories forward efficiently through the use of appropriate beats. But here’s another difference: whereas the beats in Enchanted all have some sense of depth to them, some resonance for the viewer from their connection with stories that have gone before, and the emotions they stir; The Golden Compass paints a new world and forgets to make it resonant with other fantastic milieus other than at the most superficial level of CGI. Instead, we get lush settings and concepts aplenty, but nothing to engage the emotions, beats that move the plot forward but fail to ensure suspension of disbelief. Which proves to me that suspension of disbelief – essential in any story concerned with the fantastic – is less about the amount of money spent on the set, than how it engages the imagination and emotions. I watched countless Dr Who episodes as a child captivated by the ideas and relationships central to the stories, despite the most perfunctory attention given to environment and costume. But The Golden Compass, for all its rich trappings, failed to captivate me for a moment. And Enchanted, days later, is with me still. Like the princess it stars, I feel a song coming on…