YMMV / The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement

• Accidental Aesop: "The maids know everything." While Mia and Joe were talking about Brigitte and Brigitta, the quote applies to Viscount Mabrey's maid as well, as she told Nicholas Mabrey asked a reporter to spy on him and Mia at the lake, which ends Nicholas' relationship with Mabrey once and for all. In fact, the contrast between the way Clarisse and Mia treat the staff versus the way Mabrey does is an aesop in itself.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Jonny Blu singing a Chinese cover of "Miracles Happen" has no bearing on the plot whatsoever.
  • An even bigger example is the scene where the maids attempt to distract the Grandmother for the Princess... by singing "Frère Jacques", dancing, putting pots onto their heads, and then taking them off and clanging them together while singing, "DING DANG DONG! (clang!) DING DANG DONG! (clang!)" It's absolutely surreal in its own right, comes out of nowhere, its never discussed again, and seems so random and out of place that the sheer "WTF face" shown by Julie Andrews is mimicked by everyone in the audience who sees that scene.
  • Stan Lee's cameo in the wedding scene. This was well before Disney's purchase of Marvel and the film has absolutely nothing to do with comics and superheroes in general, so it's not clear why he's here.
• Dancing Bear: The sequel was heavily promoted around the fact that Julie Andrews would sing for the first time in seven years.
• Fridge Horror:
  • Viscount Mabrey bribes a royal guard to spook Mia's horse with a rubber snake. While the incident only manages to embarrass Mia, since her fake side-saddle leg is revealed in front of everyone, a bucking horse could have seriously wounded or killed Mia.
  • While the parallel isn't pointed out, part of the reason Mia reacted so poorly to the incident at the lake in the second film is likely because of her memories of Josh and Lana setting her up in the first film.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Prince William is part of the slideshow of prospective suitors only because the ladies "love to look at him". This is back when he was single and had a full head of hair, so modern viewers look at this scene rather differently.
  • Nicholas once refers to Mia as "Rapunzel" when beckoning her to come down from her window. Chris Pine would go on to play a royal again in Into the Woods, where his character's brother would woo Rapunzel.
• Memetic Mutation: The hair scene.
  Mia: I look like a moose.
  Paolo: Yes, but a very cute moose. Make all the boy moose go, "WAHHH!"
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Lord Nicholas is played by Chris Pine, who would later shoot to stardom as Captain James T. Kirk in the rebooted Star Trek film series, and, to animation fans, Jack Frost in Rise of the Guardians.
  • Abigail Breslin played the orphan girl Carolina, a couple of years before her breakthrough role in Little Miss Sunshine.
  • For an offscreen example, whose name should appear in the story and screenplay credits but Shonda Rhimes, one year before the debut of Grey's Anatomy?
• Sequelitis: The Royal Engagement is not too well liked. It diverges completely from the books and falls heavily into the Girl-Show Ghetto.