Tangled is the 50th animated feature film to be released by Walt Disney Animation Studios. Directed by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard from a screenplay by Dan Fogelman, it is a retelling of the German fairy tale Rapunzel. In it Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy), on finding a magical healing flower, hoards it for herself in order to retain her youth. When the people of the kingdom take the flower in order to heal the ailing queen, Gothel wisks away their newborn daughter Rapunzel (Mandy Moore), whose golden hair has taken on the flowers restorative properties.
Like The Princess and the Frog, the plot of Tangled gives equal focus both the the Princess character and her male love interest (Zachary Levi's Flynn Rider). Indeed, Rider is the film's POV character, narrating the events of the film for the audience. He is introduced as a rogue, a thief and a ladies man with a cocky, swashbuckling personality but, later in the film, this is revealed to be an act, imitating a folk hero that the outlaw, who's real name is Eugene Fitzherbert, read about as a young orphan. Rapunzel's innocence and wide eyed naivete disarm the cynical Rider and bring out a vulnerable emotional side that has been buried inside Eugene for many years. Eugene, like Prince Naveen from The Princess and the Frog, decides to make a heroic sacrfice for his new found love in the film's climax, but it is unfortunately undercut by a rather dubious deus-ex-machina.
Rapunzel's flaws are not as clearly defined as Tiana's. She is mostly just naive and easily manipulated, which is perfectly understandable considering that she was raised by a surrogate mother who pretends to love her in order to keep her locked up and gain exclusive access to her hair's magical properties. Mother Gothel may be the most thoroughly despicable villain in the Disney canon, driven purely by vanity and selfishness. Her abusive relationship with Rapunzel is one of the films more interesting ideas, and provides some unusually dark and at times unsettling subtext for a Disney film. Rapunzel too offers a heroic sacrifice, allowing Mother Gothel to keep her imprisoned if she allows her to save Eugene's life.
The songs, composed by Alan Menken with lyrics written by multiple Tony Award nominee Glenn Slater are very evocative of contemporary Broadway and as such, hearken back to the Disney Renaissance. It is clear that the studio wanted the film to be reminiscent of the older classics, so Menken was a natural choice having composed the music for Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), and Hercules (1997). While not reaching the heights of Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin (Glenn Slater is no Howard Ashman) Tangled still features some strong material. "Mother Knows Best" is certainly the best of the bunch (no pun intended) capitalizing on Donna Murphy's vocal range and experience on Broadway it also succinctly captures, in a winking, comedic way, Mother Gothel's cold calculating manipulation of the unsuspecting Rapunzel.
The biggest drawback for me is the ironical, winking tone that dominates most of the songs, a tonal problem that also extends to Zachary Levi's narrative voice-over. This kind of self-awareness, so pervasive in modern cinema, takes away from the genuine emotional core of the story. This is especially irksome in a Disney fairy-tale, once a bastion of sincere, morally unambiguous family fare. On the other hand the film is incredibly funny at times. The romantic banter between Rapunzel and Rider is endearing but the real showstopper is the outrageous slapstick between Rider and Maximus, the police horse who acts more like a loyal bloodhound. There's one sequence in the film's second act that is so flamboyant in its levels of bravado and daring stunts that it wouldn't feel out of place in a Pirates of the Caribbean film.
What Tangled really has going for it is its innovative, at times draw-dropping animation. Glen Keane, who came up with the concept for the film in 1996 and originally proposed doing it with traditional 2D animation, wanted the film to have a more fluid appearance, hearkening back to the Golden era of Disney animation. Computer animation technology was not able to achieve this in the early 2000's when the film was first proposed but, by the time Keane was replaced with Byron Howard and Nathan Greno in 2008, significant strides had been made. Rather then focusing on realism, as previous Disney CG efforts had, the animators were able to replicate the intuitive sense of depth inherent in hand-drawn animation. To do this they used a new technique called multi-rigging where each pair of virtual camera is used on a separate element, like the background, foreground, and characters, without adjusting for the relation with the other cameras, resulting in something that would be visually impossible in the real world.
Visually, the film hearkens back to the rococo style of Cinderella and takes inspiration from the oil paintings of Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It's one of Disney's most beautiful looking films. The backgrounds have a lush, painterly quality and the characters are expressive and move in with wonderful fluidity. The film's use of lighting is particularly striking: the way the sunlight streaks through the windows of Rapunzel's tower or the way the lanterns, floating through the sky, cast a reflection on the water below, suspending Rapunzel and Eugene in a pool of sparkling luminescence.
Though suffering from an overabundance of ironic humor and featuring a contrived denouement Tangled still manages to come out on top thanks to its strong characters, a solid soundtrack from Alan Menken, and some of the best looking animation of the past decade.
Score: 8/10
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