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#566 - Tangled
Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, 2010
Based on the classic fairytale of Rapunzel, the story of a princess with extremely long hair who is locked into a tower by an evil hag.
Can I really begrudge Disney for not really doing anything overly inventive with their features? After creating a consistently strong alliance with Pixar in order to create some of the definitive family films of this generation, their non-Pixar output has tended towards sticking to the tried-and-true formula of taking classic fairytales and offering their own interpretations of them. Here, the tale of the day is that of Rapunzel, a young princess who has been locked away in the highest room of a tall tower and whose hair has grown so long that it can be dropped from the tower, allowing people to climb up and down to the room in question. I don't remember exactly how the original tale went (which is probably for the best considering what the brothers Grimm were like), but in the world of Tangled it means that Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) is the long-lost princess who has been kidnapped by a hag named Gothel (Donna Murphy) due to some magic mumbo-jumbo about a flower that has healing properties, which ends up being used on the local queen and resulting in the newborn princess being born with the flower power. Enter a dashing rogue by the name of Flynn Rider (Zachary Levi), who is on the run from having pulled a daring heist and has decided to hole up in a certain tall tower...well, there, you have enough plot to fill out a hundred minutes of computer-generated family fun.
What Tangled lacks in narrative innovation, it makes up for in a relatively high level of visual prowess. This doesn't automatically extend to character models (damn the people who pointed out how much Rapunzel's facial model makes her look the same as Elsa, Anna, and Honey Lemon - now you can't unsee it either, and then there's the unfortunate implications associated with the appearance of Mother Gothel...), but it extends to everything else in a fairly tolerable manner. The annual release of a mass of floating lanterns makes for a decent motif and narrative objective, but the rest of the film definitely seems to play things awfully safe with its generic fantastic European kingdom setting - and then there's Rapunzel's hair length increasing or decreasing as narrative convenience demands. There's also the carefully paced-out use of musical numbers, most of which feel don't feel great in recollection but are thankfully not obnoxious ear-worms on par with a certain Disney song about letting something go. The action sequences do little to stand out in my memory, while the ones that do don't exactly do so out of the thrills or laughs that they generate. Basically, Tangled is about as middle-of-the-road as Disney films can get - it's not great but there's enough quality involved so that you don't hate it outright.
Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, 2010
Based on the classic fairytale of Rapunzel, the story of a princess with extremely long hair who is locked into a tower by an evil hag.
Can I really begrudge Disney for not really doing anything overly inventive with their features? After creating a consistently strong alliance with Pixar in order to create some of the definitive family films of this generation, their non-Pixar output has tended towards sticking to the tried-and-true formula of taking classic fairytales and offering their own interpretations of them. Here, the tale of the day is that of Rapunzel, a young princess who has been locked away in the highest room of a tall tower and whose hair has grown so long that it can be dropped from the tower, allowing people to climb up and down to the room in question. I don't remember exactly how the original tale went (which is probably for the best considering what the brothers Grimm were like), but in the world of Tangled it means that Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) is the long-lost princess who has been kidnapped by a hag named Gothel (Donna Murphy) due to some magic mumbo-jumbo about a flower that has healing properties, which ends up being used on the local queen and resulting in the newborn princess being born with the flower power. Enter a dashing rogue by the name of Flynn Rider (Zachary Levi), who is on the run from having pulled a daring heist and has decided to hole up in a certain tall tower...well, there, you have enough plot to fill out a hundred minutes of computer-generated family fun.
What Tangled lacks in narrative innovation, it makes up for in a relatively high level of visual prowess. This doesn't automatically extend to character models (damn the people who pointed out how much Rapunzel's facial model makes her look the same as Elsa, Anna, and Honey Lemon - now you can't unsee it either, and then there's the unfortunate implications associated with the appearance of Mother Gothel...), but it extends to everything else in a fairly tolerable manner. The annual release of a mass of floating lanterns makes for a decent motif and narrative objective, but the rest of the film definitely seems to play things awfully safe with its generic fantastic European kingdom setting - and then there's Rapunzel's hair length increasing or decreasing as narrative convenience demands. There's also the carefully paced-out use of musical numbers, most of which feel don't feel great in recollection but are thankfully not obnoxious ear-worms on par with a certain Disney song about letting something go. The action sequences do little to stand out in my memory, while the ones that do don't exactly do so out of the thrills or laughs that they generate. Basically, Tangled is about as middle-of-the-road as Disney films can get - it's not great but there's enough quality involved so that you don't hate it outright.