Movies Reviews

Tangled – Movie Review

By Anne Brodie Nov 24, 2010, 13:18 GMT

This version of the famous Brothers Grimm fairy tale picks up with the princess, famous for her 70 feet of golden hair, after she\'s been abducted from her parents\' castle as a child and imprisoned. Rapunzel escapes as a teen and goes on the run with a bandit as her jailers pursue them. ...more

Tangled, the Walt Disney Animation Studio’s latest 3-D digital offering, a candy-colored re-imagining of the Rapunzel story has much in its favor – an old-fashioned, true storybook feel, technical accomplishment, a lovely girly palette “lush and painterly” according to the filmmakers, and some cute scenes. 

But it won’t be going down in storybook history as Disney’s greatest, even if it is the animation studio’s 50th film.  It’s pretty and it’s cute, but it’s not great or even very good.

What makes a great animated film great is that it entertains or resonates with the widest possible audience as well as children; it has complexity, dimension, and a few double entendres to keep us on our toes. 

The entire Pixar oeuvre, for instance.  Or Tangled’s predecessor, The Princess and the Frog.  Tangled has a Holly Hobby sensibility that looks entertaining, but in fact it is conventional and allergic to irony and wit.  And oddly enough, because of “brief, mild violence”, it’s rated PG, not G. 

The characters aren’t dimensional enough to hold attention, with the exception of the horse, the film’s best executed and thought-out character.  He is an expressive creation of wordless wonder that bursts out of the screen. 

Ryder Flynn the dashing villain voiced by Zachary Levi, is a ho hum effort at complexity – he’s a thief who is reformed through love but it’s hard to buy what he’s selling.  I don’t buy that he could do any kind of wrong.  Not with his cartoon DNA.  He’s no gangsta. 

Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) is as irksome a cartoon heroine; she’s limited, very young, and innocent, and okay, she has been locked in a tower her entire life, but she doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose.  But she does have big, baby kitten eyes and is infantilized.  She seems so young that it’s creepy when she kisses Ryder.

Mother Gothel, (Donna Murphy) is a wicked woman who kidnapped Princess Rapunzel at birth for her own purposes, but she is the least layered and sympathetic of any of the characters. 

She’s awful, she’s cruel, and she’s a liar, but why?  That’s something the filmmakers could have had fun with, but they missed it completely.  And the film’s ageist view of her is unsettling to say the least.

The music is uninspired although there’s a fun Broadway style dance number in the pub staring Rapunzel, Ryder and a pack of heathens. 

The three dimensions are really only necessary in one sequence, the triumphant moment when the lanterns are released into the night sky.  It doesn’t make a whit of difference otherwise.  Saying that of course is like saying ‘don’t bother with color”.  But it’s not though.  3D in the right places is a marvel and has the power to move audiences.

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Written by Jacob Grimm (fairy tale), Wilhelm Grimm (fairy tale), Mark Kennedy (screenplay); Dean Wellins(screenplay)
Directed by Nathan Greno; Byron Howard
Opens: Nov. 24
Runtime:
MPAA: Rated PG for brief mild violence
Country: USA
Language: English