Sensational Tangled Lets Down Its Golden Hair
Once upon a time, a pregnant Queen was slowly dying. To save his beloved, her husband the King sent his people on a quest for a mythical magical flower that could cure all illnesses. Finding it, they broke the plant down into an elixir, feeding it to the Queen and thus saving both her life and that of her unborn child.
The cast of Tangled © Walt Disney Pictures
But the evil Mother Gothel (voiced by Donna Murphy) knows intimately the power of the flower the Queen has ingested, sneaking into the palace and kidnapping the beautiful blond-haired princess shortly after her birth. For eighteen years she has raised Rapunzel (voiced by Mandy Moore) as her own, using the magic within her hair to maintain her own youth and beauty.
Trapped within a high tower this young woman longs to see the world, to discover why there are flickering lights off in the distance above the royal castle every year on the night of her birth. Teaming up with a wondering rogue named Flynn Ryder (voiced Zachary Levi) she breaks Mother Gothel’s number one rule and finds away outside of the home which has been her defacto prison for so long. In the process she discovers a world she never could have imagined, a horrible truth she never would have believed and a potential love no one, not even the unflappable Ryder, could have anticipated.
Inspired by the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Tangled is the Walt Disney Company’s first computer animated feature that mostly closely echoes their beloved hand-drawn catalog. It is a superlative piece of family entertainment that might just be one of the year’s very best motion pictures, and along with Pixar’s Toy Story 3 and DreamWorks How to Train Your Dragon it is a wonderful effort bordering on the timeless.
I have to say, not since Beauty and the Beast have I been so thoroughly and completely caught off guard by an animated release from the Mouse House. Starting with Dan Fogelman’s (Bolt, Cars) remarkable script, moving on to the marvelous vocal work by the entire cast and finishing up with Oscar-winner Alan Menken’s (The Little Mermaid) music and Glenn Slater’s (Home on the Range) superb lyrics, everything about this borders on perfection. At the very least watching it is akin to pure bliss, the smile on my face growing by increasing increments all the way from first delectable frame to last.
As for the animation itself, there are moments here that rival anything Pixar has ever put to celluloid. The first meeting between Rapunzel and Flynn is a major wow, while a singing inner monologue by the heroine describing her typical day is a beguiling winner. But the sequence that really made me hold my breath came just before the start of the final act, our two potential lovebirds getting a boats-eye view of a blizzard of flying lanterns that left me thunderstruck in awe. It’s one of those moments that makes you cherish how lucky you are to be sitting in a theatre taking these sights in, the picture filled with so many charms it’s almost impossible to give all of them their proper due.
Is it all a bit slight? Sure it is, this being a fanciful Disneyfied fairy tale after all. But just because that’s so doesn’t make any of it less remarkable. There hasn’t been a CG animated film like this one, none of them echoing the pure unadulterated joy of classically animated Disney like it does. You get the feeling as the film progresses that Tangled has every opportunity to enter the timeless canon, to be as fondly remembered as Cinderella, as Sleeping Beauty, as Beauty and the Beast.
Time will be the final judge and jury there, or course, and when we revisit the picture in a decade or so hopefully I’ll be waxing just as poetic then as I am now. But right now, at this very moment, my heart is soaring beyond the moon thinking about the glories of Tangled. This movie made me feel bushels of ecstasy as it resplendently filled my heart with glee. I am beyond enamored with it, and this Thanksgiving Holiday I can’t think of a more satisfactory treat than the ability to introduce my two young nieces to an animated treasure I’m almost positive they’ll take pleasure in into their adolescence and beyond.
Film Rating: êêêê (out of 4)
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