Cinema Review: Tangled (2010)

Tangled is the second film in John Lasseter's quest to return Disney animation to its classic roots, the Pixar supremo having previously overseen The Princess and the Frog. Both are fairytales in Walt's grand tradition. Tangled - which lost its original, more familiar, title of Rapunzel after The Princess and the Frog made less money than had been hoped, blamed on the girl-skewing connotations of the "Princess" part - is the first fairytale to be told entirely via the modern wonder of CG animation. It's certainly a triumph of pixel mapping, presenting a lush, glistening, beautiful fantasy land, and with a lead character who owns implausibly long but lovingly rendered hair.

If going the CG route can be seen as an attempt to update the fairy tale for contemporary audiences, so too can the manner in which the story is told. It's a jaunty affair that splits its attention between the tower-bound Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) and dashing outlaw - notably not a prince - Flynn Rider (Zachary Levi), soon to be her unwitting saviour, in an obvious attempt to keep both boys and girls interested. Flynn's scenes are the stronger, adding a good helping of excitement and swashbuckling, while Rapunzel is saddled with some dreary songs that err occasionally towards the sound of a Taylor Swift B-side - hardly the sort of orchestral romanticism that one expects from such subject matter. Indeed, Alan Menken's songs are generally underwhelming, although the composer behind the music of Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid does produce some minor, if unmemorable, gems. Two of the musical highlights are devoid of lyrics, but are certainly lyrical in a different sense: one occurs when Rapunzel, free of her shackles, finally reaches the city with Flynn and engages in an impromptu dance with passers by; the other is a magical scene involving her watching hundreds of floating lanterns being released from the city at night.

Flynn also delivers a knowing, semi-postmodern voiceover narration at the beginning and end which comes off as a little too desperate to be cool, but thankfully the film never opts for DreamWorks-style pop-culture references. Instead, it develops its central story with admirable restraint, featuring a central romance that doesn't seem too forced or cliché. The animal characters steal the show, though - Pascal the chameleon (Rapunzel's shoulder-mounted sidekick), and Maximus the horse that thinks it's a dog - generating the biggest laughs, purely through their movements, gestures and facial expressions, as they remain resolutely mute. The way in which the story has been developed from the very simple original tale is quite ingenious, as unlike, say, Sleeping Beauty, the pacing never feels elongated or devoid of sufficient incident. It's a pleasure to see a film so happy to embrace an old-fashioned story style, setting it apart from the glut of competing CG 'toons that are ten a penny these days.



Summary
Some of the attempts to pander to modern, multi-demographic audiences fall flat, but otherwise Tangled is an enormously endearing update to the Disney fairytale framework of old.