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sanetWelcome to 2011! As usual, I watched a ton of movies over the holidays. I caught up on SF-FX films like Inception and the new Tron, and checked out the latest in CG fantasies, like Tangled. Tangled wasn't the best animated film I saw over the holidays (I liked Legend of the Guardians more), but it's worth keeping tabs on what Disney is up to these days in their "traditional" fairy tale films.
In Tangled, the Disney Animation Studios take on the tale of Rapunzel, and do just what Disney has always done with princess stories. It tells the story of a spunky teen girl who wants more out of life than her sheltered upbringing has given her, and ends up finding her true love and coming into her birthright over the course of her adventures. Sound familiar? It's the narrative of Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Jasmine's side of Aladdin, I could go on. But is it only that? What is the same, and what is different?
The specifics of the story, of course, are different from past films. In this version of Rapunzel, the baby princess' hair was imbued with the healing power of a sun spark used to save her mother in childbirth. She was then kidnapped by the manipulative witch Mother Gothel, who raised the girl as her own in order to use the power of her hair to stay eternally young. Rapunzel lives a life of painting, baking, and playing with her Cute Animal Sidekick™, always longing to see the colourful lanterns released every year on her birthday up close but never daring to try. Never, that is, until her tower is invaded by the dashing rogue Flynn Ryder, whom she coerces with a frying pan into taking her to the lanterns. And so begins your classic love/hate relationship adventure. He tries to scare her off. She saves his life. They start to like each other. Evil Mother plots against them. Throw in a righteous white horse, and they live happily ever after. Ta da!
Design-wise, this is just the kind of film that used to be done in cel style, now done in cg. The characters have the look and feel of 1990s Disney character design (Flynn's face and hair recall Prince Eric; Rapunzel's songs sound a lot like Ariel's). The cg ads some dimensionality, but the basic style carries over from 2D film more than, say, Pixar's recent cg works like WALL-E. The motion, especially of Rapunzel’s gleaming multi-purpose hair, is fluid, and the whole thing flows nicely in familiar channels.
In fact, I think its smoothness is both the strength and the weakness of this film. It’s called “Tangled,” but watch Rapunzel’s hair: she drags it through the forest but it never actually gets tangled. You expect from the title a kind of “fractured fairy tale,” but this movie plays everything straight, straight as its heroine's shiny blonde locks. I sometimes found myself thinking, “I can’t believe they’re still doing this seriously after Shrek.” It is certainly beautiful to look at. It just has no edge, no reconsideration of fairy tale tropes beyond anything the Disney co. has already done. And as a result, it has some of the same problems that Disney films have had for decades.
For instance, look at the role of Mother Gothel here. Disney has never been good with mother figures (mostly they are dead, absent, or evil substitutes), and Mother Gothel is the ultimate Wicked Stepmother meets Femme Fatale. Curvy and mature, she has an sort of classic-Hollywood world-weary sensuality, like a toned down Rita Hayworth. When Rapunzel defies her, she either turns cloying, singing “Mother knows best,” or coldly cruel. And to top it off, it’s Mother Gothel who has wildly curly, unruly dark hair. She is the tangled one, the twisted one. But although she better embodies the title, she's still played as the villain, the thing to get rid of, the thing that stands between the True Lovers (that is, the required heterosexual union that will complete Rapunzel as a character and the film as a narrative.) Like so many Disney films, Tangled prefers the ingenue and punishes the powerful sensual woman.
I wish the folks at Disney (besides Lasseter) would take a cue from Miyazaki and give their female villains some ambiguity, like Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke. But then again, both Ghibli and Disney films have their patterns. As I said about The Borrower Arietty, I think the real challenge for directors in big studios with these established tropes is how to rework what has worked, to keep the new films as fresh in narrative as they are in visuals. Finally, I don't think Tangled did enough of that.
In Tangled, the Disney Animation Studios take on the tale of Rapunzel, and do just what Disney has always done with princess stories. It tells the story of a spunky teen girl who wants more out of life than her sheltered upbringing has given her, and ends up finding her true love and coming into her birthright over the course of her adventures. Sound familiar? It's the narrative of Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Jasmine's side of Aladdin, I could go on. But is it only that? What is the same, and what is different?
The specifics of the story, of course, are different from past films. In this version of Rapunzel, the baby princess' hair was imbued with the healing power of a sun spark used to save her mother in childbirth. She was then kidnapped by the manipulative witch Mother Gothel, who raised the girl as her own in order to use the power of her hair to stay eternally young. Rapunzel lives a life of painting, baking, and playing with her Cute Animal Sidekick™, always longing to see the colourful lanterns released every year on her birthday up close but never daring to try. Never, that is, until her tower is invaded by the dashing rogue Flynn Ryder, whom she coerces with a frying pan into taking her to the lanterns. And so begins your classic love/hate relationship adventure. He tries to scare her off. She saves his life. They start to like each other. Evil Mother plots against them. Throw in a righteous white horse, and they live happily ever after. Ta da!
Design-wise, this is just the kind of film that used to be done in cel style, now done in cg. The characters have the look and feel of 1990s Disney character design (Flynn's face and hair recall Prince Eric; Rapunzel's songs sound a lot like Ariel's). The cg ads some dimensionality, but the basic style carries over from 2D film more than, say, Pixar's recent cg works like WALL-E. The motion, especially of Rapunzel’s gleaming multi-purpose hair, is fluid, and the whole thing flows nicely in familiar channels.
In fact, I think its smoothness is both the strength and the weakness of this film. It’s called “Tangled,” but watch Rapunzel’s hair: she drags it through the forest but it never actually gets tangled. You expect from the title a kind of “fractured fairy tale,” but this movie plays everything straight, straight as its heroine's shiny blonde locks. I sometimes found myself thinking, “I can’t believe they’re still doing this seriously after Shrek.” It is certainly beautiful to look at. It just has no edge, no reconsideration of fairy tale tropes beyond anything the Disney co. has already done. And as a result, it has some of the same problems that Disney films have had for decades.
For instance, look at the role of Mother Gothel here. Disney has never been good with mother figures (mostly they are dead, absent, or evil substitutes), and Mother Gothel is the ultimate Wicked Stepmother meets Femme Fatale. Curvy and mature, she has an sort of classic-Hollywood world-weary sensuality, like a toned down Rita Hayworth. When Rapunzel defies her, she either turns cloying, singing “Mother knows best,” or coldly cruel. And to top it off, it’s Mother Gothel who has wildly curly, unruly dark hair. She is the tangled one, the twisted one. But although she better embodies the title, she's still played as the villain, the thing to get rid of, the thing that stands between the True Lovers (that is, the required heterosexual union that will complete Rapunzel as a character and the film as a narrative.) Like so many Disney films, Tangled prefers the ingenue and punishes the powerful sensual woman.
I wish the folks at Disney (besides Lasseter) would take a cue from Miyazaki and give their female villains some ambiguity, like Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke. But then again, both Ghibli and Disney films have their patterns. As I said about The Borrower Arietty, I think the real challenge for directors in big studios with these established tropes is how to rework what has worked, to keep the new films as fresh in narrative as they are in visuals. Finally, I don't think Tangled did enough of that.
