Tangled (Film Review)
Dec. 29th, 2010 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakTogether with a Young Companion, I saw Tangled yesterday. It hasn’t dethroned The Princess and the Frog as my newer Disney fave, but it has more than set to rest the fears I had last year when hearing Disney changed the prince to a Errol-Flynn type rogue named Flynn in order to make the film more appealing to boys. Turns out that Rapunzel is still firmly at the center of the film and there is some neat gender cliché subversion going on with the Flynn character. My Young Companion loved it, squeed, laughed and yelled in all the right places, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself, too.
As is usual with Disney adaptions of Grimm fairy tales, not much of the tale survives. Starting with the fact that Rapunzel is now a princess instead of the daughter of an ordinary couple, and that instead of being handed over in exchange of the salad plant she’s named after and which her pregnant mother craved so much that Rapunzel’s father made the mistake of stealing it from the garden of a neighbouring sorceress and getting caught, our heroine is kidnapped by the woman in question, the vegetable has becoming a universal healing plant, which Rapunzel’s mother needed to survive during her pregnancy and which transformed baby Rapunzel into a living healing device. Doubling as a de-aging device, which is why she’s kidnapped by the no-longer-a-sorceress. (At least the woman never displays any magical powers through the film.)
I can see why they made the changes, other than Disney shying away from painting biological parents-child relationships as dark as fairy tales can do, in which poor parents are often forced to trade in their offspring for something else. It makes for an understandable motive why Rapunzel is locked up and kept by her kidnapper/adopted mother in that tower all her young life. At the same time, taking their cue from Sondheim, perhaps, they took the trouble of making it not as simple as a captor/prisoner relationship. It IS a mother/daughter one, on both sides. It’s interesting to compare this with what Disney did in regards to Frollo and Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. Frollo in the book isn’t abusive towards Quasimodo, but Frollo in the film is, in a very overt and brutal fashion. Meanwhile, Tangled, the Not!Witch tries to keep Rapunzel in line through a mixture of overprotectiveness (half-pretend, half real) and the occasional confidence-erasing put down disguised as a joke. She’s keeping Rapunzel with her for selfish reasons, but at the same time when Rapunzel asks for a favourite dish the Not!Witch actually goes off to collect the ingredients for it. Rapunzel’s need to escape thus is something resulting from a constricting parent-child relationship easily recognizable from real life, which is unusually restrained and subtle for Disney, and she has highly ambiguous feelings towards the Not!Witch, both before and after the revelation that this isn’t her biological mother, instead of being simply afraid of her a la Disney!Quasimodo and Frollo.
If Rapunzel is a captive princess, she's one in the Leia-in-Star-Wars mold, meaning that she keeps rescueing herself, which brings me to the gender cliché subversion going on with Flynn. Whose looks are modelled on Erol, true, but as it turns out his charming-rogue-personality is in itself a construct and wish fulfillment on his part; his real name, confided to Rapunzel at a point when they're both expecting to die, is Eugene. Rapunzel has been told by her mother she's too fragile for the real world, and she's the girl in the tower, while Flynn/Eugene's entire persona is that of the quintessential swashbuckler, so there is a certain type of audience expectation, but once they meet, it's not only Rapunzel who keeps rescueing Flynn from distress after distress while Flynn fulfills the narrative function of damsel to be saved but also Flynn who is the character learning to abandon pretensions for reality which traditionally tends to be given to female characters rather than male ones as well. The one - and crucial - time where it's Flynn/Eugene who saves Rapunzel he does so not with a derring-do gesture but by a self-sacrificial one.
There is the usual array of cute and funny animal sidekicks - Rapunzel has a chameleon, and there's the horse of one of the palace guards pursueing Flynn which is called Maximus - and they are amusing without being ever treacly. More gender (and traditional Disney narrative) subversion goes on in the subplot of the hyper male ruffians Rapunzel and Flynn/Eugene encounter in a tavern; it's the point where we get the usual "I have a dream" song but here it's Rapunzel saving Flynn from getting beaten up by the bandits by making them talk about their dreams, which turn out to be pianist, flower arranger, mime of pantos... you get the picture. Plus the Not!Witch manages to overwhelm Flynn's sleazy accomplices – also drawn as big muscular fellows – without a sweat (or sorcery) twice. In conclusion: well done, Disney. Well done!
As is usual with Disney adaptions of Grimm fairy tales, not much of the tale survives. Starting with the fact that Rapunzel is now a princess instead of the daughter of an ordinary couple, and that instead of being handed over in exchange of the salad plant she’s named after and which her pregnant mother craved so much that Rapunzel’s father made the mistake of stealing it from the garden of a neighbouring sorceress and getting caught, our heroine is kidnapped by the woman in question, the vegetable has becoming a universal healing plant, which Rapunzel’s mother needed to survive during her pregnancy and which transformed baby Rapunzel into a living healing device. Doubling as a de-aging device, which is why she’s kidnapped by the no-longer-a-sorceress. (At least the woman never displays any magical powers through the film.)
I can see why they made the changes, other than Disney shying away from painting biological parents-child relationships as dark as fairy tales can do, in which poor parents are often forced to trade in their offspring for something else. It makes for an understandable motive why Rapunzel is locked up and kept by her kidnapper/adopted mother in that tower all her young life. At the same time, taking their cue from Sondheim, perhaps, they took the trouble of making it not as simple as a captor/prisoner relationship. It IS a mother/daughter one, on both sides. It’s interesting to compare this with what Disney did in regards to Frollo and Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. Frollo in the book isn’t abusive towards Quasimodo, but Frollo in the film is, in a very overt and brutal fashion. Meanwhile, Tangled, the Not!Witch tries to keep Rapunzel in line through a mixture of overprotectiveness (half-pretend, half real) and the occasional confidence-erasing put down disguised as a joke. She’s keeping Rapunzel with her for selfish reasons, but at the same time when Rapunzel asks for a favourite dish the Not!Witch actually goes off to collect the ingredients for it. Rapunzel’s need to escape thus is something resulting from a constricting parent-child relationship easily recognizable from real life, which is unusually restrained and subtle for Disney, and she has highly ambiguous feelings towards the Not!Witch, both before and after the revelation that this isn’t her biological mother, instead of being simply afraid of her a la Disney!Quasimodo and Frollo.
If Rapunzel is a captive princess, she's one in the Leia-in-Star-Wars mold, meaning that she keeps rescueing herself, which brings me to the gender cliché subversion going on with Flynn. Whose looks are modelled on Erol, true, but as it turns out his charming-rogue-personality is in itself a construct and wish fulfillment on his part; his real name, confided to Rapunzel at a point when they're both expecting to die, is Eugene. Rapunzel has been told by her mother she's too fragile for the real world, and she's the girl in the tower, while Flynn/Eugene's entire persona is that of the quintessential swashbuckler, so there is a certain type of audience expectation, but once they meet, it's not only Rapunzel who keeps rescueing Flynn from distress after distress while Flynn fulfills the narrative function of damsel to be saved but also Flynn who is the character learning to abandon pretensions for reality which traditionally tends to be given to female characters rather than male ones as well. The one - and crucial - time where it's Flynn/Eugene who saves Rapunzel he does so not with a derring-do gesture but by a self-sacrificial one.
There is the usual array of cute and funny animal sidekicks - Rapunzel has a chameleon, and there's the horse of one of the palace guards pursueing Flynn which is called Maximus - and they are amusing without being ever treacly. More gender (and traditional Disney narrative) subversion goes on in the subplot of the hyper male ruffians Rapunzel and Flynn/Eugene encounter in a tavern; it's the point where we get the usual "I have a dream" song but here it's Rapunzel saving Flynn from getting beaten up by the bandits by making them talk about their dreams, which turn out to be pianist, flower arranger, mime of pantos... you get the picture. Plus the Not!Witch manages to overwhelm Flynn's sleazy accomplices – also drawn as big muscular fellows – without a sweat (or sorcery) twice. In conclusion: well done, Disney. Well done!
