I saw Tangled in 2D and found it very good. I suppose some of the effects might have been even more spectacular in 3D, but they were still quite good.
And I do agree that Rapunzel was quite lovely.
I saw Tangled in 2D as I can’t resolve 3D and enjoyed it perfectly well. John Lasseter was one of the producers, and he is opposed to stunt 3D.
Toy Story 3 is the much better film though. Tangled was enjoyable, but it didn’t have any scenes with the raw emotional power of:
…all the toys being drawn to the incinerator or Andy giving all the toys to the little girl.
…both of which moved me to tears. What can I say, Pixar knows how to push my buttons and I’ll pay them good money to do so.
Come ON, people! Isn’t anyone going to run with my hijack, and agree that Pascal was the best part of Tangled?
Just kidding.
Funny, true story, though:
My wife and I bought our 7-y.o. daughter a stuffed Rapunzel doll, along with a stuffed Pascal, for Christmas. The thing is, though, the set comes with THREE stuffed Pascals, each of which is a different color, conveying a different “mood” and accompanying body language. (Green = cheerful, Red = angry, Blue = sad. The doll makers really did a good job with it.) Anyway, on Xmas morning, we only gave our daughter the one “normal” Pascal doll, colored green. I wondered aloud to her if she put Pascal on a different-colored surface, if he’s change color like the “real” Pascal. So she took the bait…
She put the green Pascal on our maroon-colored couch, and left him there, and proceeded to play with her other new Xmas toys. I took the red Pascal, which she didn’t know about yet, and surreptitiously switched them out.
A few minutes later, when our daughter saw that Pascal had “changed color”, she SQUEALED with excitement. (She still believes in Santa Claus and in “magic”.) I did this once or twice more with the blue and again with the green Pascals, and she was thrilled each time.
We finally let her in on the secret, and she thought it was awesome. That, and that she has THREE Pascals to play with, instead of just one. 
Just had to share that.
This. I’m a proud guy who tries not to let anyone know that I cry at movies (stupid of me to be that way, I know), and TS3 had me almost sobbing. I still get choked up thinking about how they all just joined hands together when they thought they were meeting their end in that incinerator. The mournful but loving looks they gave each other as they joined hands for the “last time” was masterful animation.
All-time domestic box office rankings for Disney animated films, adjusted for inflation:
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
- 101 Dalmatians
- Fantasia
- The Jungle Book
- Sleeping Beauty
- Pinocchio
- Lady and the Tramp
Tangled would need to bring in an additional $250 million or so, in the United States, to approach the bottom of this list.
I don’t judge movie’s qualities based on their ability to make me cry. Toy Story 3 was a more emotional movie of the two, but that was about ALL Toy Story 3 had going for it. Tangled offered so much more.
Also, isn’t Tangled the most expensive movie ever made, topping Spider-Man 3? I heard that somewhere…
Agreed. I thought TS3 was the worst of the trilogy (still good though). Sounds like I really need to check out Tangled now.
TWEET! This chain of references has gotten far too silly. [/gruff military type]
Superman Returns had a buget that was $10m higher.
Anyway, yes, Toy Story 3 was more dramatic in parts, and it was well crafted and made with respect for the audience, but it also felt lazy at times. The writers obviously have no idea how to write for the self-aware Buzz, because in both sequels they found a way to include “delusional Buzz” to make the character more interesting. Lotso was essentially the Prospector II and the themes were already addressed in Toy Story 2 much more succinctly with Jessie’s Song. For Dreamworks, TS3 would be a masterpiece; for Pixar, after WALL-E and Up, it was a huge step backwards. Tangled, OTOH, was like no other film I’ve seen.
Maximus and Pascal were pretty wonderful, I agree. I saw this in 2D because I refuse to pay extra to see anything in 3D (unless the word “Avatar” is in the title) and thought it was beautiful. I liked Princess and the Frog a bit more, but yes, this was a real charmer.
I don’t really care who wins the Oscar. It’s been such a great year for animation and I’ve highly enjoyed all the ones I’ve seen, from the big-name ones: Tangled, Toy Story 3, Megamind, Despicable Me, How To Train Your Dragon, to the more obscure ones: the breathtaking Summer Wars, the funny, raunchy and moving My Dog Tulip (that one’s definitely NOT a kid’s movie), the strange and gorgeous The Secret of Kells (nominated for an Oscar last year, but released in the States in 2010), the overpoweringly fruit-loopily goofy A Town Called Panic (it played at film festivals in 2009, and was released for about 2 seconds in 2010) and yes, even the stately and unfairly treated Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole.
I’ll see Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist Monday night, hoping fervently that the Sylvain Chomet influence overrides the Jacques Tati influence (Chomet directed the quite wonderful The Triplets of Belleville, whereas I recently discovered I loathe Tati’s most famous character, M. Hulot). I had no interest in seeing Shrek Forever After or Yogi Bear (partially live-action) and skipped them on purpose.
The only big problem I had with Tangled was that the music was very forgetable Disney generic. Except for the one Donna Murphy song all of them just blended together and I couldn’t recall the melody the second they were done.
One thing I liked about Tangled compared to other princess movies, is that there are no talking animals. It’s easy not to notice because Pascal and Maximus are far better characters than any of the other talking animal side-kicks.
Also I don’t have anything against CGI, but I like how with Tangled it is easy to forget that it was 3D. Whenever I recall the movie, I think of it as hand drawn. 3D animation is essentially stop motion filmmaking in a computer. A fundamental difference between that and 2D animation is that in 3D you make pictures by moving models which is in some ways more restrictive than 2D in which you just move the pictures. They seem to have somehow achieved a style of movement that is much more like hand drawn animation. I would bet that there is no motion capture in there at all. The complete opposite would have to be Shrek, which is populated by stiff little action figures.
In Japan, this movie is still called by it’s original name ‘Rapunzel’, probably for ease of transliteration. Boy was that confusing!
My 21 year old daughter and I took my six year old for her birthday last December. All of us loved it! It was our first 3-D movie and I was just captivated.
OK, so I saw the film over the weekend. Good film, not sure it was worth the cost of admission, but I’m not sure any film is worth the cost of 3D admission these days.
Two thoughts I had on watching it.
-
OK, so yeah, kidnapping and holding a girl hostage are pretty bad things. But in the intro, it was implied that it was a bad thing to even have kept it to herself over the years. But then how is it OK to boil the flower in water and make a soup out of it to heal one person?
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I’ll spoiler this both for plot reasons and because…well…someone already mentioned Rule 34…
So, at the end, if that means her bodily fluids still carry the power, if she gives a literal hummer, it’s like viagra?
I finally got to see this. I watched the 2D version.
I loved the fact that they dropped all the topical humor and the ‘jokes for the grownups’ and just made a simple story that everyone can enjoy.
Easily my favorite Disney film in years.
I have to give Toy Story 3 the edge when it comes to pure emotional depth and impact, but I enjoyed the HELL out of Tangled, despite recognizing how often it ripped off earlier Disney films. The animation was flat out gorgeous, but the story succeeded on the characters. Rapunzel and Flynn were both adorable and lovable to the nth degree, the animals were funny without being obnoxious or ‘X-treme!’, and Mother Gothal was nasty in a way I almost never see in family movies. I loved that her villian song, which was nothing more than a long string of emotional abuses toward Rapunzel, ended with Rapunzel wrapped in her arms. It made my skin crawl, in a good way.
And Flynn was one of the hottest animated characters I’ve ever seen. I’m pretty sure every aspect of his character was engineered to melt the heart of 12 year old girls.
The Reduced Shakespeare Company podcast recently had a two-part interview with Roy Conli (you can hear it here) that I found quite interesting and un-promo-y. He talks not just about the film but about his career and how one ends up as a producer on a Disney animated film, and about the influential predecessors to Tangled. Also, the hair gets talked about a lot (Rapunzel’s, not Conli’s).
I also saw it in 2D and was pretty enraptured by it; it’s hard to imagine 3D would make it that much better. I agree that the songs, while well-delivered, were fairly forgettable although we really enjoyed the “I Have a Dream” comedy number from the tavern (and heard it on Disney Radio the next day).
As far as Oscars go I would still give the nod to TS3 for emotional impact (I’m a 41 year old male and TS3 made me cry) but as others have said, this is Disney’s best animated film in many years.
According to a couple of different articles I’ve read, including this one from the L.A. Times, Rapunzel’s hair was actually comprised of 100,000 individually animated strands. Sounds pretty amazing.
I haven’t seen this film yet, but I want to.