I hung that up in my room!!!

Tangled is, and probably will always be my absolute favorite Disney movie! (My pre-Tangled absolute fave was 101 Dalmatians; it still occupies 2nd place in my heart, though). I’m very pleased with what we’ve seen after Tangled, don’t get me wrong. I just happen to love that movie so much I think I can’t love any other film more…

First time I saw the film, I wasn’t as anticipated as when Princess and the Frog came out. At first, the film felt too similar with the Shrek films for its humor and satire. Then soon I started to see the “heart” which makes this a great Disney film. The protagonists (Rider & Blondie), the villain (Mother), the lantern sequence (which is spectacular in 3D), and even the climax (“did I ever tell you that I got a thing for brunettes?”). It felt like this film’s a dream child of Beauty and the Beast & the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I’m amazed that it almost costs $250 million to make the film (which makes it the most expensive animated film ever made), and it did a much better in the BO than the Princess and the Frog, which I thought was a better movie that sparked the start of Disney’s revival, the diverse characters of race & color, the return to hand-drawn animation, and its unexpected plot. Sometimes I find Tangled paired with Enchanted for its music (which were both done exceptionally well by Alan Menken), free-spirited leading heroines, and the dark haired villainess. When I read the Art of Tangled, I was overwhelmed by is design origins coming from films like Pinocchio and (especially) Cinderella, which became an inspiration for most of the architecture of the film (including the design of the tower). In addition, the film does have that painterly feel to the classics of the 40s & 50s, which resulted in a combination of nostalgic and modern ambient of this fairytale world.

After Tangled, it changed my perception towards CGI films (because I’ve been a hand-drawn animation lover for most of my life and I tend to criticize DWA films for being too “Hollywood” for most of the time), so long as there is always a “heart” in every great story, character, music and the technical aspects of a film. From then on, I love films like Wreck it-Ralph, Big Hero 6, and even Frozen, which will soon followed by the upcoming Zootopia (hopefully not in the same vein as Chicken Little) and Moana in 2016. Tangled paved the way for modern CG Disney films, and it will continue to delight audience for generations to come.

There is no doubt that Frozen is more explicit about the love-at-first-sight thing, but Tangled still implied it, and before Frozen came along I had always taken this–ever since Beauty and the Beast, really–as a “correction” that accounted for audience expectations given the storytelling styles WDAS use today…but not just this. Frozen making this more explicit was, in addition to giving an example of “love” that is not true love, to disguise the main plot twist, which was the prophecy twist involving the act of true love. Here the definition of love was further refined as not necessarily involving romance–true love can be a part of a romantic relationship, which is what Anna + Kristoff serves to illustrate, but romance in itself is not love. Setting up this twist required getting romance into the audience’s heads, and this was done with sort of a passive love triangle that contrasted Hans against Kristoff. You’re entitled to your view, but personally I saw the Hans twist has nothing more than this–telling us what we already knew in order to serve the story and its main theme, the true meaning of love, in other ways.

As for the “correcting”/contradiction, the modern movies and older movies simply play by different rules. In the older movies true love for the romances is implied in a form of shorthand while the stories focused a lot more on other relationships, particularly with the sidekicks and other secondary characters. When WDAS decided to focus more and spend more time on the main characters and romantic relationships between them, in the modern movies, naturally they had to make them more detailed (relatively speaking) and realistic.

That said, even with some of the older movies, there is a bit more going on than pure love-at-first-sight. For example, Snow White already knew her Prince before he came back later to revive her–she had acted very coy with him earlier, but there is no telling how well they actually knew each other. At least they’re not complete strangers, though, and in a story like this, that’s something. And for example the lyric that you quote from Sleeping Beauty is interesting because Aurora says “I know you”–this may well be an indirect, abstract way to imply that even though the movie wasn’t going to spend a lot of its running time on their relationship (because that would be boring, or so thought Walt and WDAS at the time–they preferred to spend more time with the Dwarfs, mice and birds, and fairies) there was still an implication that they got to know one another. This is actually implied whether or not WDAS added things like this to the fairy tales because like I said, true love is implied rather than concretely portrayed. This wouldn’t work with the different storytelling styles of today, which is why love-at-first-sight must be avoided or, in the case of Frozen, invalidated. But this does not invalidate the fairy tales or older Disney movies because they’re assumed to be about true love even though they don’t explicitly portray it.

Now, as for the classic fairy tales, H.C. Andersen’s The Little Mermaid gives us a non-modern example of a relationship between two people, a mermaid and a human, in which they explicitly did not get to know one another, really, and man did it end badly for the mermaid as a result. See, it’s not that authors back then did not understand true love (the idea is ancient and at the very least the Bible defined it thousands of years ago) or literally wrote about love-at-first-sight–true love was implied rather than literal and explicit as it is in modern Disney movies (not just Frozen).

As for “fingerprints of the 21st century” being all over Frozen, like I said its views on love–that it is not merely a shallow (but strong) feeling like “puppy love” but all about selfless caring and sacrifice–are very old and very classic, actually giving Frozen a Biblical feel in some ways. WDAS has been more explicitly portraying this sort of love in conjunction with romance since the late 20th century in any case, due to shifts in storytelling styles.

These are the reasons the Hans subplot doesn’t really stick out as excessively “modern” from my perspective. On the other hand, some of Rapunzel’s abilities remind me of the modern notion of portraying the strength of women through unrealistic butt-kicking–a cheesy and superficial form of overcompensation for previous portrayals of women. The way it’s done in Tangled is actually perfectly acceptable to me (at least they showed her “training” with her hair earlier), although it still did remind me of some of the crappier examples I’ve seen, and in general I’m not very fond of this Hollywood trend.