LITTLE ROCK — “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair.”
Those words aren’t the only familiar things about Tangled, the new Disney animated musicalcomedy-adventure, which riffs off the famed Brothers Grimm fairy tale - not to mention a dozen other Disney princess fantasies. But Tangled never finds a voice of its own.
Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) was kidnapped as an infant by Gothel (Donna Murphy), who keeps herlocked in a tower, convincing her that the real world is much too dangerous to enter. Gothel’s realmotive, however, is to use the magic power to Rapunzel’s hair to keep herself young. Enter the scampish thief Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi), who literally stumbles his way into Rapunzel’s tower, and who might just be her ticket out of there.
Directed by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, and written by Dan Fogelman, Tangled employs Broadway-style show tunes to tell its story of a rebellious girl caught between an overprotective parent and her dreams of a bigger life. Those songs were composed by Alan Menken (here working with lyricist Glenn Slater), who won multiple Oscars in the ’90s for the much more memorable music in The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas. Rapunzel even has a colorful sidekick,a chameleon named Pascal, who looks just like Sebastian the Crab from Mermaid, minus the personality.
The comedy here generally involves people stumbling over things, a routine that wears thin quickly. With the exception of one bouncy number called “I’ve Got a Dream,” set in a rough-andtumble tavern where all the burly patrons turn out to be softies at heart, none of the individual sequences stand out.
Even the pastel-bright look of this fairy tale universe is a bit of a bore - or at least a vast step backward from last year’s resplendent The Princess and the Frog, which vividly evoked jazz age-era New Orleans in richly saturated, hand-drawn animation.
In short: Dud on arrival. An opening credit bills this as Disney’s 50th animated feature, and for the most part Tangled plays like a greatest hits collection of the previous 49.
MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 11/26/2010