Tangled (Bryan Howard & Nathan Greno, 2010)

This is, in essence, a remake of The Little Mermaid, only better. It's a literalization of the idea that part of growing up means moving outside your comfort zone and making mistakes and basically floundering around without much help until you figure out how to do things. It's messy and fun, just like this movie! And, unlike The Little Mermaid, Tangled shows a surprising amount of female agency for a Disney movie. Rapunzel's desire to escape her perceived parental entrapment (much more literal here, since the ocean is, uh, actually way bigger than the not ocean) is motivated by curiousity for the outside world and nothing more, whereas Ariel's curiousity is at least in part inspired by her affection for hot dude whose life she saved. Rapunzel also spends much of the movie acting of her own volition, solving her own problems, and, for the most part, helping herself. This is a fairly stark contrast to Ariel, who is mostly helpless without her animal friends and spends much of the movie not even being able to speak -- certainly problematic as a portrait of the supposedly "ideal" woman Disney tries to paint her as.

Now I cannot honestly trumpet Rapunzel as a strong, feminist portrait. She is, in her own somewhat different way, a sensualized idealization along the lines of Ariel or Aladdin's Princess Jasmine. There is also something about the suddenness of the relationship that develops between her and Flynn Rider, which, I suspect, is as abrupt as it is because it is one of the few Disney films in which the love story is not the point. They go from disliking each other to liking each other to maybe being in love far too quickly. If Disney can go this far out on a limb, it would be nice to see them go even further and maybe suggest that it's okay to date someone BEFORE you fall in love with them, rather than the other way around.

It's interesting to note, though, that the promotional material for the movie actually creates a completely false impression of what the movie is. More so than usual, I suppose I should say. Rapunzel is depicted as a mysterious other, showing up first as magic, violent hair defending itself from Flynn Rider's intrusion. She doesn't show up until part way through the trailer, giving the impression (along with the movie's ambiguous title) that the movie is far closer to Aladdin than The Little Mermaid. What was the motivation behind this? Was there some kind of 7-10-year-old focus-testing that showed little boys would refuse to see a Disney movie if they thought it was about a girl, but that little girls had no such qualms about a movie about a boy? Depressingly, that whole sequence of events doesn't seem implausible. But I really wish it did.