Tangled: Disney Sees the Light

On November 21st, 2010, The LA Times ran its article “Disney Animation is Closing the Book on Fairy Tales.” It pronounced that although the Walt Disney company was built on films in the style of Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid, that form of Disney magic was history.

“Among girls, princesses and the romanticized ideal they represent — revolving around finding the man of your dreams — have a limited shelf life. With the advent of ‘tween’ TV, the tiara-wearing ideal of femininity has been supplanted by new adolescent role models such as the Disney Channel’s Selena Gomez and Nickelodeon’s Miranda Cosgrove.”

“You’ve got to go with the times,” MGA Chief Executive Isaac Larian said. “You can’t keep selling what the mothers and the fathers played with before. You’ve got to see life through their lens.”

   On the same day this article ran, the executives at Disney disavowed the viewpoints expressed and assured the public that Disney was NOT in fact shutting down fairy-tales altogether. Ed Catmull, then president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, declared in a Facebook post:

“A headline in today’s LA Times erroneously reported that the Disney fairy tale is a thing of the past, but I feel it is important to set the record straight that they are alive and well at Disney . . . We have a number of projects in development with new twists that audiences will be able to enjoy for many years to come.”

         The authenticity of this retraction remains in question. Perhaps some quotes were taken out of context, but Ed Catmull himself is specifically quoted in the LA Times article as saying: “They may come back later because someone has a fresh take on it … but we don’t have any other musicals or fairy tales lined up,” and I’m just not sure how they could misconstrue that. All signs indicated that everyone else had moved on from Disney, and Disney itself was ready to get with the program.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

    At its highest, Disney animation has been a cultural reservoir of bold idealism, but 2010 was a weird time in Disney history. It had been about twenty years since the one-two-three punch of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, and the most prominence Disney films had during the new millennium was in the hot takes about Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast celebrating abusive relationships. And weren’t those Disney cartoons, what with their talking animals and impossibly voluminous hair, just for kids anyway? It was into this ecosystem that Disney was attempting launch a brand new fairy-tale adventure, their adaptation of the Rapunzel story, Tangled.

Opening only three days after the story in the LA Times ran, Tangled premiered to a world that was not asking for another Disney classic. The movie was one giant experiment, and had the experiment failed, Disney’s relationship to its own legacy as we know it today would be unrecognizable. That it did succeed, that we are still singing “I See the Light” ten years later, that Disney is the hurricane we know today, that Disney didn't close the book on fairy-tales, stems from one source: the movie’s earnest belief in the fairy-tale tradition.

         Disney’s Dark Ages

Let’s look back ten years prior to Tangled.

In 2000, after a full decade of lucrative movies like The Lion King and Aladdin, Disney had just experienced its first flop in a decade with The Emperor’s New Groove, whose production history was a managerial maelstrom. The studio's next films were beset with similar handicaps that kept them from reaching their full potential, and the box office reflected this. (For more on this period of Disney history, see the Treasure Planet essay.) Disney in 2004-05 perhaps represented the studio at its worst when Disney, still shaken after Treasure Planet’s crash, started shamelessly mimicking the Dreamworks model. Gone were the once upon a times and sweeping orchestral crescendos. 2000’s kids were “edgier” than that. Who needs musical numbers when you have underwear jokes? Critic Tim Brayton said of 2005’s Chicken Little:

“I cannot of course say if Michael Eisner and his crew were honestly sitting in their offices, trying to figure out how best to reduce the hallowed Disney brand name to a shallow DreamWorks clone; but that is certainly how things turned out. Faced with a quickly-changing market for the first time in its history, the company responded with sheer desperation, and that desperation is obvious in every frame of the criminally insipid Chicken Little, by a comfortable margin the worst feature to come out of the Disney Studios since they invented the American feature-length cartoon in 1937.”

         Chicken Little desperately tried to imitate the popular style of cartoons of the day, but only revealed Disney’s naked insecurities. A New York Times article just ahead of Tangled’s release sums up the critical reputation for 2000’s Disney.

“People came to know that a Pixar film meant grown-up cinematic touches (nimble tracking shots, subtle changes in the texture of light), unconventional plots (a scream-processing factory, an old man on a balloon flight), and swiftly edited chase sequences, usually in the final act. DreamWorks Animation excelled at snarky, sequel-seeking romps brimming with pop culture references and vocal performances from big-name stars. A Disney animated movie? More often than not, that stood for rudderless mediocrity.”

         But come 2005, a managerial shake-up in Disney saw Bob Iger replace Michael Eisner as CEO, and it could not have come sooner. This new regime brought about many new changes within the company, including the formal purchase of Pixar Animation. This in turn positioned Pixar's Chief Creative Officer, John Lasseter, over Walt Disney animation as well (where he stayed until allegations of sexual misconduct pushed him out of the company in 2017). To get Walt Disney animation back on track, Lasseter greenlit two projects ripe for the Disney touch, both adaptations of classic fairy-tales: The Frog Prince, and Rapunzel.

The first project, what would eventually become The Princess and the Frog, had a relatively straightforward production. Rapunzel by comparison spent a little more time lost in the woods.

 

Genealogy of a Fairy-Tale

The first attempt was titled Rapunzel: Unbraided. This would have featured a wicked witch casting a magic spell that made Rapunzel switch places with two teenagers named Claire and Vince living in the modern San Francisco. (Above is a demo reel of said project which never made it to full animation.) If reading that logline gives you deja vu, you might be thinking of Disney’s 2007 film Enchanted, which indeed had a very similar premise. The two projects certainly influenced one another, though we still need clarifying about whether the chicken or the egg came first.

         But while we’re here, let’s talk a moment about Enchanted.

Enchanted plays like every Disney fairy-tale baked into a screwball rom-com with Amy Adams playing Katherine Hepburn to Patrick Dempsey’s Cary Grant. Leading lady Giselle is literally a cartoon princess dropped into the live-action world of modern day New York where she encounters a no-nonsense lawyer named Robert. They come from very different worlds, and in exposing the discrepancies, Enchanted overtly pokes fun at many tropes of the Disney style, seemingly conceding to the Shrekian world view that, yeah, Disney movies are too corny, aren’t they?

    Except that while the film acknowledges how out of place the Snow White approach to life is in modern times, Enchanted insists there is a wisdom to this way of life and deep down we’re all looking for a fairy-tale. Yes, Robert calls out the absurdity of Giselle falling in love with someone after only one day, to the delight of many critics of the Disney style, but he himself falls in love with her after only a single day with her, and the film plays to that beat sincerely.

This pastiche of Disney iconography garnered more financial and critical success than any of the animated films Disney was putting out at that time, and so the film became a sort of guidebook for Disney on how to sell “Disney” to the 21st century audience. Turns out post-Shrek audiences will still permit pixie-dust as long as it is overtly labeled so within the text.

Disney veteran Glen Keane said the following about Rapunzel: Unbraided.

“It was a fun, wonderful, witty version and we had a couple of great writers. But in my heart of hearts I believed there was something much more sincere and genuine to get out of the story, so we set it aside and went back to the roots of the original fairy tale.”

         And so Rapunzel: Unbraided was scrapped and the fairy-tale was retooled once again.

Glen Keane

    This iteration was followed by a much darker take on the fairy-tale, one often likened unto Disney projects like The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Sleeping Beauty. Glen Keane helmed this one himself. Aside from its tonal ambitions, we don’t know a lot about this film. Rapunzel reportedly didn’t leave her tower until the third act of the film, and Rapunzel’s love interest was named Bastion, but a lot of the details are still unknown. Following a heart attack in 2008, Keane stepped back from his directorial duties (though he would serve as lead animator for Rapunzel in the final film), and the project was rebooted again.

This time the directorship was passed onto relative newcomers Byron Howard and Nathan Greno, who inherited the project almost immediately after they finished leading Bolt for Disney in 2008.

Their ambition for the project is summed up by this quote from Greno:

“We wanted to make a great classic Disney film. To do that we have to work earnestly and with respect and know where the edges are. We want to create a film that sits on the shelf next to Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Lady and the Tramp, and feels like it belongs there. At the same time, we are without a doubt creating a modern film. Our pacing, action, and humor are being done with a contemporary audience in mind. It’s all about balance.”

This effort would experiment with the Disney essence in a number of ways. Though Disney had been producing CG animated films since 2005, Tangled would be the first fairy-tale rendered in this format. There was some curiosity over whether old wine would sit well in this new bottle. In this pursuit, the animation team bent the medium to emulate all that was beloved of the hand-drawn method. Note the more contoured character designs of Rapunzel or Flynn compared to the comparatively geometric designs in computer animated films like The Incredibles.

    But the medium also afforded its own advantages. The copy+paste function of CG animation made it easier, for example, to herd 45,000 floating lanterns in a snowstorm of lights. The sequence resulting would surely be as breathtaking as anything Disney had put out thus far.

This version borrowed the most successful elements from the Pixar format—a roadtrip narrative, two unlikely partners, thoughtful blending of pathos and humor, etc.—and enlisted the service of Disney legend Alan Menken to compose new songs with his partner Glenn Slater. The cast was rounded out by former teen idol Mandy Moore, tv comic actor Zachary Levi, and Broadway celebrity Donna Murphy. Maybe this was the version that would stick.

Ever since Bob Iger said “Go!”, the elusive Rapunzel adaptation was beset with keeping one foot firmly planted in Disney history and the other in the modern world. It seemed Disney found a balance it was happy with. 

Then The Princess and the Frog gave them cold feet.

 

            Disney’s PR Dance Recital

It’s nigh impossible to discuss this movie’s impact on the Disney canon without the context of The Princess and the Frog released one year earlier. Knowing how much fans of The Princess and the Frog hate constantly being reminded of how Tangled was much more successful than their movie, let me be clear that, yes, The Princess and the Frog is a jewel within the Disney library and was done wrong by the box office. That said . . .

        

    The Princess and the Frog grossed about $260 M on a $100 M budget. Disney Animation’s film from the previous year, Bolt, grossed $300 M on a $150 M budget, so by comparison, The Princess and the Frog had a lower overall gross but a higher return on investment, sitting squarely between “not a failure” and “decent.” But Disney’s first fairy-tale musical in a generation wasn’t just supposed to be “decent.” It was supposed to catapult the Disney brand back into the public eye, but it only performed marginally better than the rest of their products over the previous decade.

And so Disney’s entire think tank was tasked with figuring out why The Princess and the Frog did not break the box office. And what should they conclude but that princesses, while hot products as dolls, were box office poison. Of course, The Princess and the Frog floundered because it was about a Princess! Boys don’t see movies about princesses! It was all so clear now. 

         Why did The Princess and the Frog actually underperform? The problem lies less with how the world saw “princesses” and more with how the world saw “Disney.” 

With The Princess and the Frog, Disney boldly proclaimed that the next Disney Classic—the worldwide phenomenon that was going to inspire theme park parades and sing-along DVDs for generations—was launching in T-minus 10. The film’s trailer even opened with footage from the very Disney classics the movie wanted so badly to be compared to. Meanwhile the room was still reeking from Chicken Little. The public just wasn’t ready to buy into it, and so they took their kids to see Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 instead.  

         This put Disney’s next film, also a singing princess movie, in a rough spot. When you need to significantly alter the appeal of your movie, and said movie needs to be ready to ship out in six months, there’s really only about five seconds of the total runtime that you can play with: the five seconds where the title card plays. And so . . . 

In February 2010, Disney announced that their Rapunzel adaptation would no longer carry the leading heroine’s name in the title. Instead, the movie would be referred to henceforth and forevermore as “Tangled.” This, they argued, was the BETTER title—the title that more honestly reflected the movie they were making. Said Byron Howard shortly after the movie’s release:

“When Nathan [Greno] and I figured out that this film was really about two characters, Flynn and Rapunzel, we knew that changing the title would be a good idea. We like that ‘Tangled’ as a title sounds smart and intriguing, while also relating to the tangle of plot, characters, and emotion in the film.”

Online critics saw through this very quickly. Former Disney Animator, Floyd Norman, even called the title change “beyond stupid.” After a good four years, the suits admitted that they were really just scared of the girly title. Said Lasseter:

“There was an audience perception that these movies were just for little girls, but when boys, men, whatever, actually see these movies they like them. So on Rapunzel we rolled up our sleeves, we changed the name and we called it Tangled. We did marketing that made the people who would not normally show up say, ‘Hey, this looks pretty good’. Tangled was then a big hit and it opened the door for more of these movies.”

    Indeed, Tangled’s first proper trailer dropped in June 2010 and is told squarely from Flynn’s perspective. Rapunzel herself has a single line of dialogue and mostly just giggles throughout the movie while Flynn scowls like his parents are making him ride it’s a small world for the fifth time. The trailer features a whole slew of footage specially rendered for the marketing, most of it featuring Flynn getting beat up by Rapunzel’s hair which I guess is sentient in this trailer. The world passed on a “Beauty and the Beast” style film, but maybe they’d go for something a little more Tom and Jerry? 

Unable to hide that there was a princess in this movie, Disney really played up the angsty teenager elements of the film. “She’s been grounded ... like, FOREVER!” flashes the text in this trailer. Poster advertising, meanwhile, had Rapunzel giving off her best Miley Cyrus impression. Yeah, she’s a princess, but like a hip, cool princess! (Never mind that the Rapunzel in the film is borderline paralyzed by her own politeness.)

I’ll repeat, Disney’s rewriting campaign was limited to the advertising, not the film itself. By the time Disney would have properly assessed the reception for The Princess and the Frog, it would have been far too late for them to make structural changes to the film. (Frankly, we’re better off for it. I don’t want to imagine the allergic-reaction of a movie Disney would have spewed out otherwise.) 

I can only speculate what the spiritual temperature must have been like for Walt Disney Animation studios in those final weeks before the release of Tangled. Because whether they liked it or not, the movie they made demanded a lot more emotionally than the movie they had advertised. 

    Go, Live Your Dream

        

Flynn at the start of this film is very much an embodiment of 21st century cynicism, sort of a mash-up of Shrek and Jeff Winger from Community. He’s read all those internet articles about Disney and their silly two-day courtships, and he’s just too cool for fairy-tales. He, in short, is the audience avatar. Rapunzel, meanwhile, is a loose bundle of Leslie Knopeian enthusiasm and optimism--an ambassador for Disney magic. Her brightness is a little overwhelming, perhaps, but ultimately reveals her undeniable goodness that leaves everyone she meets just a little better. 

    Through their interaction, Rapunzel grows more competent and assured while remaining true to her incandescent idealism. Meanwhile, Flynn stops relying so much on his devil-may-care attitude and starts to shed that coating—and that’s all it is, coating—to reveal a more sincere, vulnerable part of himself. The part that is capable of a mature relationship with another person, even laying his life down for her. Flynn never loses his signature wit or street smarts, but the way he uses it evolves across the film. His shrewdness grows from a means of distancing himself from any measure of vulnerability to a method of lightening the tension with his sharp observations and propensity for levity.

    On the surface, Flynn reads like a deliberate attempt to make the fairy-tale formula more palatable to an audience that sees itself as too old to be wishing on stars. And the film does use him as a sort of lightning rod, same as Robert in Enchanted, but as in that case, the idea of a "post-fairy-tale" viewpoint is the one that is challenged and eventually dismantled. Tangled acknowledges how odd the Once Upon a Time worldview is, but also showcases how this optimism brings out the best in us.

This is the major difference between a film like Tangled and a film like Shrek, the movie this easily could have been. Shrek parodies the fairy-tale element by taking a feature of this pixie-dust world and corrupting it for laughs—a morning aria with a princess and a woodland bird is disrupted by having the bird actually explode because of course those notes are impossibly high. Tangled does the exact opposite and takes something stoic or even grotesque and reveals the vulnerable soul latent within, the dreaming concert pianist you might not have seen within the vicious bar thug.

Tangled inherited this dynamic from Enchanted but codified this pattern in Disney's animated films, as seen with Frozen, Zootopia, and Moana: the wide-eyed optimistic young woman experiencing the world for the first time paired, sometimes romantically, with a world-weary man-child whose cynical exterior is melted away by the girl’s sincerity to reveal his own dormant idealism. Even Wreck-it Ralph and The Princess and the Frog use a slight variation of the formula. (And yes, I could write a whole series of essays about how in this modern age of “empowered” Disney girls the gender roles have never been stricter, but one thing at a time ...) 

        

    And that’s the fascinating thing about this movie: it asserts that sincerity is the default, and anything else is just a performance, armor, a coping mechanism. Even Eugene’s Flynn Rider guise was born out of his veneration of an old folktale. Flynn, the pub thugs, and Maximus all convey an aura of imperviousness, but underneath they have dreams. Or as Rapunzel says of Maximus “He’s nothing but a sweetheart!”

But isn't that maybe a little too good to be true?

    The major dramatic question of the film is whether Rapunzel can survive outside the cradle of her tower. But there’s a metatextual concern with whether or not the “Once Upon a Time” viewpoint will be snuffed out by the real world and its inhumanity. This is made explicit in the reprise of “Mother Knows Best” when Gothel issues a sort of prophecy that Rapunzel will not necessarily be snared by ruffians or thugs, but rather human indecency, especially from the person she trusts most. And it isn’t the near kidnapping on part of Flynn’s ex-compatriots that has Rapunzel sobbing back to her tower, it’s the thought that Eugene would betray her. 

Rapunzel’s temporary defeat functions as a concession that, yes, living life like it’s a fairy-tale leaves you vulnerable to hurt and loss. But, as Rapunzel learns, human indecency isn’t the sum of the human experience and, in the case of Eugene’s “betrayal,” is often based on misunderstanding or even deception. The antidote to the cruelty of the real world isn’t to retreat into your tower, or your manufactured persona of emotional invulnerability, but to imbue the world with more goodness and kindness. To step out of the tower and let your power shine. 

 

         The Lost Princess Returns

    Tangled opened under the shadow of the penultimate Harry Potter film, but still managed a $48 M opening weekend. Tangled’s final worldwide gross came to about $590 M. Critics all around welcomed Disney’s return to form with Tangled. Cinemablend's Katey Rich praised the film, declaring, "Without ever striving too hard to feel hip and current, and avoiding pop culture references to everyone's benefit, Tangled possesses a frank modernity, from its weapon-wielding heroine to its embrace of silly yet gut-busting gags ... As has been said, it's a tale as old as time-- or at least Hollywood-- but telling it this well, and with such grace, makes Tangled a genuine and special achievement."

    The film earned praise for its voice casting, clever humor, and lush visuals, particularly the floating light sequence, which critics favorably compared to other hallmark Disney moments like "A Whole New World." The film's reputation has only grown among Disney fans in the intervening ten years such that Tangled, which so earnestly tried to convince audiences that it wasn't "just another Disney film," is counted among The Lion King and Cinderella as a certified Disney classic.

This belongs on your Disney+ queue

    Tangled as a brand has continued to thrive within and outside of the Disney Princess posse. The film inspired a television series, one much better than a Disney Channel show has any business being. Rapunzel and Flynn still feature as recurring park characters frequently. That Rapunzel has held onto her pop culture real estate even after the Frozen sisters stormed onto the scene says a lot about her status as a character.

    Speaking of Frozen . . .

         Disney announced in 2011, barely a year after Tangled’s reign, that it would next be adapting the Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale “The Snow Queen” into an animated musical film. But in homage to Tangled’s success, the film would be brought to life through CG animation as opposed to traditional hand-drawn animation, and the story would also be rebranded into something less overtly girly-ish: “Frozen.” (During this time, Pixar’s “The Bear and the Bow” would also be rebranded as “Brave.”)

        

    Frozen’s marketing campaign doubled down on the Shrekian flavor and made Olaf the center of the advertising for as long as they could, not even revealing to the public that this was *gasp* a princess film until two months before the film’s opening. (They would wait even longer before confessing this was a singing Princess movie.) And when that film broke the box-office, Disney was just aghast that people actually liked what they were doing.

        

    Did Disney ever learn their lesson? Maybe. To their credit, they knew better than to call Moana “Splashed.” I think it’s also telling that the advertising for Frozen II made no attempt to pander to the SpongeBob crowd. Disney appears to have grown more confident that, yes, fairy-tale movies are something to be excited for.

         At the same time, Disney gets very sheepish about their own legacy. Popular discussion has shifted from Disney films simply being too corny for modern audiences to being problematic. Tiana and Rapunzel were the first princess characters billed to modern audiences as being “modern," “empowered,” and "not your average princess." They were just the start. A good six or seven princesses this decade alone have been proclaimed "the first Disney princess to be a good role model for girls," and we see a similar narrative surface with every one of Disney’s recent live-action remakes. Disney’s efforts to “modernize” their canon betray a certain insecurity that leaves me a little . . . anxious.

This brand of criticism has been around for a while. What’s newer is Disney conceding to this way of thinking, sometimes even leading the charges themselves. The lesson Disney appears to have taken from the success of Tangled is that audiences are responding more to the revisionist undertones of its marketing than its Disney DNA, and so they’re peddling out more of the former. One wonders how long until they start taking notes from the cool kids and we’re back to Chicken Little.

    In the studio’s 80 year history, Walt Disney Animation has risked teetering off the edge more than once, and every time the way back has always been with a fairy-tale. In 1950, the studio bounced back from WWII with Cinderella. In 1989, The Little Mermaid gave the studio its first financial smash since Walt’s passing over twenty years prior. And Tangled made it okay for millennials to like fairy-tales again. Disney doesn’t have the princess franchise to thank for that either. The princesses wouldn’t be unionized until the late 90’s, and when Pixar tried to take a swing at the ball in 2012 with Brave, the result was one of the studio’s more middling efforts. Fairy-tales have always adapted to fit the needs of their contemporary audience (Snow White is different than Jasmine is different than Tiana), but they’ve never had to dumb down the genre. The common denominator has always been a willingness to believe that way down deep inside we’ve all got dreams. 

Legacy

Tangled’s success directly contributed to the launch of Frozen which directly contributed to this modern world where Disney culture openly interacts with mainstream culture. Without Tangled’s link in the chain, Disney would have never given films like The Princess and the Frog another chance, and it most likely would have continued imitating the juvenile products Dreamworks was vomiting out during the turn of the millennium.

        

    The lingering question, of course, is whether it was the film’s orchestrated marketing campaign or the film’s innate heart that won the hearts of audiences. Would audiences have given the film a chance if they didn’t think it would just be another unremarkable day at the movies with the kids? Even talking about how this film “saved” the company from its own cynicism is a bit misleading. This crossroad awaits Disney every time it premieres a new film that even suggests “fairy-tale” because skepticism will always come more naturally than vulnerability, and so Disney will continually have to choose which house it will serve.

         The truth embodied through Tangled, both within the text itself and the hoopla around its marketing, is the boldness it takes to live a life of hopefulness. To step out of your tower. To fall in love. To bet that the masses just want a fairy-tale. Because yes, it is peculiar to believe that people are basically good or that happy endings do come to those who dream, but without that peculiarity, what are we left with?

Of their decision to write the film as a straight fairy-tale, Howard and Greno said that, “Cynicism is easy because it demands nothing of you. Intellectually and emotionally, sincerity requires commitment and risk.” It doesn’t take any courage to be a Flynn Rider, but it does to be a Rapunzel or a Eugene Fitzherbert.

                --The Professor