Tangled (2010)

Rating: 4/10 (14 December 2011)

Reading some of the reviews for this you may expect the start of a new wave of Disney brilliance. What I saw was Disney playing it safer than they have ever done before. Everything is the same, but worse. Worst of all are the songs. I pick up songs very fast. I can hear a song once and hum diddly hum it weeks later. The songs from Tangled are about as memorable as, well, if I could remember something so unmemorable it would kind of undermine my point. The film also has the least threatening of all Disney villains. With none of the menace nor charm as some of the classics, Mother Grothel is just someone you don't like, rather than fear and despise. The humour is immature and wreaks of 90's post-modernism. This same kind of narration was used in Happily N'Ever After, and there's a reason you haven't seen that film. Even the story itself is stretched and involves a bunch of lifeless characters that are overshadowed by a chameleon and a horse. The animation is fine, the voice work admirable, but this is a hollow and bland film.