Good but Not as Great as I was Hoping

Rating: 8/10 (27 June 2011)

So my journey to Tangled was a long and confusing emotional roller coaster. As a life-long fan of both Disney Animation and Glen Keane I was excited by the prospect of Mr. Keane directing Disney's grand return to the fairy tale, but as time went on Disney gave us a a change of directors, a terrible name change from Rapunzel to Tangled, and a god-awful marketing campaign to try to attract the boys who apparently stayed away from The Princess and the Frog. All this news really disappointed me and crushed a lot of my hopes for Disney's grand return to the glory days of animation. Eventually though, the reviews started coming back positive and I returned to a state of cautious optimism. Now I've seen the movie and I can finally tell you my feelings once and for all.
Tangled, is a good movie, but unfortunately, like Disney's last attempt to bring back "classic Disney Animation" (The Princess and the Frog) it was a bit too much of a mixed bag to really be great. The animation and art style in the movie are gorgeous; the landscapes really feel like a dimensional paintings and Glen Keane's attempt to bring the fluidity and warmth of hand drawn animation to CG was definitely successful (though I do feel, especially after seeing some of the hand-drawn character concepts, that the movie might have stood out a bit more if it had been hand-animated).
The first act of the movie starts off fairly promising until we arrive at the first song, this is definitely one of Disney's, and Alan Menken's, weakest musicals. Especially in the beginning of the film, the songs don't really feel like an integrated and important part of the story telling, but rather an annoying distraction from it. The beginning of the movie does, however, do a good job of setting up the characters, including my personal favorite: Flynn Rider, voiced by Chuck's Zachary Levi. Flynn is such a brilliant character, because unlike most fairy tale heroes, he realizes just how bizarre everything going on really is. It's a great modern twist that doesn't feel too Shrek-ish.
In the second and third acts things vastly improve, this is when it really starts to feel like it can maybe stand on the same shelf next to the likes of Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid. As the relationship of Flynn and Rapunzel grows, we also get some great moments from the film's primary villain all leading toward an exciting, if somewhat predictable conclusion. In the midst of this ending, however the writers pull a very disappointing (and cliché) Deus ex machina plot device which, at least in my opinion, invalidated a lot of the emotion of the ending.
Disney has said that Tangled is to be the last fairy tale that the company produces for the foreseeable future, and as disappointing as that sounds on paper, I can't help but feel that it's the right decision for the company at this point. Unfortunately while watching Tangled, you can't help but compare it to the great Disney animated fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast. Until Disney can do something to really reinvent the genre like The Little Mermaid did, staying away from fairy tales is the best thing they can do. Part of Pixar's success is that they have been consistently doing what no one else in animation has done. Tangled was enjoyable, and I'm certainly glad I saw it, but it unfortunately pales in comparison to other animated films like How to Train Your Dragon and Toy Story 3 and doesn't live up to the precedent set by Disney's previous fairy tales.
Rating: B