Best Disney Heroine Ever

Rating: 10/10 (22 January 2011)

I'll never get this magic stuff. If you put a magic flower under a basket, won't it die from lack of light? And if you use it to save the queen in childbirth, why will the baby have magic powers? And why her hair? That's why I flunked out of Hogwarts. But what a fun film. Rapunzel is not just beautiful, she's seriously cute. And unlike the saintly Snow White and Cinderella, she's got a marvelous streak of spitfire in her. There's hilarious slapstick and barbed dialog. The villainess is classic Disney wicked stepmother, smarmy and selfish, whose physical beauty only serves to accentuate the evil within. She meets a most satisfying demise. The lighting of the lanterns, Rapunzel's whole motivation for leaving her tower, is breathtakingly beautiful. And on a technical note, this film got a writeup in Scientific American for advancing the frontiers of animation. Previously, extremely complicated motions of hair or clothing became rigid because the algorithms couldn't handle the complexity. The animators solved that problem. Also, a flood scene is the most lifelike CGI water I've ever seen. My only complaint, which made me consider giving the movie a 9, is that wicked stepmom has a couple of tedious musical numbers that the film could have omitted with no loss.