Very entertaining

Rating: 9/10 (20 December 2010)

This movie felt like a 9 on the entertainment scale. The movie drew me in and made me laugh many times. First Disney movie I liked since years. The 1 point missing to a full ten goes off for the plot holes (...why is it now necessary to sing in order to activate the flower/hair magic, and then again it isn't? ...how did the horse get the bunch of thieves to follow him, plus place them behind open prison doors? ...why wasn't the princess at least a little sad for her stepmother whom she had loved for so many years?...). I liked the loving attention to detail such as in the art-nouveau style wall paintings and the pub scene. While I love the old hand-drawn Disney Classics such as Djungle Book and Aristocats with wonderful swing music, I could never really connect to any Disney movie since then - did not like the over-polished gaudy-coloured look of Aladdin & Co. and the pop-style songs; found Princess & the frog a bit boring, too full of cliché visual references to old-style Disney which did not work in my opinion, and was put off by the unnatural purple colour in the voodoo scenes. Tangled on the other hand seems to look more forward than back, and at the same I thought this feels more like one of the old movies. Some scenes felt almost like a movie scene with real actors, such as the one in the cave. A turn towards realism goes well with me. As another reviewer remarked there were still other scenes of unlikely physics (surviving a huge fall) which made me stumble a bit, but which I did not mind too much. Rapunzel's big-eyed pink barbie look...well...thank god she acted differently. As for the lantern scene...it was beautifully made though maybe just a bit too much, think I heard some viewers disconnecting due to the sentimental overdose and getting a little impatient, at least when having a 3D lantern shoved into our faces :-)...I got this random thought about masses of waste lanterns littering the woods on the next morning, and then all the time I had to think about this poor guy who according to the newspapers is fighting paper lanterns, because one of them came down on their house and killed his son in the resulting fire. He will probably not enjoy the movie as much as I did.