Tangled

Walt Disney Animation follows up last years highly successful Princess and the Frog with tangled. Tangled is different form the other Disney princess movies because the title does not let the viewer know which princess story it is going to be. Plus in an attempt to appeal more to the younger boy demographic this story is told from the hero character of Flynn Rider. For me Disney was right on the mark with this movie as I feel that it was an overall improvement from the Princess and the Frog.

One of the most important aspects for animated movies is to have skilled voice actors who not only fit the role, but can give a feeling of chemistry while speaking the part. Zachary Levi and Many Moore are both perfect for their parts. Mandy Moore has a voice that fits Rapunzel perfectly with her innocent voice, but at the same time exudes confidence and not a damsel in distress. While Zachary Levi is perfect as Flynn Rider. He exhorts a great amount of cockiness and strength that you would expect from a thief, who has always been able to overcome the odds to stay alive. Most surprising though was Levi's singing in the movie, he does a great job and since for me I recognize him for his role as Chuck on the TV show Chuck, because of that the singing ability I was totally not expecting.

The second aspect within Disney animated movies is that of the songs throughout. For Tangled I feel that the overall song score fell short of the Disney standard. Yet individually some of the songs are great and are definitely ones you will not only hear over and over but they can get stick in your head. It may be wrong thinking on my end  but it did not have the usual number of songs in a Disney movie. Yet, this is the only real weakness that I noticed in seeing this movie.

The third aspect in this movie is probably its greatest strength is the storyline. Going outside of the traditional princess fairytale mold of being narrated by someone telling the story, they used the hero of Flynn Rider as the narrator. While this may not work well in most of the Disney fairytale movies it fits perfectly in Tangled. with the story of Rapunzel it is fairly simple and straightforward. Disney is able to take the simplicity and give it such a great underlying theme and also add some unique turns to keep viewers of all ages entertained throughout.

In typical Disney fashion while the main characters are great it is the secondary characters that steal the show. It is even tougher for a secondary character to steal the show without uttering a word but that is precisely what Paschal the chameleon and Maximus the horse do. This is a tribute to the talents of the animators because of the great emotion and message these two characters are able to emit from just simple facial expressions.

Tangled ends up being a fun family film that will entertain movie goers of all ages. It was great to see slow motion action sequences that one would expect in a movie like the Bourne Identity and not an animated one. For the overall enjoyment I am giving Tangled three and a half buckets of popcorn out of five. This is definitely a movie that we will be adding to our movie collection.

-The Movie Man