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We took our daughter to the movies for the first time the other day to see a movie she’d been asking about for weeks: Tangled. It was a big deal for us beyond the movie, since it was a family outing, and the first time my wife and I had been in a theater together since before our daughter was born. The day planned around the child turned out to be a bigger hit for the adults, as we thoroughly loved Tangled but our daughter’s feelings were more mixed.

The story is only loosely based on the Rapunzel myth, but is updated in a way that gives the film’s two central characters (Rapunzel and her accidental savior, the thief Flynn Rider) much more to do while also increasing the opportunities for merchandising. Rapunzel is now a princess, stolen from her royal crib shortly after birth because her hair has healing powers that the film’s villain, Mother Gothel, wants to use to continue to keep herself eternally young. So, of course, she keeps Rapunzel in an inaccessible tower in a hidden part of the forest, convincing her that to leave the tower and enter the cruel, dangerous world would be sheer lunacy. (I imagine a psychologist would have a field day here.) Flynn Rider, himself on the lam after stealing the crown Rapunzel’s grief-stricken parents have set aside for her hoped-for return, stumbles upon the tower and eventually sets off with Rapunzel … at which point the real movie starts.

And it’s some movie – not a princess movie by any stretch, but a Disney adventure flick, with thugs, fights, chases, trickery, and, in the best trick of all, some actual plot tension even though you know more or less how the story is going to end. It took about a third of the movie to get to the point where Rapunzel leaves the tower, but after that, the movie flies, with three different parties chasing Flynn and Rapunzel, leaving (thankfully) less time to dwell on the budding romance between the two characters. I feel like Disney gave the Pixar gang minimal directions – “make a movie about Rapunzel, and put her in a purple dress*” – and Pixar did what they do best: They turned it on its head and wrote a fantastic, fun, energetic story.

*So my daughter is completely caught up in the princess stuff, which means my wallet is caught up in the princess stuff as well. We were last at Disneyworld in November of 2009, right as they introduced the Tiana character from The Princess and the Frog. Her dress was green, which, I noticed as we walked through that massive store at Downtown Disney, left only purple as the likely color for the next dress, since we already have pink, blue, turquoise (twice), yellow, and green, not including the fairies. I’m wondering what color is next – orange? Magenta? Some other blue? This stuff matters when you know it’ll be on the Christmas wish list a year from now.

The animation in Tangled is absolutely absurd, the most impressive I’ve seen so far, even exceeding the normally high expectations I take into any Pixar-made film. You would expect that, in a film about Rapunzel, the main character’s hair would be superbly animated, but it’s not just her hair – Flynn Rider’s rakish hairdo and Mother Gothel’s curls* look rich and textured, more real than real, if that makes sense. But there’s a scene where a torrent of water breaks loose and heads towards the camera (I assume for the 3-D version) where I couldn’t get over how un-animated the water looked – clear, glassy, almost like I could see the drops of water making up the flood. And my wife and I both noticed that the Rapunzel has realistic-looking feet, something you almost never see on an animated character (and important since she’s barefoot through the whole movie).

*Figures that they give the film’s main villain curly hair.

The Wikipedia entry on the film explains that the animation style was inspired by a rococo painting called The Swing, although I can’t say I would have noticed the difference if I hadn’t read that beforehand. I know nothing about art, though, which is probably the reason.

Tangled was scary for my four-year-old, who particularly disliked “the bad woman” (Mother Gothel), I think in part because that character separates Rapunzel from her parents and then is increasingly wicked as the film goes on. I was more disturbed by the extent of comic violence, especially that involving blows to the head. Some of the physical comedy is brilliant, such as Rapunzel’s trouble stuffing the unconscious Flynn into a closet, but one of the best running gags in the movie involves whacking people in the head or face with a cast-iron skillet. I use one of those almost every night I cook, and a blow to the dome from one of those won’t just knock you out – it would probably fracture your skull. And in Tangled it happens over … and over … and over, to the point where I couldn’t sustain my suspension of disbelief. It lost its humor for me, until Flynn’s one great line about it near the end of the film. There’s other violence in the film, including a stabbing and an implied death by defenestration, that probably makes this inappropriate for younger viewers. It is an action flick, Disney-style, and while I’m glad they didn’t just make a dull princess movie, I don’t think we’d have taken our daughter to see it if we knew just how much of a grown-up kids’ movie Tangled was.