Review: "Tangled"

For those of the spoiler-phobic disposition, beware, I may sprinkle some rather liberally through this review. If you wish to avoid them, I'll give you the short version: I did not love this movie. I didn't hate it, either. I'd call my reaction "tepid" and occasionally frustrated at what I felt like it not only could have been but should have been. I will also say that I appear to be in a vast minority, judging from Rotten Tomatoes and my own online f-list. If you saw the trailer and thought it looked like a laugh riot, then go, you'll enjoy it. If, like me, you looked at the preview and thought they were trying way too hard and not hitting the mark, wait for DVD.

Spoilers beyond this point, beware all ye who read past this line.

Since I got home last night I've been trying to focus on exactly why

this movie fell so far short of my already hesitant expectations, and I'm still not entirely sure. In part, I felt like the character animation wasn't quite up to snuff-- the three leads look too perfect, with no blemishes, little imperfections, or quirky facial features to offer anything very interesting to look at. They came off looking more like dolls than people, and without much in the way of visual performance beyond highly repetitive slapstick numbers and not a lot in the way of internal mechanics, I found myself very aware that I was watching some very pretty emptiness. I might change my mind if I ever watch this again, but going off my first impression, the characters didn't seem to do much in the way of "thinking" or experience an emotion that wasn't telegraphed a mile wide.

This leads to my second issue: the lack of character depth in general. Again, I'm not expecting Hamlet from Disney, but characters that feel like they had at least some thought beyond archetype tropes put into them would be nice. Rapunzel fared the best in this department, I think, and there were some interesting things done with her, but quite often she ran into trouble in terms of interesting animation that might have added that little extra depth that could have pushed her over the edge in Really Interesting territory. Sadly, she spent most of her time hovering in the Has Potential lobby. To a lesser extent, Flynn suffered from the same issue, and the Mother character was just flat as a pancake. I tried to get invested in them, but the only one I felt an even remote connection to was Rapunzel and quite often that connection would get squashed by a completely unnecessary musical sequence or series of slapstick jokes. This happened with nearly any moment where started to feel like we were finally getting into some character development/connection, which was irritating and downright annoying by the end of the movie. I get the concept of delayed gratification, but the filmmakers weren't giving me enough time to get a solid foothold into my caring about ANYTHING that was happening. It's like in their effort to ramp up the swashbuckling adventure/humor elements they cut too deeply into any real emotional resonance for the audience (or just me, whatever).

Major irritants: the musical numbers and the animal sidekicks. I'll give the horse a pass since they did a serviceable job of making him important to the plot in some small ways, but the lizard was completely pointless and just took up running time that could have gone into character development or humor that didn't involve hitting someone with a frying pan. The same goes for the songs. I'm not anti-musical, in fact I quite enjoy them when they're well-made. But I have a rule for the musical numbers: if they don't advance the plot, reveal character, or transport the audience from one level of emotion to another in the service of the previous two things, in ways that can't be done as efficiently with plain dialog, cut the song because it's dead weight and will drag the pace of the movie down. For me, that was every SINGLE song in this movie. I have never been so annoyed with musical numbers as I have been with this movie. I could be a bit more forgiving if the songs were at least catchy/fun enough to be memorable, but none of them were. They were dull, dead weight around the neck of this film, and again, that time could have been better used in the aid of character development or plot advancement.

I've mentioned the humor several times, and it probably works for a lot of people. It didn't work for me at all. Can't say why, really, maybe it was too dependent on repetitive slapstick and abruptly halting animation and not anything actually clever or creative. This was probably the biggest mood dampener for me, since it felt like so much of the run-time was devoted to it and it just flat-out did not work for me. I gave a few half-hearted chuckles at first, but I got tired of it pretty fast and gave up. Other people seem to like it, and if there's anything that's subjective, it's humor, so eh, whatever. I do object to the filmmakers trying to use it for character development instead of actual character development in the case of Flynn.

All in all, though, I think my biggest complaint was this nagging sense that this movie really could have been something a lot better and different than it was. It felt like I was watching something that could have been great but was hamstrung by a bunch of people who were too afraid to take risks. Elements of this would surface now and then and I'd find my interest piqued only to have it re-submerge and never appear again for the sake of banality. That was the worst of it. Don't dangle the carrot in front of my face long enough to get me excited and then take it away. You can't be brave and cowardly at the same time, either take the court or go back to the bench.

I don't know if it was a lack of faith in the animators, the story, or the audience, but I suspect the latter. Rule one in movie-making: trust your audience. If you can't do that, do something else with your life. Trust that we will understand what a character is feeling without having to spell it out in huge letters. Those musical numbers felt superfluous specifically because they were not necessary to understand anything. It was like getting "Anakin, you're breaking my heart" on repeat for two minutes a pop every ten minutes or so. Film, and especially animation, is a visual medium: SHOW us, don't TELL us. If you don't trust the audience to understand the significance of a moment that has been built up for half the film in every conceivable way without a song TELLING us how the character feels, you have issues. The moment with the lanterns would have been so much more powerful resting on the ability of the animators to convey it on Rapunzel's face instead of the song they felt was necessary. I get it's a big moment, I don't need you slapping my face asking me if I get it yet. Give us the opportunity to figure it out for ourselves, it means so much more when we do. Other animation studios get this, it's time to step up and get with the program.

Having said all that, I didn't hate it. It's not going on my "must own" list, or even my "I'll rent it when it comes out" list, but I'm probably in a minority there. Everyone seems to quite like, if not even love this movie, and that's fine. I really wanted to, heck, I paid $9 to see it on an evening when I could have stayed off the icy streets and watched a movie I know I already like. I heard friends wax poetic about how much they liked it, I skimmed reviews to the same effect, and I figured if nothing else I'd get an hour and a half of nice animation. Instead I spent an hour and a half being very aware that I was watching a movie in a theater. I was constantly aware that I had seen nearly all of this before in other Disney movies and I had a hard time trying not to directly compare them. It was like a mash-up of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame when it would have been nice to just see Rapunzel without the ghosts of Disney past. Yeah, you had some successful movies back then, but don't strip their carcasses to try and pad your new movies. Figure out WHY those moments worked and go with that, don't just recycle the same ideas over and over again. In short, I was bored. I am frequently many things while watching animation, but"bored" is not one of them, even if the movie itself isn't that great. I left feeling frustrated, confused and irritated at the waste of it all. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't what it could or should have been if someone had taken the chances the film needed to really breathe and come into its own the way it had the potential to do.

For a less clichéd version of (a surprisingly similar take on) the Rapunzel story, check out the graphic novel Rapunzel's Revenge by Shannon, Dean and Nathan Hale. I read it a few years ago and found it really charming and clever in ways that fell flat for me here. Even if you liked this movie, check it out, you'll probably like it.

Wait, What's Wrong With Being a Girl, Again?

(Not officially a part of my series on feminism in animation, although it certainly applies. Just a quick rant.)

So, as most people who might care probably already know, Disney's changed the title of its upcoming movie Rapunzel to the more gender-neutral Tangled. In and of itself, I guess not that big a deal, it's got a certain catch to it, slightly more engaging to a modern audience since it's an adjective, not a noun. Whatever. But then why did they decide to change the content of the movie too? According to the interviews I've read, they're beefing up the role of the heroic prince guy and giving him lots more action scenes. Okay, I'm all for equal character development (which is not what "swashbuckling action" means, btw), but why are they changing so much so suddenly, and especially less than a year before the movie opens?

"We didn't want to be put in a box," according to Ed Catmull, president of Disney and Pixar's animation department (via the LA Times). "Some people might assume it's a fairy tale for girls when it's not. We make movies to be appreciated and loved by everybody."

Translation: "The Princess and the Frog underperformed (ie: only made ~$220 million worldwide) and like we always do, we're blaming something totally arbitrary on the failure instead of our story department and our marketing strategy."

Remember back when they announced they were closing their traditional animation studios in favor of switching to digital animation? Their reasoning there was that everyone else's CG-animated movies were making money and their traditional ones weren't, therefore it must be that traditional animation as a medium is dead and not that the movies themselves had issues. Only now, instead of blaming traditional animation for the "failure" of their blockbuster movie, they're blaming it on the fact that boys won't go see a movie with the word "princess" in the title.

Or, apparently, "Rapunzel". (Which the semantic in me must point out is a kind of leafy green plant people use in salads, not a fancy word for "princess".)

So now, instead of the method of animation at fault, it's the fact that it's about a girl. I keep forgetting that girls aren't regular people who can be easily identified with by people of either gender, like boys can. See, when you make a movie with a girl in the lead part, and it's about "girl" stuff like romance and magic (as 99% of lead-women movies are), it means it's a "chick flick" and the only acceptable guy audience members are the ones dragged there by their girlfriends and who spend every second of its run-time in sheer emotional anguish. Because everyone knows that girl things are silly and emasculating and real men only tolerate it for the sake of sex.

But when a movie comes out with a guy in the lead and it's about "guy" stuff like adventure and action, it's totally cool for girls to like that, too, because when we say "guy", we really mean "everybody". Because guy stuff is the default, "non-gendered" stuff, and "girl" stuff is for sissy, fluffies who like glitter and shoes. And in case you're confused by that, "glitter" and "shoes" and everything else associated with being feminine are less important, interesting, relevant, and acceptable to enjoy because they are silly and beneath all the relevant "boy" stuff like explosions and car chases.

Thank you, Disney, for reminding me that girls are silly and nobody wants to watch movies about them. It's a really good thing you remembered, too, before releasing another movie that will only make a few hundred million dollars because there wasn't enough boy-time and we all know that the only way to relate to a girl character is to be a girl yourself. I mean it's not like they're real people or anything.

(Just for the sake of clarification: I do not assume this of all males, and in fact I think it's pretty demeaning to assume they're all this shallow, but there's a lot of cultural pressure and influence out there that supports the "girls are silly and you shouldn't like anything aimed at them" mentality. I don't know which I find more insulting, the idea that all guys must think this way, or the fact that there are evidently so many who do. And they're not the only ones! There are loads of girls out there who feel the exact same way due to the same social stigma. I was one of them for a very long time. Hence the bitter.)

(Another clarification: I have big issues with the so-called "chick flicks", too, and the predominance of princesses in animated movies. Not because I think femininity in and of itself is demeaning, but because of how "appropriate" femininity is showcased in them, and the almost complete lack of anything else for female consumers. I'm of the opinion that people who genuinely like the glittery princess thing, rock on. But limiting the idea of "girl" to just that is... limiting. Girls can be foofy princesses, and they can be other things, too! We have LOADS of princesses already, maybe we can explore, I don't know, something else for a change?)

Feminism in Animation: "Disney's Hercules" (the series)

This series really never got the recognition it deserved when it was on back in 1998, and I'm really doubtful that it'll ever make it to DVD despite a fan following and a ton of celebrity voice talent. I found it to be a pretty clever series, especially since I'm a huge fan of Greek mythology and I love that the writers clearly studied it and involved it heavily in the plots of the series. It's not always accurate, of course, since it's Disney and an animated daytime show aimed at children, but they actually got away with a fair amount, and you can tell they went to the myths first. It's actually pretty cool, since the original myths were largely pretty woman-phobic, anyway. Don't believe me? Take a look at all the female monsters those strapping demigod heroes had to go defeat, like gorgons, sirens, harpies, dracaenae, scylla, maenades, sphinx, Amazons, and the list goes on. (Note: I'm not saying all the monsters were female, but there were a lot of them, and there's a lot of symbolism involved in terms of taming/conquering female power, especially sexuality, which actually lines up with the role and treatment of women in ancient Greek society, too.)

The basic premise, as with most Disney TV adaptations of their movies, is setting Hercules (Tate Donovan) in high school during his awkward adolescent phase. Despite being a demi-god and the son of Zeus, he's pretty much a social outcast and his only steady friends are Icarus (French Stewart), the boy who flew too close to the sun on wax wings and who now seems to be permanently fried physically and mentally, and Cassandra (Sandra Bernhard), a pessimistic, sarcastic, and downright acidic young woman who's cursed to have unerring visions of future catastrophe, but who will never be believed if she tries to warn anyone about them. Cassandra alone's a great feminist character because, as might be surmised by the casting choice, she's a smart, outspoken, independent woman with a lot more on her mind than just dating and shopping. In fact she only dates one character in the entire show and that was only for two episodes-- this is in spite of Icarus's conviction that they're a couple and his stalking and obsessive behavior towards her, while not portrayed as anything other than annoying and basically harmless, isn't touted as building up to a true love match for them, either. She rejects him constantly and never capitulates to dating him or seems interested in him in that respect at all, which is nice. In fact, the character she winds up dating is very similar to him in a lot of ways, but importantly, he's not obsessive or clingy or possessive. Of course it's played for laughs and Bernhard goes completely over the top with her syrupy lovesick voice, but I think it's interesting that it seems to be Icarus's stalker-like behavior that's his biggest obstacle with her.

Icarus, for his part, is also pretty cool when not latched onto Cassandra, since he doesn't seem to pay much heed to constructed gender roles at all-- he's often shown to be more creative, nurturing, and domestically-minded, and never self-conscious about it. Of course he's also delusional and often has very bad ideas that get him into trouble, but it's still cool that he's totally at peace with his masculine and feminine sides.

There are several specific episodes that deal directly with feminist issues, especially anytime the Amazon Tempest (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is featured. One episode, The Girdle of Hyppolyte, dealt with Hercules having issues with his “Home Grecinomics” class (ha ha, puns) because he didn't feel like he should have to do “women's work” like cooking. He winds up following Tempest back to her home because he thinks she's in danger and winds up at odds with the Amazonian ruler, Hyppolyte (Jane Curtain). Banished to the kitchen to do “men's work”, he meets Tempest's father, King Darius (Emeril Lagasse) and learns that cooking and homemaking aren't gender-specific, nor are they inherently demeaning. They stay clear of more prickly topics like reinforcing the gender binary and its inherent struggle for dominance, and the idea that homemaking as a full-time job isn't regarded any more highly in the matriarchy than in the patriarchy, but the ideas are in there if anyone stops to read between the lines. Pretty subversive for a daytime animated kid's show.

It also takes on the Pygmalion myth, which has become popularized these days in movies like My Fair Lady and Annie Hall (which is a great movie, by the way). The basic story of the original myth is that the sculptor Pygmalion found every woman he saw to be inadequate next to his idea of what they should be, so sculpts himself his perfect woman. During his sculpting, he becomes so besotted with his creation, Aphrodite takes pity on him and brings the statue Galatea to life. The episode The Dream Date plays on this, even having Pygmalion be the school's art teacher with the improbably attractive wife (who is never named), but instead of a dissatisfaction with women in general, Hercules's problem is his inability to get a date for a school dance. Inspired by the art teacher's story, he sneaks into the art room and sculpts a woman out of clay, hoping to invoke Aphrodite (Lisa Kudrow) to bring her to life so he can have a date. As exacting and specific about what he wants her to be like physically, he is equally as uninterested in her personality, and just asks that she be “crazy about [him]”. Naturally, things go awry when Galatea (Jennifer Aniston) is clingy, obsessive, possessive to the point of violence with any other girl who so much as says boo to him, and even winds up rigging the election for the king and queen of the dance. When Herc tries to break up with her (by restraining her and dropping her on a remote island), she's completely undeterred and makes her way back to the dance. Long story short, the dance is ruined, the building catches on fire, and because she's made of clay, she winds up hardened into a statue. Realizing his mistake with the helpful prodding of his friends (Cassandra even gets to say the word “sexist” in a Disney cartoon), he asks Aphrodite to give Galatea the ability to be her own person, which is granted; however instead of getting the real date he's hoping for, Herc instead gets the very same break-up speech he'd given her earlier in the episode right before she runs off to find “that hunky Ajax”. All in all, the message there is pretty clear, and I think the episode presents it in a fun and not-too preachy way: women are their own people, not soulless dolls for men to use to satisfy their lust with and project their fantasies onto-- and yes, that means that they might choose to date someone else, no matter how nice a guy you might be. Seems simple, right? Sadly, in the words of Aphrodite, “not everyone gets the lesson.”(may be nsfw)

Other notable examples from the show include:

Hecate (Perri Gilpin), a disgruntled Underworld employee who's sick of getting very little recognition for her work and is trying to unseat Hades much the same way Hades is trying to unseat Zeus-- frankly in some ways she may actually be more qualified to run the Underworld than he is, not the least of which because she actually wants the job. She creates the unique situation of putting Hades in a vulnerable and even sympathetic position at times, while at the same time, the viewer can also sympathize with Hecate's frustration at her lack of respect and power. I wish she'd been around more, she was interesting. Episode to try: The Underworld Takeover

Athena (Jane Leeves), as the patron goddess of Athens shows up more than once, and is always amusing since she's usually smarter than anyone in the room, and usually in a competitive relationship with her twin brother Ares (Jay Thomas). I like her because she can compete with him in physical areas (they were both patrons of war and combat), but not at the expense of knowledge, wisdom, and reason. I also like that she seems to love irritating everyone by being a smarty pants a lot. Episode to try: The Big Games

Artemis (Reba Macentire), as the goddess of the hunt, is only in two episodes or so, but is knee-slappingly funny most of the time. Interestingly, the writers dug out this old myth about Orion, the legendary hunter of constellation fame, and she having an affair of some sort, in contrast to her more typical virgin status. But in typical Reba fashion, Artemis is straight-shootin', down-home wisdom, and prone to raising her voice when someone isn't listening to her. Episode to try: The Boar Hunt

Elektra (Jennifer Tilly), interestingly having nothing to do with her mythical counterpart, this Elektra is a goth/beatnik girl that Herc's interested in. The problem is, she hates guys like him and wants nothing to do with him until he starts trying to adopt her counter-culture lifestyle. Oh yeah, and she summons “furies” (bird-like monsters) when she gets angry for some reason. What's interesting about this is that the episode doesn't seem to come down firmly on one side or the other here; she isn't really vilified for her viewpoints, and Herc doesn't seem to learn much of a lesson beyond 'don't pretend to be someone you're not to fit in'. They butt heads constantly about their life views but neither one wins the other over, and they part still not seeing eye to eye, but it's actually a more realistic ending than everyone magically getting along after seeing the error of their ways. Episode to try: The Complex Elektra

Medusa (Jennifer Love Hewett), in a big nod to The Little Mermaid, is a lonely soul who longs for a connection with someone without turning them to stone. When given the choice between a human makeover that lasts from sunup to sundown in exchange for doing work for Hades, or a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses that keep her look from turning things to stone from Aphrodite, she takes what really does seem like the better deal and goes with Hades. She fits in when she goes to school, has friends, gets the start of a romance with Hercules, but after a serious anxiety attack when she hears Herc talk callously about learning to kill gorgons in his training, she decides to tell him who she is. It's an interesting episode and the only one I can recall offhand that focuses more on the emotional journey of a one-shot character than the protagonists. I remember that one being somewhat controversial in the fanbase when it first aired, since some people found Aphrodite's solution to be too optimistic in the face of overwhelming cultural bias against 'monsters', but there is also something to be said for the basic lesson of not trying to pretend to be someone you aren't just to gain acceptance. It's too bad she was only in one episode, since by the end of it, only Hercules was shown to be accepting of her, and it never says what happened after that. Episode to try: The Gorgon

As noted before, this series isn't available on DVD, nor is it likely to be for at least a very long time, if ever. Fortunately, some episodes are available on at least one popular movie sharing online community, and to the best of my knowledge, it's in reruns on one of the Disney channels, although I think some of the episodes have been edited since their initial airing. It's not a perfect show; the animation's pretty hit or miss, and some episodes are definitely better than others, but I thought overall it was pretty clever, especially if you're familiar with Greek mythology and history already. If not, it's a fun introduction, and it's a great way to play 'spot the celebrity guest voice', too.