Disney’s 50th feature-length animated movie is their best in many years. Tangled recaptures the charm, humor, and spirit of the studio’s second renaissance, the late 80s/early 90s period that saw such hits as The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. Quite simply, I laughed and I cried, thoroughly engaged with the characters and the storytelling. And when I thought I had Tangled figured out, it gave me a couple of twists and some welcome sophistication. Touche, John Lasseter, touche.
Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead) takes the reigns and casts Tobey Maguire as the famous web-slinging superhero. The script is ripe with pointed dialogue, but I’ll be darned if the cast don’t pull it off more often than not. Raimi’s approach is decidedly ‘comic booky’, full of color and frenetically paced, with all the grace notes and emotional high points bent toward operatic. As Peter Parker and Spider-Man, Maguire, with his big, soulful eyes, is easy to empathize with. His take on the character is more introverted than you might expect, but inviting. (If I wanted to watch a douche bag save the day, I’d re-watch Iron Man.)
This may be a guilty pleasure, but I also think it inherited an unfair reputation, too. George Lucas wanted to produce a comic film noir. No matter how well it was done, it would never be a huge hit. His name proved cancerous to the movie, unintentionally promising universal appeal for what is really a niche movie. The critics took their best shots and Howard the Duck went down as one of the most famous flops in movie history.
There’s precious little to keep you interested in this hideous-looking and busily boring shit-fest of a film that is both a nadir for director Tim Burton’s creative trajectory and emblematic of everything wrong with Hollywood in the early 21st century. Much muchness? Indeed. Alice in Wonderland is the cinematic equivalent of a priapism.
Disney’s Frozen borrows ideas from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen and follows closely in the footsteps of Tangled before it, but it’s also a bit more. For one thing, there’s an interesting sister dynamic at play here. One royal daughter, Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell), is the care-free sort, while the older daughter Elsa (Wicked‘s Idina Menzel) is born with a curse – the power to turn things into ice. After a childhood display of her magical powers nearly kills Anna, Elsa hides herself away for fear of hurting anyone. That’s all prelude. The story proper takes off when Anna inadvertently upsets Elsa on her coronation day. When the citizens of Arendelle discover their queen is a sorceress, they freak, she freaks, and a hard snow comes to fall. Elsa flees the kingdom and builds an ice castle for herself on the side of a mountain, leaving it up to little sister to later beg her for a return to warmer times.
