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Tangled poster

Tangled

2010 · Nathan Greno, Byron Howard

Feisty teenager Rapunzel, who has long and magical hair, wants to go and see sky lanterns on her eighteenth birthday, but she's bound to a tower by her overprotective mother. She strikes a deal with Flynn Rider, a charming wanted thief, and the duo set off on an action-packed escapade.

dir. Nathan Greno, Byron Howard · 2010

Disney's fiftieth animated feature and, at the time, the most expensive animated film ever made — a decade-long production whose central technical obsession was making computer animation glow like a hand-painted storybook. Rapunzel, locked in a tower by a mother whose manipulation is the film's real villainy, bargains her way out with a wanted thief, and the ensuing escapade quietly rebooted the Disney princess formula: screwball banter, a heroine with a frying pan, romance as negotiation between equals. Legendary animator Glen Keane, who originated the project, pushed the studio toward what he called 'the best of both worlds' — CGI dimensionality with the gestural warmth of the 1950s Fontaine Fox–era house style, using non-photorealistic rendering to approximate brushwork. Alan Menken's score bridges the Renaissance era he defined and the revival to come; the film's success paved the road to Frozen. Its signature image endures on its own terms: thousands of lanterns rising over dark water, a sequence the animators spent years perfecting and which remains one of the medium's purest renderings of longing.

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