Tangled : Movie Review


“Great,” sighs the wicked witch in Tangled, a CG-animated spin on the Rapunzel story, “now I’m the bad guy.” Mother Gothel, the frizzy-haired, sharp-featured enchantress with the inimitable voice of Donna Murphy, is Disney’s first villainess whose chief crime is being an underminer, and the heroine of Disney’s 50th animated film its first co-dependent princess. Tween girls may have some tough questions for their moms on the way out of the funny, brassy Tangled: “Hey, how come Mother Gothel said the same things about Rapunzel's weight that you say to me?”

Those moms might answer as Murphy does in her finest number, “Mother Knows Best,” a Mama Rose–worthy tune (by famed Disney composer Alan Menken, with lyrics by Glenn Slater) in which the witch—who kidnapped the magical Rapunzel as a toddler so that her long blond hair might keep Gothel forever young—explains all the reasons why Rapunzel doesn’t want to leave the tower on her 18th birthday. Sure, there are “ruffians, thugs, poison ivy, quicksand”—but the real problem, Gothel tells the girl, is that Rapunzel is too silly, too uneducated, too unsophisticated to survive the trip.

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Author : Dan Kois