In my family, Tangled is one of the better movies to come out of Disney’s classic animation studios in a long while. Released in 2010, it was the studio’s 50th animated feature film and as such it nicely combines a bit of the old with the more modern. Like the vast majority of animated films coming out of the House of Mouse, Tangled takes an old fairy tale (in this case Rapunzel from the Brothers Grimm) adds in a few contemporary flourishes (and more than a few songs), gives it a happy ending, and calls it all good. It features all the things you want in a classic Disney movies – a beautiful princess, a fairy tale castle, precocious animals, and a hero’s journey.
The songs are more of the Frozen-styled pop tunes instead of the more show tune-oriented songs of something like The Little Mermaid. The animation combines traditional drawing and sublimely implemented CGI, giving it a really gorgeous look. While there is a princess, she has more agency than traditional Disney films, and while there is a love interest who helps her out of many jams, she’s perfectly capable of managing things by her self.
The jokes are good, the songs are solid, and the story is a lot of fun. Tangled is a darn good film. Disney being Disney, they can’t just let a successful movie lie on its own so beyond the 18 kajillion toys and other assorted plastic things they have also recently made a Disney Channel Original Movie entitled Tangled: Before Ever After, which served as a prelude to Tangled: The Series. Now there is a comic that follows what the series is doing in paper form.
It’s about as good as you expect a comic based upon a TV series based upon a movie based upon a fairy tale to be. That is to say: not bad. In about 70 pages, it tells eight different stories of varying lengths. Presumably, they all come straight out of the television show, but not having seen it, I cannot confirm that. The full color pages contain art that is very similar to the movie.
The stories are adventurous and a little romantic. They are funny in a cutesy Disney way and even contain the same slightly snarky voiceover narration that the movie had. It’s a comic that will please the younger set of Disney fans more than your average comic book geek. I read it with my six-year-old daughter and she certainly enjoyed it more than me.
