By Lina Das
Last updated at 10:02 AM on 28th January 2011
Having taken Disney almost 70 years to get there, Tangled realises the studio’s long-held ambition to bring the legend of Rapunzel to the big screen.
The story of the girl with unfeasibly long hair who is locked in a tower until a prince comes to rescue her was first published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm, but in Tangled, the animators have given the tale a contemporary twist. Our modern Rapunzel is a feisty girl who gives short shrift to Flynn Ryder, the charming male hero Who crosses the threshold of her tower one fateful day.
Given that the tale of Rapunzel is so engrained in our consciousness, much has been made of the decision to call the film Tangled — a move which many saw as a marketing ploy to encourage more boys to see the film.
All Tangled up: The film about Rapunzel has taken a decade to meet Disney's high standards
But as Roy Conli, the film’s producer insists: ‘You can’t name your film until you know what the story is and as we built the story up, it became more and more apparent that we had two protagonists in the form of Rapunzel and Flynn, rather than just one, hence the movie’s broader title.’
It is Disney’s 50th animated feature and as Byron Howard and Nathan Greno, the film’s co-directors admit: ‘There was a huge responsibility in making it because if they’re done right, Disney films live for ever.’
Their biggest challenge was Rapunzel’s defining feature — hair is notoriously difficult to animate and because it is so central to the story, technology had to be improved.
‘The technicians were saying: “It would be easier if Rapunzel’s hair was never touched, never got wet, never brushed her shoulders and if we don’t have any characters with curly hair,”’ says Nathan Greno, ‘so, of course, we asked for all the above.’
The British Film Institute is screening all 50 films during the course of the year and with the quality of features such as Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, Bambi and Sleeping Beauty, to live up to, Tangled was under considerable pressure.
Happily for its creators, U.S. critics hailed it a success when it was released there last year and it has already taken nearly £250 million at the box office. It is also the most expensive animated film ever made, costing £163 million.
THE CHARACTERS
Rapunzel (voiced by Mandy Moore)
Rapunzel is the tenth official princess of the Disney franchise (and the first to be computer-generated rather than hand drawn).
The film-makers were adamant that she shouldn’t be ‘princessy and aloof’ and to that end, ‘we looked at actresses such as Reese Witherspoon, Natalie Portman and Amy Poehler from the comedy series Saturday Night Live,’ says Clay Kaytis, one of the film’s animators. ‘We wanted unexpected, quirky qualities to shake up expectations of what a princess should be.’ They came up with nine versions of Rapunzel (five of which were fully animated) before they settled on the final one.
Finally made it: The voice of Rapunzel, Mandy Moore, with directors Byron Howard (left) and Nathan Greno who said they felt huge pressure to make the film perfectly
Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi)
Though one might assume that Flynn was named in homage to the swashbuckling movie star Errol Flynn, Mark Kennedy, the film’s head of story, insists: ‘Unlike the Errol Flynn characters who were so cool they never really worried about anything, our Flynn is more like Indiana Jones, who’s always getting into trouble. Another influence was Bruce Willis in Die Hard. We didn’t want James Bond insouciance.’
Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy)
Having kidnapped Rapunzel as a baby, elderly witch Gothel uses the restorative powers of her hair to maintain her youthful looks.
There’s no delicate way to say this, but the villain of the piece is pretty sexy. ‘We didn’t do it deliberately,’ insists Clay Kaytis, ‘but because her whole thing is about trying to stay young, we wanted to create this beautiful kind of cougar character. We looked at Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood divas such as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Mother Gothel is very much of that ilk.’
Gothel is undoubtedly one of Disney’s most deliciously awful villains, and many of her finer lines were put together after film-makers asked female colleagues about their relationships with their mothers. ‘We got these stories about how their mothers would come out with awful put-downs, even though they had their daughters’ best interests at heart,’ says Nathan Greno. ‘It’s funny because that stuff goes way over kids’ heads, but adults love it.’
Getting in knots: The hair proved to be the most difficult thing to capture on film and was described as having a character all of its own
THE HAIR
It took ten years of playing around with computer graphics technology before film-makers felt prepared enough to commit Rapunzel to the big screen, ‘and even with less than a year to go before the film’s release, we weren’t entirely sure we could do this,’ says Byron Howard. ‘The hair is almost another character in the movie and we needed to do it justice.’
A real-life hair model was used to observe and then recreate the movement of Rapunzel’s flowing locks, while the effects team drilled a hole in an American football helmet and passed a huge bunch of thread through it before walking up and down to see how it felt to carry that weight on their heads.
Steve Goldberg, the film’s visual effects supervisor, says: ‘We also calculated that a foot of hair would weigh approximately 1lb and so Rapunzel’s hair, at around 70ft would have weighed about 70lb [5st]. Obviously, we couldn’t design her neck to realistically accommodate that weight of hair,’ he adds. ‘That wouldn’t have looked nice at all!’
THE BIG 5-0
As the 50th animated feature in the Walt Disney canon, the pressure was definitely on to create something special with Tangled. ‘Although we wanted to draw on Disney’s history, we also wanted to make something new and fresh,’ says Nathan Greno.
The animators looked to such Disney classics as Pinocchio (1940) and Cinderella (1950) for inspiration, but also to more modern movies such as 1989’s, The Little Mermaid.
Greno says: ‘A lot of the female characters up until The Little Mermaid were lovely but bland, but with Ariel, we saw something we’d never seen before — a real spark — and we tried to do a similar thing with Rapunzel.’
THE LASSETER EFFECT
In one of Tangled’s most memorable scenes, Rapunzel and Flynn are in a boat while thousands of floating lanterns are launched into the sky. It was a scene influenced by the experience of John Lasseter, director of Toy Story and Disney’s inspirational chief creative officer, after his wedding anniversary celebrations in Bora Bora.
He says: ‘My wife and I were having a meal when they brought out a lantern, made us write a note to each other, taped them to the lantern and said: “Now kiss and let the lantern go”. We watched it drift off for two hours and it just looked like a tiny, floating star.’
His animation team thought it would look ‘awesome’ in 3D, even though, technically, the scene was one of the most complex to film.
‘You know that Spencer Tracy quote about the job of actors being to learn their lines and not trip over the furniture?’ says Steve Goldberg. ‘Well, getting the lanterns to behave on screen was like getting 50,000 actors to avoid the furniture. It was a real technical achievement.’
■ Disney's Tangled is in cinemas today.
OFF TO WORK WE GO - 50 CARTOON CLASSICS... AND CLUNKERS
Disney’s 50 animated features in chronological order:
Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Pinocchio (1940)
Fantasia (1940)
Dumbo (1941)
Bambi (1942)
Saludos Amigos (1942)
The Three Caballeros (1944)
Make Mine Music (1946)
Fun And Fancy Free (1947)
Melody Time (1948)
Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr Toad (1949)
Cinderella (1950)
Alice In Wonderland (1951)
Peter Pan (1953)
Lady And The Tramp (1955)
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
101 Dalmatians (1961)
The Sword In The Stone (1963)
The Jungle Book (1967)
The Aristocats (1970)
Robin Hood (1973)
The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh (1977)
The Rescuers (1977)
The Fox And The Hound (1981)
The Black Cauldron (1985)
The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
Oliver & Company (1988)
The Little Mermaid (1989)
The Rescuers Down Under (1990)
Beauty And The Beast (1991)
Aladdin (1992)
The Lion King (1994)
Pocahontas (1995)
Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1996)
Hercules (1997)
Mulan (1998)
Tarzan (1999)
Fantasia 2000 (2000)
Dinosaur (2000)
The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)
Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
Lilo & Stitch (2002)
Treasure Planet (2002)
Brother Bear (2003)
Home On The Range (2004)
Chicken Little (2005)
Meet The Robinsons (2007)
Bolt (2008)
The Princess And The Frog (2009)
Tangled (2010)
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