Review: 'Tangled' delivers song, dance and a few laughs

Film: Tangled (U)
Cast: Zachary Levi, Mandy Moore, Donna Murphy, Ron Perlman
Rating: ***
Director: Nathan Greno, Byron Howard

Disney is back with another fairy tale, this time it's Rapunzel. The film begins with swashbuckling thief Flynn Rider (voice of Levi) narrating how a magical flower capable of healing the sick was guarded by a witch, Gothel (Murphy), who used it to regenerate her youth.

The mythical flower is discovered and whisked away by the guards of a kingdom far away to aid its ailing pregnant queen. The queen gives birth to a child, the princess Rapunzel (Moore), whose hair possesses the flower’s magic (as long as it is not sheared off).

Gothel sneaks into the palace and snatches the child from her cradle and hides her in a concealed tower for 18 years. Poisoning her view of the world by teaching her to fear change and adventure, Gothel, who raises the child as her own, keeps Rapunzel cooped up in the tower. The obedient child is, however, obsessed with a spectacle — the festival of the lanterns — an annual ritual where thousands of lanterns are released from the palace on her birthday.

One day, the cavalier Rider, with the help of two thugs, steals the lost princess’s tiara. Deceiving his fellow crooks while they are being pursued, Rider chances upon the tower where he is held captive by a paranoid Rapunzel.

Rapunzel persuades Rider to take her to the lantern festival in return for the tiara which she confiscated before knocking him out cold with a frying pan. An unlikely partnership is formed and the scheming Gothel isn't pleased at all.

Technically ambitious, the film is a hybrid between new-fangled CGI and the traditional hand-drawn Disney classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Beauty and the Beast, though the film, which delivers on all counts and is not wanting in anything in particular, is not as memorable as those classics.

Coming from Disney, humour and song and dance are givens. Rapunzel’s pet chameleon Pascal and diligent army horse Maximus’s love/hate relationship with Rider is particularly funny.

Tangled is a pleasant film. Though not exactly exceptional, it does deliver a few laughs. The film proves to be a solid, reliable diversion that makes it an ideal film for an outing with the kids or as a date movie.