Tangled (2010)

There's a moment in Tangled where Rapunzel first steps outside her tower, touches the ground with her bare feet, and swings between pure, giddy joy and immediate crushing guilt. It lasts maybe thirty seconds. And it tells you more about who she is than most animated films manage in their entire runtime. That's the kind of filmmaking that makes this one of the strongest entries in the modern 3D Disney era, full stop.

It's easy to overlook, actually. Tangled arrived in a period when Disney was finding its feet again after a long rough patch, and the conversation around its revival tends to jump straight to Frozen or skip back further to the '90s golden age. But that undersells what this film gets right. It takes a fairy tale everyone thinks they know and gives it a genuine fresh spin without losing any of the warmth that makes these stories worth telling in the first place.

Rapunzel isn't just a girl waiting for someone to climb up and sort her life out. She's curious, restless, funny, and a little chaotic in the best possible way. She's been locked in a tower her whole life and she's still managed to fill every inch of it with paintings and books and projects. You believe her energy immediately. And Flynn Rider, her reluctant travelling companion, earns his place too. He could easily have been a smug void with good cheekbones, but there's real character underneath all the deflection and bravado. Their chemistry is the engine the whole film runs on, and it never stalls.

The animation deserves a proper mention because it really is something. The way the light moves, the way the kingdom feels lived-in rather than just decorative. And then there's Rapunzel's hair, seventy feet of it, constantly in motion, used as a weapon, a rope, a paintbrush. I don't know what the technical process was but whoever had to figure out how to make those curls behave deserves some kind of award and probably a long holiday. Pascal the chameleon mostly operates on side-eye and silent reaction, and it works almost every time. The humour throughout feels earned rather than engineered. There's nothing here that screams "and now a joke for the adults in the room," which is a harder balance to strike than it looks.

What the film is actually about, underneath the action and the songs and the lantern sequence (which is as beautiful as everyone says), is freedom. What it means to want your own life. What it costs to claim it. There's a thread running through it about the way love can become control, and the way you can be kept small by someone who insists they're protecting you. It doesn't hammer the point. It just lets it sit there, and you feel it. I think about The Hunchback of Notre Dame in similar terms, another Disney film that has more going on beneath the surface than its reputation sometimes suggests, though Tangled lands it with considerably less darkness and considerably more jokes about a horse.

Is it top-tier Disney? Not quite. It doesn't have the scope of The Lion King or the strange, timeless quality of The Jungle Book. But within the newer wave of Disney animation, it's right at the front of the pack. I'd put it comfortably alongside Zootopia as a film that works as pure entertainment while also having something real to say. It's the kind of film you can watch with a kid and enjoy just as much as they do, which is not a given, not by a long way.

Rewatchable, warm, properly funny in places, and with a central character who actually drives her own story. Four stars and I'd watch it again tomorrow.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 2010  | Watched: 2025-05-14

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus · fuboTV
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Byron Howard: Encanto (2021) · Zootopia+ (2022) · Zootopia 2 (2025) · Zootopia (2016)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More family: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Wonder (2017) · Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anastasia (1997)