Disney’s 2010 retelling of the story of Rapunzel, one of the last great films to emerge from a studio more interested these days in cashing in on shoddy “live action” remakes of their old classics than doing anything new and worthwhile, got just about everything right. The original songs, written by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater, are uniformly terrific, the writing is witty and clever, and the animation is fantastic, setting a standard that I’ve yet to see surpassed, even by Pixar. Mandy Moore voices what I’d argue is the most nuanced and relatable character among all the Disney Princesses, a young woman who’s somehow a complete naif yet nobody’s fool, neither a girl boss nor a helpless little wallflower in need of saving – the early scene in which she repeatedly brains the raffish Flynn Ryder (real name Eugene Fitzherbert) with a cast iron skillet is hilariously off the well-beaten path trod by the likes of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty – and Zachary Levi’s Ryder is the most charming outlaw this side of Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood. On top of that we get the magnificent Maximus, the majestic palace horse of the King’s Guard, who’s absolutely relentless, can track his quarry like a bloodhound, and, in a pinch, even hold his own in a swordfight:
Today’s selection captures the moment when Rapunzel finally gets the wish she’s been struggling all film to fulfill, gaining a ringside seat to the mysterious annual light show that always occurs on what she’s been told is her birthday; locked away in her tower, she’s only ever seen it from a distance, far-away lights twinkling and climbing in the night sky, as mystifying as they were beautiful. Now she witnesses the festival of floating lanterns in all its glory, as first the visibly heartbroken King and Queen, and then thousands upon thousands of their subjects, release the lights in a ceremony to mark the birthday of their lost Princess, kidnapped when she was just a baby, gone now for almost 18 years, still alive, they pray, and perhaps able some day to follow the lights back to their source and come home to them. It’s a thoroughly captivating scene, all the multicoloured little hot air balloons wafting about gently in the calm evening air, their glow reflecting in the mirror-smooth surface of the placid bay, while Rapunzel begins to grasp a pair of momentous ideas: first, that somehow, those lanterns have something fundamental to do with both her own murky past and her destiny, and second, that she’s falling in love with the young man who brought her through thick and thin in a perilous but grand adventure to finally go see them up close.
Here’s a nice performance video, including clips from the recording studio, and the stage production at the Oscars, where I See the Light, believe it or not, didn’t win for best original song**.
**Randy Newman’s We Belong Together, from Toy Story 3, took home the gong. It’s nice to see Randy win, but it wasn’t his best work, you know? Maybe the Academy was making up for the travesty of cheating Newman when the sublime When She Loved Me, from Toy Story 2, a wonderful, heart-wrenching song, lost out to something by Phil Collins. So it goes.
the needlefish 