Tangled The Intersection of Commerce, Gender, and Genre...

In the 2010 film Tangled, a modern retelling of the Grimm Brothers’ story Rapunzel, Rapunzel pursues her dream of seeing the floating lights away from her hidden tower and escaping from her â€Å"evil mother† Gothel with the help of a young thief named Flynn Ryder. The film manages to navigate the tension between the traditional fairy-tale storytelling archetypes of the early Disney princess movie-musicals and a modern reinvention of these stereotypes in order to create a harmonious blend between the two. However, both â€Å"When Will my Life Begin?† and â€Å"I Have a Dream,† with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Glenn Slater, employ diverse musical references and techniques that nevertheless starkly challenge the construction of the typical Disney†¦show more content†¦Though Disney has at least been able to keep the movie-musical alive (especially princess musical) through its Broadway showings and this latest movie installment, part of the re ason why this movie was so refreshing is because it shows how Disney was trying to make up for lost time to modern audiences. With the 2006 acquisition of Pixar Studios, Disney put Ed Catmull in charge of Walt Disney Animation Studios and made John Lasseter chief creative officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, ushering a large change from the previous leadership of Walt and Roy O. Disney and the later Michael Eisner administration. Under Catmull and Lasseter’s direction, Disney sought to bring together the history of Disney’s animation tradition with the originality and freshness of a Pixar film, with Lasseter stating â€Å"we don’t just want to copy the past.† True to his word, Lasseter worked with a team of animators for three years to bring Tangled to life in a synthesis of modern three-dimensional, computer-generated imagery (CGI) and the warmth of the historical hand-drawn art of Disney’s earlier days. Therefore, the Disney Company started to be more creative, bringing a younger generation’s musical and visual aesthetic into the foreground, suggesting a fusion of past and present, such as what is displayed in