An animated Disney fairy tale.
No pressure there!
Add to that the fact that it would be the Mouse House’s 50th animated feature, and you can see why the people behind the just-released “Tangled” had their work cut out for them.
“It was a huge challenge,” co-director Nathan Greno said. “There’s an expectation from the audience when Disney brings a classic story to life. There’s an expectation of what a Disney film is.
“At the same time, as a filmmaker you don’t just want to keep going back to the same well. We love the Disney legacy, but we didn’t want to rehash what had been done before.
“So we were constantly looking for a balance, asking ourselves just what was so great about classic Disney? And how do we reinvent it?”
Greno and co-director Byron Howard found their answer in a hip, modern approach to the Brothers Grimm story of Rapunzel, the long-haired princess imprisoned in a tall tower. The audience experiences the heroine’s story through the eyes of Flynn Rider, a cocky, wisecracking thief who is something of an anti-hero … a Han Solo, if you will.
“We knew we’d need to open with a prologue that provided Rapunzel’s back story,” Howard said. “The audience had to know how she came to be living in this tower with a woman she thought was her mother.
“Originally we used a woman’s voice, an older voice, but it wasn’t working. That’s where Flynn’s voice came in. If all this important back story wasn’t to put everyone to sleep, we needed a narrator who could entertain us. And Flynn’s tongue-in-cheek approach worked.”
It also dovetailed nicely with Disney’s determination that this not be a girly movie. Last year’s “The Princess and the Frog” underperformed, partly because male moviegoers thought it was only for girls, so the studio changed the title of “Rapunzel” to “Tangled” and emphasized Flynn Rider in the marketing.
“But we never wanted a cynical movie,” Greno said. “At its heart we wanted an emotionally honest story. So we worked the plot really hard. We’d push it a bit too far and it would get too contemporary, then we’d have to pull it back. If it got too earnest, we’d have to lighten up.
“In storyboard version we screened it six or seven times at various stages, and we insisted that people who saw it be brutal in their comments. We ripped it apart several times, and a lot was left along the way.”
But what was left sparkled.
One show-stopping scene finds Flynn taking Rapunzel to a woodland tavern frequented by the scuzziest thugs imaginable.
“We thought, ‘Well, what if it’s kind of a biker bar?’ ” Howard said. “We sent someone out to do research, and he found that many biker bars across the country have a poetry night. The bikers will come in, and like cowboy poets they’ll read aloud what they’ve written about their bikes, their feelings, about being lost, about the loneliness of the road.
“So that was what we kept in mind. This tavern is full of scary-looking guys who seem to be vicious murderers but actually sing about getting in touch with their tender side.”
“Tangled” has five new songs by Disney veteran Alan Menken (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin”), but Howard and Greno said they didn’t want the film to be a musical per se.
“We didn’t want to make a big Broadway type show,” Howard said. “Our models were the older Disney movies that were more of a movie with music than a movie musical. Look at ‘The Jungle Book.’ People don’t describe it as a musical, but the few songs that are in it are very important.
“We wanted to use music as a way to get inside the characters’ heads without lots of dialogue. We didn’t want any gratuitous singing. … Each song had to move the story along.”
Another source of inspiration was the directors’ shared love of cinema history. They patterned Rapunzel’s adopted mother after screen divas like Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford. They insisted that animal characters be, in effect, silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin who expressed themselves solely through expression and movement. In doing so they created a big brute of a horse, Maximus, who has as much personality as any talking/singing character.
“The animators loved bringing Maximus to life,” Greno said. “Without a voice, it’s all about acting and movement. Going in, we didn’t realize what a standout Maximus would be.
“Our head of story, Mark Kennedy, originally drew Maximus sniffing the ground like a bloodhound. It was so different from what we’ve seen horses do in the past that the animators ran with it. Once those scenes starting coming in with Maximus exhibiting doglike behavior, the more charming he became.
“Now it’s almost universal that people come out of ‘Tangled’ and declare Max is their favorite character.”
Howard and Greno already have pitched an idea for their next film to Disney animation chief John Lasseter.
“We’re still figuring out that world, so we can’t say much at this point,” Greno said. “But it will have many of the same elements as ‘Tangled’: big action, hilarious characters, big emotion. We like making the audience cry. There’s no formula to making a good movie, but those are the things that keep audiences entertained.”
Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/11/27/2470165/how-two-directors-turned-an-old.html#ixzz16bBPVzsi
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