Hair fetishists, rejoice! The latest spunky, rebellious, buxom, comely, big-eyed Disney heroine bounds onto the screen in a wash of magical blonde locks she can form into bondage straps, whips, rope pulleys, and vines from which to swing. I love the onanistic possibilities of the poster art, even, with a hot girl and her hot boy peering out with dangerous insouciance from beneath a sea of follicles. At least she's eighteen this time. Our girl (voiced by Mandy Moore, typecast) is ripe from a lifetime of captivity in her brick tower and determined to shanghai the next ride to The Castle to watch a string of floating lights that annually memorialize the loss of that kingdom's towheaded infant princess. No fair guessing who that might be. It's the Rapunzel story given the Disney treatment, with a fairly able if perfunctory assist by John Lasseter to lend what looks like a little of that Pixar flair in a scene in which the freshly-emancipated Rapunzel veers wildly between ecstasy at her newfound freedom and abject misery at her perceived betrayal of her mother figure, Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy). Mother Gothel, it seems, once stole baby Rapunzel from her loving ciphers of royal parents so that she could use the magic in Rapunzel's hair to keep her immortal. Or something.

Being Disney, you have secret parentage, ageless hags who must be destroyed, a preference for blondes (to the extent that blonde denotes magic in the film, and brunette denotes loss of magic--literally), and an anthropomorphized animal sidekick or two for slapstick and reaction shots. The lucky guy who gets to get snarled and wrapped up and generally abused by hair is dashing roustabout Flynn Rider ("Chuck" himself, Zachary Levi), who ends up in his trichophiliacal wonderland/dungeon as Rapunzel's beard (ha) as he's evading the Law (like Aladdin!) and ends up assisting our young heroine on her quest to...see lights. The rest of it is a surface skim, from a musical number at the worst pub in the middle ages to a daring mine-shaft escape to a delightful romantic misunderstanding to the eventual (hair-related) slaying of the Wrong Mother. In tone, it most resembles the nominally fluffy The Emperor's New Groove--in success, too, meaning that it's not awful.

It's also not particularly inspired or inspiring. Tangled is only what it is, aspiring for nothing much and ultimately delivering the unpleasant dual message that blondes are special and rejecting parental advice means a tearful reunion with real parents. Who happen to be the king and queen. At least it's not The Little Mermaid's soft-porn fantasy of girl-power coupled with the complete rejection of parental advice in favour of following a sixteen-year-old heart. At least it's also not the materialism-as-feminism of Beauty and the Beast: all this princess wants is to go for a walk--and in that first scene of freedom, Tangled offers a glimpse at all the complexity and wonderful, mature introspection of a real Pixar movie. The animation is bright, for what it's worth, and the 3-D, as 3-D is wont to be, is superfluous, tending mainly to make a lovely picture dimmer and blurry. Kids are sure to like it unless they're not blonde, in which case you may be setting yourself up for an uncomfortable conversation on the way home. But let's face it, kids like pretty much anything so long as it's lively. They deserve better. Rent Toy Story 3.-Walter Chaw

Disney brings Tangled to Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D in separate releases; this review refers to the former, which presents the film in a breathtaking 1.78:1, 1080p transfer. (The cover copy describes this disc as having "Disney Enhanced High Definition Picture and Sound" in the studio's compulsively proprietary fashion.) It's all about the hair, of course, and the image, so detailed, accounts for every single strand of it, but what really impressed me was Pascal the chameleon, who glows a magnificent shade of green only possible in HD--it just doesn't translate on the bundled DVD--and has such tactile cobbled skin that I wanted to reach out and pet him, or squeeze him like a rubber toy. Similarly irreproachable, the 7.1 DTS-HD MA track honours a playfully directional, often thunderous mix with a crystalline rendering. Even the terrible songs sound objectively great. The light helping of extras begins with three Deleted Scenes (13 mins., HD) in storyboard form with forced intros from co-directors Nathan Greno and Byron Howard; the longest elision is an alternate take on the tavern sequence, while the wisest involves a fortune-telling monkey. (American animators desperately need a monkey intervention.) In the same vein, two "Original Storybook Openings" (4 mins. each, HD) show how Tangled's prologue and, in turn, story proper evolved over the course of production.

Next comes the "50^th Animated Feature Countdown" (2 mins., HD), which speedily ticks off the Disney animated features one-by-one in chronological order. Curiously, the '40s portmanteaux Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music, Fun and Fancy Free, Melody Time, and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad--so rarely screened intact since, all--are considered canon while Return to Never Land, Valiant, and The Wild are not. This guff about the 50 milestone fuels "Untangled: The Making of a Fairy Tale" (12 mins., HD), wherein hosts/voice stars Mandy Moore and John Krasinski Lee Pace Zachary Levi ply us with trivia between unsatisfyingly brief soundbites from the likes of animator Glen Keane, who's still struggling to perfect the look of sympathetic machismo in his princely leads. Rounding out the platter: longer-length versions of the songs "When Will My Life Begin" and "Mother Knows Best," again in storyboard form; nine Tangled teasers (HD) that creatively assume the form of other kinds of advertisements; that awful "Discover Blu-ray 3D with Timon & Pumbaa" demo; and startup trailers for Cars 2, Tron: Legacy, and The Lion King. There's a lengthy block of sneak peeks under the main menu as well, but the prospect of auditing a trailer for Sharpay's Fabulous Adventure spooked me clear of it.-Bill Chambers

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