I get the feeling that Disney is growing tired of princesses. First, they made Enchanted, a movie that adhered to Disney princess norms while openly mocking them. Then they tried shaking up the formula a bit, trying some new things with The Princess and the Frog. Sadly, this experimental attitude and all that it yielded were promptly kicked to the curb when the latter movie underperformed at the box office (thanks a pantload, Avatar).

And now we have Tangled, another standard Disney princess movie that works at least partly as a parody of all the forms and cliches thereof. This is, after all, a movie in which our magic princess somehow talks with animals and drives a room full of strangers to song, all while our leading man stands by and implicitly remarks about how crazy all this is. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

You’re probably familiar with the old Rapunzel fairy tale, but Tangled puts a considerably different spin on it. In this version, rampion is a one-of-a-kind flower with the magical ability to bestow eternal youth and heal any injury. For centuries, this flower was safeguarded by an old woman named Mother Gothel, who uses its power… with a song.

Wait just a minute here. This unique and otherwise completely unknown plant can only be activated by a particular song that this old woman somehow knows? That seems just a little silly and more than a little stupid, but I guess I can roll with it. This is a Disney animated musical, after all.

Anyway, flash forward a few hundred years. The queen of a nearby kingdom is pregnant, but ill to the point where she may die before childbirth. The villagers go out in search of a cure and manage to find the rampion, in spite of Gothel’s clumsy attempts at hiding it. The villagers take this strange and undiscovered flower, somehow knowing that it can be made into a liquid that will restore the queen to health. And they somehow do this without the special song. Whatever.

The queen ingests the flower and is healed while its curative powers and radiant glow are in-hair-ited (I am so sorry) by the queen’s new daughter. Gothel comes to steal the power back, only to find that the child’s hair loses its magical shine when cut. So she kidnaps the girl and the rest you know.

Gaping plot holes aside, I rather like this new origin. It makes Gothel so much more evil and provides her with some strong ulterior motives for locking Rapunzel away, growing her hair out, visiting her frequently, etc. It’s also a good way to keep the tresses of our hair-oine (that’s the last one, I swear) relevant after her escape from the tower. In effect, Rapunzel’s ability to instantly heal and to glow in the dark turns her hair into an all-purpose “get out of a painted corner free” card.

Our story takes place eighteen years later, when Rapunzel finally starts to rebel against her lifetime of cabin fever. Our princess makes for a very nice protagonist, voiced to perfection by Mandy Moore. Rapunzel’s years of reading, painting, baking and other such hobbies have made her surprisingly smart, hauling Gothel up by her hair every day has made her deceptively strong and a lifetime of isolation has made her endearingly naive. More importantly, Rapunzel is understandably and greatly conflicted between her mother’s wishes for isolated safety and the thrill of independent discovery. This conflict is the crux of the movie, explored in depth to great comedic effect.

As to how Rapunzel utilizes her hair, I’m very glad to say that it’s less “Doctor Octopus” and more “Indiana Jones.” She doesn’t have the magical ability to telekinetically move her hair like so many appendages, she’s just really, really good at whipping it around and tying it up. In my opinion, that makes for much better action scenes as well as a much smarter and stronger heroine. Yes, there is the danger of her hair getting obtrusive or conspicuous, but this is dealt with in a very intelligent way when she finally gets to civilization.

Then there’s our male lead, Flynn Rider (presumably named for Errol and not that other Disney character). This guy is definitely no Prince Charming. He’s a thief, a rogue and a scoundrel through and through, kind of like what Aladdin might’ve been if he was perfectly happy to keep living as a street rat. Additionally, Flynn is written with strength, charm and hilarity in great amounts, all of which are wonderfully conveyed by Zachary Levi’s voice work.

Of course, no Disney movie would be complete without some animal sidekicks and this movie has two. One of them is Pascal, a chameleon who befriends Rapunzel and serves as her only company in the tower. The other is Maximillian, a royal guard horse with more intelligence, determination and tracking ability than most humans. But here’s the kicker: THEY’RE MUTE! Both of them! Sure, they communicate and contribute some comic relief by way of gestures, emotions and the kinds of noises you’d expect these animals to make (also, Pascal changes color), but they don’t sing and they never utter a single annoying wisecrack. This is such a huge improvement and such a revelation that I’m amazed it hasn’t been done sooner (okay, Mulan had Khan and Cri-Kee, but Mushu spoke more than enough for all three of them).

Visually, this movie is commendable. The character designs are a perfect mix of cartoonish and realistic, the set designs are fittingly whimsical and the animation is superb. The 3D was effectively utilized, though I’m not sure that the movie would be unwatchable without it. The music, unfortunately, is a problem. Alan Menken returned to do the music and the songs greatly benefit from his expertise, but the lyrics by Tim Mertens are unforgivably mediocre. The music is there and the vocal talent is sure as hell there, but their ample quality is acutely crippled by lackluster lyrics and that’s a damn shame. Still, we do get a nice consolation prize: There’s a second-act montage in which Rapunzel and Flynn dance and have fun in the city. The sequence is not only very well-edited, but set entirely to Menken’s score and without any lyrics. Very good.

Another problem with this movie is in its plot, specifically in how predictable and contrived it was at times. When Rapunzel and Flynn get trapped in a dark place, anyone in the audience with a working brain cell should be able to predict their solution before they do. Additionally, you should already know — or at least suspect — that there’s a plot development in which Rapunzel is apparently abandoned by Flynn. It should be just as readily apparent that Flynn goes back to Rapunzel, after he’s inevitably caught by the royal guard and saved from execution in the most implausible manner possible.

Additionally, this movie has a prominent and saddening death which is now a standard in Disney animated movies. This time, however, the death doesn’t take. The death is reversed in a way that is pure and total bullshit, and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with Rapunzel’s hair. You might think this is a spoiler, but that’s only because you don’t know who dies. To be fair, however, it’s worth noting that the death scene was visibly drained of color, which I found very satisfying in its emotional influence.

But all of this is beside my single greatest complaint with this movie: The villains. There are several antagonists in this movie and none of them pose any great threat. The royal guard is constantly after Flynn, but these trained and armed soldiers are repeatedly outclassed by a frying pan. Hell, we see on a constant basis that the only competent one among them is a goddamn horse! Flynn has a couple of former partners-in-crime who are also positioned as supporting villains, but these guys are all bark and no bite. They can flex their muscles and act all threatening, but when the time comes to act, they’re easily dispatched off-camera by a character who isn’t Rapunzel or Flynn. And the next time we see them, they’re willingly giving information to Flynn for no apparent reason. FAIL.

Of course, the big bad of this piece is Mother Gothel herself. I will admit that aside from her crappy job at hiding the rampion, she does seem like a decent villain at first. She’s deceitful and manipulative, but in a passive-aggressive and affectionate way. In these opening scenes, Donna Murphy successfully voices Gothel with evil intentions cloaked in motherly love and concern. But then the movie continues and the time comes for Gothel to gradually shed her matronly facade. You’d think that we’d see what threat Gothel can pose when the chips inevitably come down. But it turns out she’s got nothing. This woman is not a witch, a homicidal maniac or a threat of any kind. She’s nothing more than a pathetic old woman who’s terrified of growing old and ugly. Sure, there’s a climax between Rapunzel and Gothel, but the action between them happens entirely off-camera. Moreover, pretty much all of the climax’s tension comes from Rapunzel’s choices and has precious little to do with anything that Gothel says or does. Such a disappointment.

However, it’s important to remember that the movie has a much greater conflict: Rapunzel’s free uncertainty versus her safe isolation. I know it’s been explored before in several other movies (Finding Nemo and Secret of Kells for example), but this internal dilemma is the focus for most of the movie and I found it quite satisfying to see.

Tangled is far from flawless, but it definitely has its charms. The voice acting is uniformly amazing, our lead duo is fun to watch, the animation is wonderful and the writing is very funny. Rapunzel is a worthy addition to the Disney princess line-up, though I do hope that her parent company goes back to breaking new narrative ground in animation soon.