Long time lurker, first time poster here. Maybe it's unwise for me to jump straight into the argument (haha), but here goes...
I don't understand the whole "butthurt"
Tangled fans thing. What exactly is there to be "butthurt" about? That
Frozen is on its way to $1.1 billion+ at the box office, while
Tangled "only" made $600 million? I'm personally a bigger fan of
Tangled (I think it's the "better" movie in most, but not all, respects), but I love
Frozen as well, and I'm absolutely
ecstatic that it has become the phenomenon that it is. Plus, I genuinely believe that the recent streak of good films coming from WDAS going back at least as far back as
The Princess and the Frog have contributed to its success by building up good will for the studio. And I think
Tangled was a particularly big player in that respect.
And
Tangled fans shouldn't be "butthurt" regarding reception either, since for the most part, reception to the films themselves have seemed pretty equal to me. (Similar scores on RT, Metacritic, IMDB, and the like.) And going solely of anecdotal evidence, out of the people I know, I'd say there's a pretty even split between the people who prefer
Tangled or
Frozen. Granted, there were a lot more reviews proclaiming that
Frozen was "the best Disney movies since ___." But I'm of the opinion that there were a handful of great movies between the Renaissance peak and now.
It's true, I have seen nasty arguments between fans of PATF and
Tangled, and between fans of
Tangled and
Frozen on the net, but I'd always thought it was kind of weird. (The same way the battle between DC and Marvel fans is weird.) People on the net seem to identify so closely with these movies that they take comments on them to be comments on their person. Isn't taking pleasure on the "tables being turned" on
Tangled fans pretty much the same thing?
Mooky wrote:You keep going back to the magic hair/tears concept and their functionality which I have no problem with whatsoever. As I said, my only issue is with the very creation of and knowledge about the flower which does not make sense at all. And just because the movie is a fairytale I don't have to take as given illogical, nonsensical crap some poor writer came up with and people ate up. You mention movie's internal logic, but it goes out of the window the moment you realize the movie is clearly set in some fantasy version of medieval Europe which should still operate on basic physics/chemistry rules, and AFAIK, the Sun has never given birth to a plant. I can accept purely magical things happening in a movie, but when you start mixing it with real-life science... eh, not so much. Maybe they should have set it on some faraway planet with a cast of aliens instead (and it still wouldn't make sense). This is all the more infuriating considering the source material was pretty straightforward in that regard. Also, how the hell did the king's men knew the flower would work on the queen when we were specifically told only Gothel knew about it and its effects? For all they knew, it could have killed the queen on the spot. I find it stupid and distracting, and it -- and along with the generally clichéd story and characters -- ruins my enjoyment of the movie.
I don't understand how the sun drop giving birth to the flower can't be explained away as part of the fantastical/magical element of the story. It makes just as much/little sense as the magic hair/tears concept or Elsa having ice powers. I'm not even sure it's supposed to be taken that literally. In the story, there is a magic flower with healing properties; it seems to me that Flynn's narration can be taken as the "legend" as to how it got there. It's just a way to make something that's inexplicable explicable.
As for the king's men knowing the existence of the flower and that it would work on the queen, I don't really see why it is difficult to swallow that as is. Perhaps only Gothel knew about it in the sense that she knew for sure that it exists, but it's not inconceivable that others knew about it as some sort of legend/myth. Flynn even says they were looking for a miracle. They tried everything, and out of desperation the went looking for some mythical/legendary flower. I certainly think you can make the case that they found the flower way too easily and that Gothel was unbelievably careless with it, especially considering she had it hidden from sight for hundreds of years. Heck, I would agree with you. It's a little too convenient. However, I don't have too much grievance with it considering this is just the short, cliff-notes version of the back story. We don't know all the details about how it happened. But we're given what we need to know to understand the main portion of the story that follows.
Mooky wrote:Goliath wrote:As for Rapunzel getting those memories: I do admit that seemed rather far-fetched, however, if I;m not mistaken, I remember reading that it is not entirely impossible, though it is incredibly rare.
Yeah, I bet it's incredibly rare… It's also incredibly lazy writing.
I agree that this is the weakest point in the story for me. Lazy? Maybe. But it was just incredibly difficult to understand. The first time I watched it, I was kind of confused. However, I think the implication in that scene is that she always had the memories. Humans actually have a lot more memories and information stored in their mind than they know, and they can't recover everything at will. The symbol of the sun was obviously something that Rapunzel had seen a lot as an infant. She didn't remember the symbol, and couldn't conjure the memories at will, but after being kidnapped by Gothel, Rapunzel had subconsciously been painting the symbol of the sun all of her life. Her trek into the kingdom then allowed her to realize this, thus triggering her memories as an infant.
Yes, I still do think it is a little too convenient. I would have liked it to be clearer, or the realization that she is the lost princess to come about in a different way. But I honestly find this to be the one weak link in a generally tight story.
Mooky wrote:Goliath wrote:Not really, it's basically a good guy who turns out to be a bad guy. It's a surprise twist, but it's not subtle by any measure. He just turns from an all-out good guy to an all-out bad guy. Subtelty would have demanded ambiguity, to keep us guessing what kind of character he really was.
There are multiple hints to his true nature in each of his scenes. It does not come off as that surprising if you re-watch the movie and look for the signs.
I agree that the hints are there, but only if you are looking for them. I've seen the film three times so far, but I'm still not 100% sure how I feel about the twist. What I do think, however, is that I wish he hadn't turned out to be a moustache-twirling bad guy that he became. I also think they missed an opportunity to have a movie with no real villain. (We need more of those from WDAS and Pixar.) I wish he could have been a misguided hero, making bad choices despite good intentions. That would have given him some much needed complexity (and would have made him redeemable).
Acting like Frozen and Grown Ups are of the same quality though...that's a new one. How delusional and bitter you are 
