✨You are my home✨

...can fill the lungs with magic.

They are both resourceful and determined, used to doing the best they can with what they have, and as a result they encounter each other and decide to team up. Practicality, not romance, is what drives them together and what keeps them together for much of the movie.

Their methods of filling voids with whatever scheme they can concoct, the skills they’ve both gained from their past experiences, become the means they use to achieve their shared goal: get Rapunzel to the city to watch the floating lights and return her safely home. The scrapes and (mis)adventures they get into on their way are not just filler or fluff; they are opportunities to highlight the natural teamwork they have, the ways in which they complement and complete each other and so help each other: Rapunzel solves the run-in with the group of thugs/misfits with vulnerability and openness; together, they escape from the guards and avoid drowning. 

Already this is an improvement on their previous work, their previous “business”. It has more warmth, it has more success, it has more color. But that’s not all. Alongside their adventures, they start to talk to each other. Confide in each other. Nothing huge or dramatic. When he tells her his name he follows it with the dryly delivered “someone might as well know”. And when he asks about the situation at home, his voice is gentle and kind but not full of depth of feeling just yet. But it’s real, honest connection about their pasts and so contains within it the articulation of their emptiness. It’s the realest relationship either of them have ever had. It’s far realer than anything their past endeavors have ever brought them.

When they reach the lights, Rapunzel realizes this and it comes out in her words expressing her fears and worries about the lights. Understandably, she’s scared finally seeing the lights won’t be enough. But then, and here’s the beautiful thing, she’s scared that it will be. “And what if it is,” she says, tears in her eyes and voice. “What then?” This is the moment in which Rapunzel recognizes that she really has never filled the void in her life, the place where real love and human connection should be, and that the lights won’t do it either. Chasing the lights was her noblest effort yet, a beautiful and real and a valid dream, but still not enough. because the lights are not a person and the lights can’t love her back. 

Eugene’s answer to this is hopeful- there’s always another dream to chase. But he still doesn’t really have an answer for her. He doesn’t really understand.

Until they see the lights. 

Until they see the lights together. 

Their golden glow and beauty is enchanting, it’s everything she dreamed it would be. And then, it’s more. 

And it’s more because when she turns around, right at the end of the first verse, she sees him. Holding her dream in her hands, watching her watch it, experiencing it with her. 

That’s when she knows. 

She hands him the satchel and he knows he knows too. 

He knows that there is no new dream, no better dream, than her, than a real life of love with the person in front of him. 

After the lights happens everything I said in the original post. They’re torn apart and beautifully, magically, unexpectedly Mother Gothel’s ploy to sow discord between them doesn’t work. Rapunzel sees through Mother Gothel’s lie to see the truth of everything, including his reasons for leaving, and when he shows up there is no reproach or misunderstanding to clear away. Like I said in my original post, they understand each other now. 

And like I said in the post above, Rapunzel’s bargaining for his life and Eugene’s cutting off of her hair are the means they use to set the other free. And ultimately Eugene wins. He dies and his death, the first time she truly experiences loss, opens her up to a fuller understanding of and use of her magic and her healing. He is restored to her and they live (truly) happily ever after.

Birthright update!

Let me be oh so clear when I say that I don't think that traditional animation is superior to CGI. They're very different mediums. I will, however, say that traditional animation lends itself more to versatility, and that CGI, as the medium progresses, seems too hyper-focused on making textures real (skin, fabric, the environment), and that's leading them down a path of sameness that's boring (for me) to look at.

(On the other hand, realistically programming Elsa's blizzard in Frozen led to scientists solving a decades-old mystery.)

Tiana famously wears 13 different outfits while spending only 17 minutes as a human, when you take into account everything she's seen wearing as a child, and outfit variations that include coat and/or hat. That means that, on average, she's wearing each outfit/outfit combination for approximately one minute and twenty seconds, and we know she spends a few minutes in three of the outfits. So, really, she's seen in most of them for less than a minute. That's really only possible within budget for a traditionally drawn movie, because CGI would require new rigs and texturing and physics engines for the fabric and all sorts of things that cost way more than just someone to design the different outfit. That's why, in the movie of Tangled, Rapunzel wears two dresses, one of which is a modified version of her main one, and is also the basis for her wedding dress. It was just cheaper that way, especially considering that Tangled still clocks in as the most expensive animated movie made to date, when taking inflation into account (and second most expensive just after The Lion King (2019), and they actually had comparable budgets).

All that being said, I wouldn't have hated a traditionally animated Tangled. Big screen budget with the vision they had? It would have looked absolutely amazing, and Rapunzel could have worn so many more outfits. So could Eugene have.

Another in my line of WIPs I'm finally finishing.

In 2019, I drew a quick pic of what we thought Eugene's S3 outfit looked like, based on a teeny tiny image we had of him from the season poster. I got several of the details wrong.

So, in 2024, I decided to polish the pic I did in 2019, fixing it to be accurate, nicely inked and colored, etc.

TANGLED JUNE BRIDE DAY 6: The Kiss