It's Tangled's first birthday! In honor of this fantastic movie, I am providing you with a variety of fun-facts about the movie. Most are taken from the IMDb Tangled page and Wikipedia. I hope you all enjoy these fun facts.
Rachel Rogers provided the voice for Young Rapunzel during the initial scratch phase.
Kristin Chenoweth and Dan Fogler were the original choices to voice Rapunzel and Flynn.
David Schwimmer and Burt Reynolds were cast in roles that were eventually deleted in the pre-production stage.
According to production manager Doeri Welch Greiner, the original script was a quasi-sequel to Enchanted, and had Rapunzel turned into a squirrel and her place taken by a girl in the real world. Glen Keane eschewed in favour of a more fun and fantastical fairytale that Disney is famous for: "I think that's what Disney needs to do right now. No one else can do it. We should not be embarrassed or make excuses for doing a fairytale."
According to Glen Keane, the movie's visual style (a three-dimensional painting) was greatly inspired by the Romantic painting "The Swing", by the French rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard: "A fairy tale world has to feel romantic and lush, very painterly." For a clear idea of what was intended, the animators duplicated the picture in 3D to achieve a shot containing depth and dimensions.
According to Glen Keane, the technique of non-photorealistic rendering was extensively used to make the CGI surface look like it is painted but still containing depth and dimension. He also mentioned the use of subsurface scattering and global illumination and "all of the latest techniques" to render, in computer-generated imagery, convincing human characters and rich environments.
From the beginning, Glen Keane intended that the film looked and felt like a traditional hand-drawn film, but in 3D. He hosted a seminar called "The Best of Both Worlds," where he brought in 50 Disney animators (both CGI and traditional artists) to discuss the techniques used in each style and how to, in his words, "bring the warmth and intuitive feel of the hand-drawn to CGI."
Glen Keane credits animator Kyle Strawitz for achieving the painterly style of the film: "Kyle helped us get that Fragonard look of the girl on the swing... He took the house from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and built it in CGI, and painted it so that it looked like a flat painting that suddenly started to move, and it had dimension and kept all of the soft, round curves of the brushstrokes of watercolor. Kyle really helped me start to believe that the things I wanted to see were possible... that you could move in a Disney painterly world."
Composer Alan Menken reported that he based the film's musical score on 1960s rock.
The hero's name was originally going to be Bastian.
This is Disney's first CGI Fairytale film.
Glen Keane and Dean Wellins were serving as directors of the film, but due to other commitments they stepped down and were replaced by Byron Howard and Nathan Greno.
Glen Keane's ambition with this film, technically speaking, is to make the computer "bend its knee to the artist" instead of having the computer dictate the artistic style/look of the film, and make the computer become as "pliable as the pencil."
Because many of the techniques and tools that were required to give the film the quality Keane demanded of it didn't exist when the project was started, the WDFA had to make them on their own.
Zachary Levi auditioned for the part of Flynn Rider, and got it, with a British accent. Later this was dropped, and Levi read the role in his own American accent instead.
Disney's previous animated feature The Princess and the Frog, despite being popular with critics and audiences alike, was a box office disappointment. Disney felt that the film's princess theme discouraged young boys from seeing it. In an attempt to market the film to a broader audience, Disney changed the title of the film from Rapunzel to Tangled, and promoted it as a comedic adventure. An early trailer for the film focused less on Princess Rapunzel and more on Flynn Rider, the male lead character. It was originally believed that Disney's marketing campaign was a desperate attempt to search for a particular audience. However, Byron Howard and Nathan Greno, claimed that the title change was to emphasize that Flynn has as much of a role in the film as Rapunzel.
This is the first animated Disney "princess" film to get a PG rating by the MPAA. All other Disney "princess" films got a G rating.
Clay Aiken was at one point confirmed for the role of Flynn Ryder during the film's pre-production in 2005.
The song "When Will My Life Begin (Reprise 1)" and part of the song "Mother Knows Best" is omitted from the movie. However, the complete renditions can be found in the soundtrack album.
The sword that Maximus uses to fight Flynn at the dam is a Roman gladius. This would normally be an anachronism to the time-set of the movie. However, in this case it is very fitting because the name Maximus is also a Roman name.
The most expensive Disney film in the animated canon at US$260 million dollars.
The character of Rapunzel is constantly barefoot, something she shares in common with her voice actress Mandy Moore, who loves to perform barefoot.
An average inch of hair weighs about 50 µg - a light estimate, as blonde hair tends to be lighter than other colors. Animators have said that Rapunzel's hair is approximately 70 feet (840 inches), and consists of about 100,000 strands. That yields 4,200,000,000 µg = 4,200,000 mg = 4,200 g = 4.2 kg (approx 10.4 lbs) of hair. We assume that its manageable weight in the movie is another innate magical property.
Rapunzel's parents don't say a word for the entire movie.
In the Snuggly Duckling tavern, the character who leaves to get the guards is named "Greno," after the film's co-director Nathan Greno.
The teaser trailer for the movie showed the first meeting between Rapunzel and Flynn quite differently. After hitting him with the pan, Flynn comes to but Rapunzel stays out of sight, while her hair punches and grabs him, and drags him around the room in slapstick fashion. When Flynn is tied to the chair and tries his smoldering look on her, she throws him out of the tower while still tied to her hair. There is also an unused scene where Flynn waits at the foot of the tower and gets the full weight of Rapunzel's hair thrown on him, which greatly amuses Maximus the horse.
The algorithm that manages how Rapunzel's hair moves appears to be based on a similar algorithm for cloth. This is noticeable, for example, at the end of the "When Will My Life Begin" montage as she tosses her hair around her in a spiral.
"Pascal" was also the name of a character in the 1980s drama Beauty and the Beast, which starred Ron Perlman, voice of the Stabbington Brothers.
In the marketplace, when Rapunzel looks at the mosaic of herself, the camera cuts from her eyes to the tile eyes of the picture and - very briefly - there is a clarinet musical motif that is exactly the same as the motif in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, when Cameron is looking at the pointillist painting and the camera cuts between Cameron's eyes and that of the child in the painting. The moment is just a fraction of a second; just after that, Rapunzel looks at the clarinet player walking behind her and smiles.
In the opening scenes you see baby Rapunzel in her cradle staring up at a baby mobile. In a little bit of foreshadowing, you see several items hanging from the mobile that come into play later in the story, namely a chameleon (her pet Pascal), a rubber ducky (The Snuggly Duckling that Flynn takes her to), a cupid (also from the Snuggly Duckling), a horse (Maximus) and a blue bird (when she first leaves the tower).
Rapunzel is the only Disney princess to have green eyes and the second Disney heroine after Esmeralda to have green eyes.
Rapunzel is the first Disney Princess to be computer animated. Special software was used specifically to animate Rapunzel's hair because no one ever animated that much hair before.
Although Rapunzel is based on the character from the classic fairy tale, she is altered quite a bit in order to develop a more adventurous and outgoing personality, and further complicate the romantic relationship between her and her love-interest.
Eugene, according to the official Tangled blog, is twenty six years old.
To determine the appearance of the male protagonist of the film, Disney Animation held a "hot guy" meeting. They invited the female members of the staff to a meeting where they pin-pointed certain characteristics that Flynn could and couldn't have. This meeting gave us the Flynn we know and love.
In production of the movie, Tangled was originally supposed to feature a song call "You Are My Forever", sung by Mother Gothal to Rapunzel in a motherly nature, then later sang by Eugene to Rapunzel in a romantic nature. This was replaced by the songs "Mother Knows Best" and "I See The Light".
I hope you enjoyed that trivia. Tangled is, and always will be, my favorite Disney movie. Happy birthday Tangled.