Tangled – review

We are often and rightly said to be living in a new golden age of animation. Just occasionally, though, you get something a bit leaden. Rapunzel gets a very ordinary updating in this Disney picture, raiding duller moments from the Shrek movies for ideas, and sporting a laboured selection of Broadway-style showtunes – signalling that someone, somewhere clearly wants to turn this into a lucrative global franchise on stage, maybe with a cast in each country culled from a selection of hopefuls competing in some reality TV show. Despite the title, Rapunzel's hair stays as lustrous and untroubled as something from a shampoo ad; extreme girliness is of course the order of the day, but those great big doe eyes really are verging on the absurd. Even given that movies like Wall-E, Up and the Toy Stories have probably spoiled us all, this just looks like a cynical money-machine.