My roommate and I saw Tangled last night, and we both absolutely loved it. We loved the characters, the animation, and everything related to the mother-daughter relationship. Of course, we were both afraid to go to sleep afterwards, for fear that our nightmares about our respective mothers chasing us might return.
The mother's character was stunningly developed; she was so nuanced a villain that she could have been real. Her lines were pitch-perfect for an overbearing mother with a psychological stranglehold on her daughter (and all the quick cuts with Rapunzel waffling between running off and moaning about how she's a horrible daughter were perfect, too), the animation for "Mother Knows Best" was marvelous, and Donna Murphy was fantastic.
I did have a couple of gripes with the writing (there's no reason for fairy-tale characters, even those speaking in contemporary colloquialisms, to use "like" the way Rapunzel did; that's just lazy) and with the animation (Rapunzel still did look like a Barbie doll, and her design hasn't veered even slightly from the old "no room for a womb" standard of animated female characters).
And all in all, it's very much a Disney movie. The women characters were a witch and a clueless pixie with magical powers. The heroine only discovers herself and reaches maturity with the aid of a love interest. There's still a princess, and still a happily-ever-after.
Within that framework, however, Disney did everything they could to take this movie in a progressive direction. Everything that the writing for "Princess and the Frog" had gotten wrong by telling and not showing, this movie did right. Rapunzel may not have been worldly-wise, but as a heroine she was smart, brave, resourceful, and did all the rescuing on her own, and nobody made a big deal about it.
Oh, and the male chorus and Maximus the horse deserve huzzahs all their own.
Honestly, my biggest difficulty with this movie was suppressing the urge to take the cue from my favorite incarnation of the Rapunzel story at every call of "Let down your hair!" and shout, "My haiah?!" You're welcome, fellow moviegoers.
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