Hilarious movie. I especially liked the ruffians. That scene seemed cheesy, but the fact of the matter is, it made me laugh.

I don’t know if 3D movies are getting better or if I’m just getting used to them. I think it’s the former, because really, what I like most about the look of 2D films seems to be slowly showing up in 3D films. I’ve been preferring 2D because it’s more expressive & the characters stand out much better. The color palettes have just been more optimized. And the movement, you just can’t beat the movement in 2D animation.

Or can you?

I mentioned this about Megamind, but I’m noticing better movement & aesthetics in Tangled, too. Of course this would happen, since practice makes perfect, but it’s noticeable and I think it has finally caught up with the aesthetics of 2D animation. I also noticed the overall look of Roadside Romeo, a movie from India that never got dubbed into American English. The color palette was the main thing with that. It just worked, in the same way a 2D film’s color palette works, just with more texture.

It’s all about the aesthetics. In 2D films, you can really tweak the environment to give focus to the characters or whatever you want the viewer’s eye drawn to. 3D films tried too hard to look “real”, which can make the characters blend in with the background & just throw the focus all over the place. Realistic color palettes just don’t create good movies. There’s a lot of power in a limited color palette & strategic lighting. These shortcomings were likely a side-effect of slower computers that couldn’t allow for as much environmental fine-tuning(“oh wow, that background element is more vivid than we expected!”), but I’m quite sure a large part of it was finding what works for CGI & how to do it. The movement of the characters? Yeah, mostly computer ability, but it also takes a LOT of practice to create the most natural movements possible. You simply can’t find anybody with more than maybe 30 years of 3D animation experience, and even then, any knowledge of it over maybe 10 years would be obsolete(“What’s with all this ‘mesh’ nonsense? I’ve done amazing things with primitive shapes and fractals. I’m the MASTER of phong shading!” …80% of you won’t know what I just said).

Tangled had backgrounds that looked like the painted backgrounds in traditionally-animated films, except you could move the camera freely around them. The characters had perfect movement throughout the entire movie(in Megamind, everybody except Megamind himself still had stiff movement). And the expressions were as expressive as a hand-drawn animated character.

I’m very optimistic about 3D animation now. It’s actually finally looking GOOD!

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Oh, and the script-writing and the music were pretty good too. I wouldn’t say it was a 10/10, and no songs really stood out as much as anything out of The Lion King, but I’d rate it as “worth seeing”.

That’s right, they seamlessly changed the Wanted posters for the foreign dubs, just like they did with all the signs & labels in Toy Story 3(much more to translate there). In CGI, this is a fairly simple process(of course, it’s still a fair amount of extra planning & work), so I’m glad that Disney does this. The Spanish version is above, and the French version is shown below. Yes, the changing nose was a running gag.

The only other words I recall showing in the film was the sign for the Snuggly Duckling & the map in the credits, but neither of those were changed for the Spanish or French versions. They translated the name when spoken, though.