As Tangled opens, we are introduced to Mother Gothel (voiced by Donna Murphy), a wicked woman who hordes the powers of a magical flower which bestows her with eternal youth. When the Queen of the kingdom, who is pregnant, falls ill, soldiers are dispatched to search for the mythical flower, and much to Mother Gothel's chagrin, they find it. The Queen is saved and the flower's power if passed along to her newborn daughter, Rapunzel, who is born with dazzling blonde hair. Desperate to maintain her youth, Mother Gothel kidnaps the baby and hides her in a tower in a secluded part of the forest. The story then leaps ahead 18 years. Rapunzel (voiced by Mandy Moore) is a energetic and intelligent girl who spends her day keeping busy with her pet chameleon, Pascal. She has noticed the lights in the sky which occur every year on her birthday (a memorial put on by the King & Queen) and she wants to see them, but Mother Gothel forbids her to leave the tower. During her 18 years of imprisonment, Rapunzel's hair has grown to 70-feet in length. One day, a thief named Flynn Rider (voiced by Zachary Levi), who is on the run from palace guards, stumbles across the tower and thinks it a perfect hiding place. He is captured by Rapunzel, and she agrees to let him take his treasure if he takes her to see the lights. The two leave the tower, and Rapunzel's adventures in the big, wide world begin.

Whether or not you wish to believe it, everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is that one learns from one's mistakes, and clearly, Disney has. The Princess and the Frog was by no means a bad movie, but there were some things holding it back, such as it's (sort of) modern setting and the fact that the heroines problems were far too grounded in reality. (I'm speaking of course about her wish to open a restaurant, not the fact that she became a frog.) With Tangled, Disney has (literally) gone back to the drawing board and once again introduced the idea of a beautiful princess, surrounded by magic, in a far-away land.

This back-to-basics approach is what helps Tangled to really work. Essentially, there are only three characters in the film -- Rapunzel, Flynn, and Mother Gothel. Other characters go in and out of the story, but the movie basically focuses on Rapunzel and Flynn. This kind of hyper-focus has forced the writers to really make the dialogue and action stand on its own. Following a Disney tradition, there are sassy animal sidekicks, Pascal the chameleon and Maximus the horse, but neither of them talk. So, instead of one-liners, they must rely on facial expressions. This adds an element of humor to the story without taking the movie into full-blown comedy territory. Speaking of which, Tangled has some funny moments, but unlike so many other recent animated movies, the comedy is never cheeky and doesn't rely on making pop-culture references. Other than the bar scene -- which is unusual, but not too weird -- the humor comes naturally from the situation at hand, not from something which feels forced.

While all of these attributes are good, the most interesting thing about Tangled is the animation. The movie is computer generated, but the artists have gone for a hand-drawn look, so we get the best of both worlds. The characters have a classic Disney animation look, but the animators had the freedom to do dramatic lighting effects and sweeping camera movements. For this review, I watched the 2D version and didn't really see anything which made me regret not seeing it in 3D, as the CG animation naturally gives the picture depth and makes this fairy tale world seem a bit more real.

Tangled illustrates everything which one can do with a chameleon in one day on Blu-ray Disc courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment. The film has been letterboxed at 1.85:1 and the Disc contains an AVC 1080p HD transfer which runs at an average of 25 Mbps. The image is impressively sharp and clear, showing no grain and no defects from the source material. The colors practically leap off of the screen and look fantastic. This is a bright and colorful movie and the image balance is perfect. It's never overly dark or bright. The image shows nice detail, and thanks to the impressive animation, we can easily make out textures on objects. The image has nice depth, and the objects in the foreground are nicely separated from the background. The Disc carries a DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 track which runs at 48 kHz and an average of 5.0 Mbps. The track provides clear dialogue and sound effects. The audio isn't as nice as the video, but it's still impressive. The surround sound effects are nicely done, and are plentiful during the action scenes. The effects are very detailed and the speaker placement is accurate. The stereo effects are good as well, and the separation is good. Subwoofer effects pepper the action scenes.

The Tangled Blu-ray Disc contains only a handful of extras. We get three DELETED SCENES which run about 13 minutes, including introductions by Directors Nathan Greno & Byron Howard. All three are done in storyboard-like drawings, some of which have been colored. The bulk of this is taken up by an alternate version of The Snugly Duckling scene. The only new thing here is a cut idea of a fortune-telling monkey. We get two versions of the "Original Storybook Opening" (both around 4 minutes), both of which offer alternative opening sequences told in a traditional "once upon a time" book form. "50th Animated Feature Countdown" (2 minutes) is a pretty cool montage of Disney's 49 other animated movies. "Extended Songs" offers longer versions of "When Will My Life Begin" and "Mother Knows Best", which contain rough animation. "Untangled: The Making of a Fairy Tale" (12 minutes) is hosted by Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi, and contains comments from Greno & Howard, as well as the animators. However, a lot of the running time here is taken up by discussions of other Disney movies. "Tangled Teasers" (9 minutes) is a series of nine fake commercials, news reports, and educational movies related to Tangled. Some of these are quite clever.