Fantastic Analysis

Disney's "TANGLED"

Before being accepted as a genre, Fantasy was accepted by literary critics with reluctance. J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and others have popularized Fantasy and pushed critics to accept it as a genre. The aftermath of the two World Wars had brought it to superiority by its readers.

The Fantastic Theory, however, focuses on the interrelationship of the elements of the fantasy rather than the genre itself. Todorov is its primary advocate and critic. He defines that one of the elements of the Fantastic is that the causes and effects that occur in the events within the story have no logical explanations; and he and Tolkien agreed that a Fantastic occurs in a 'secondary world'.

The movie being criticized here is 'Tangled' by Disney. It is a 2010 3d computer-animated, musical-comedy and fantasy film set in a world where Princesses and Witches exist. Among the two classifications of a Fantastic work - the marvelous and the uncanny - the movie belonged to the former; specifically, it is a "pure marvelous" type.

This animated film fell to the "pure marvelous" type simply because the events that occur in the story have no logical explanation: a magical, golden flower sprouted out of a drop of sun that is capable of healing any disease and render anyone with youth and strength. Now, even the viewer knows that there is no such thing as a 'drop of sunlight that can turn into a flower' in reality. In the film, the queen who drank the potion made out of this rare flower was healed instantaneously and later on gave birth to a golden-haired baby girl who, later, as found out by the witch, had the power to heal any kind of disease once a certain song was sung - which, in turn, made the girl's hair glow. One of the elements of the 'pure marvelous' is that the viewer/reader can never mingle the reality with the fantasy. The viewer can ascertain that what happened in the Fantastic film only exists in the film - that the events cannot go beyond the world of fantasy.