Rapuntsel

So, the DVD of Tangled arrived in the mail last week, and I watched it over the weekend. Yes, I spent some unseemly amount of money importing a DVD I could have bought on special from any given music shop or department store in town – but if I’d bought it locally I wouldn’t have been able to get the language options I wanted. You see, by ordering it from Estonia, I get the Estonian options. This magically converts the movie into a learning opportunity.

As the animation was dubbed in Estonian, I had the option of switching the language settings around so I could listen to the English version while watching Estonian subtitles, then flip them to listen to the Estonian version while watching the English subtitles. I have found this to be an enjoyable and useful way to engage in a spot of vocabulary reinforcement (and pick up some nuances regarding turns-of-phrase) with the few DVDs I have that offer me the chance to do this language swapping schtick with German, and I’ve been wanting the chance to do it with Estonian as well.

I’ve got some Estonian DVDs, but they aren’t dubbed in English, so I can really only get the language balance one-way. When I was ordering some books from Estonia recently, the ad for Tangled was all over the place, and I thought a Disney animation might be a good addition to my shipment.

I’m kind of impressed that someone would go to the bother of translating all of the songs into Estonian (and Lithuanian and Latvian, on this DVD). I know Disney usually has their animated movies dubbed into a ridiculous number of languages, but the fact that they would do it for the tiny languages is pretty impressive – especially when you realise that a large number of the people who speak those languages also speak one of the more popular ones. I guess the fact that it’s a kids’ movie means you want the kids to be able to engage in it without having to go through too much schooling first.

Anyway, I thought the movie was brilliant. It has been an awfully long time since I have seen a Disney film that had me wanting to watch it again immediately. This movie, on the other hand, had me willing to switch over the languages and watch it again the very next day – and I still loved it. It could have been because the Alan Menkin sound track was tapping into the same part of my brain that has stored away fond feelings for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, but I thought the movie seemed like a return to form.

No, scratch that, I thought it seemed like a good story well told – which just happens to be something Disney used to do very well.

It did feel a lot like Beauty and the Beast in places. I watched that film again last year, and found myself impressed with how well it was done, and how well it stood up to the test of time. Sometimes the films you watched as a child don’t age well, but B&tB really was something of a masterpiece. Tangled seemed to catch that same vibe and mix it with a bit of the fun banter from Aladdin - and I’m not just saying that because I kept finding the love song from Tangled bled into A Whole New World when I was humming the tune later.

In the past six months I’ve encountered two retellings of the Rapunzel story - Tangled (obviously) and the graphic novel Rapunzel’s Revenge, by Hale, Hale and Hale. Both were a whole lot of fun, and both are now firmly on my “favourites” lists. It’s always interesting to see what happens when two things touching on the same themes are developed at the same time (the lead-up to the publication of the book and the production of the movie would preclude the creators of either knowing about what was happening with the other version).

For example, both versions ditch the prince in favour of a thief. Both feature a magical flower as the source of Gothel’s power. Both imply that Rapunzel is capable of using her hair as a whip (but only one makes the logical assumption that she might have to plat it first). And both versions make it quite clear that there are exactly three books in the tower – I thought that was a bit odd.

The Disney version stayed close to the traditional version of the fairy tale but did a fair bit of tweaking (and did a better job of explaining why Gothel wanted the child in the first place), while the Hales’ book started with a tweaked version of the tale and then went off on a wild tangent. I thought encountering both versions might make me think less of one of them, but they both rock on their own merits.

Oh, and I now know that the Estonian way to say “I can’t believe I did this!” is “Unbelievable, that this I have done!” (or, to be more precise, “Uskumatu, et seda tegin!”) – which has reinforced vocabulary I know, but shown me how to use it more correctly. And, I now know the Estonian word for “rider” is “ratsur” – which is completely new vocabulary. See: learning stuff. Sounds like a good reason to watch it again…