Barbie as Rapunzel Part 2: The Electric Brush Boogaloo

Part 1 can be found here. 

This is a post about a brush.

I know, I know, you all came here expecting some ranting about how Barbie movies are too tame show about scratching about prince's eyeballs or abandoning pregnant foster daughters to the mercy of the wilderness. At least, I assume you did because the my mind-reading device is not quite complete.

Negotiations were going fairly well. We're stuck on the
details of his benefits package. 

Sorry to disappoint. Well, no, that's a filthy lie because I'm actually quite excited to talk about what may be the most powerful weapon ever introduced into Western animation.

Even combined they are no match
for the mighty bristles

It all starts when Rapunzel and gang discover a secret room beneath the kitchen. All because a spoon lands on a Gargoyle's nose.

Personally, I think all silverware should be stored like this. 

Thankfully, Gothel is prone to naps when the plot calls for it, so Rapunzel and gang have plenty of time to explore without any sort of tension. They discover a silver hairbrush, conveniently engraved with the message "To our daughter Rapunzel on her first birthday. Love Mother and Father."

Rapunzel: "Why would Gothel lie?"
Me: "Why would anyone give a one year old a hairbrush?"

Then Penelope, who can pack quite a powerful punch when the plot calls for it, is startled by Hobie and stamps a hole in the floor.

I worry about the structural integrity of this manor.

The revealed tunnel leads to the world outside the magic wall, which Rapunzel has never seen. However, certain...events conspire to ensure that she must go it alone.

"That castle is the same color as my dress. My destiny must be there." 

I know this Rapunzel wasn't confined to a tower, so being outside is nothing that new to her, but she's still taking being around other people very well. I guess no one wanted to have to explain what Stockholm Syndrome and Social Anxiety Disorder are to their seven year old.

Then again, maybe being able to make small talk with bakers
while wandering through town is an inborn princess trait.

Anyway, never one to run from danger, Rapunzel comes to the aid of a little girl who has fallen into a spike pit near the kingdom's borders.

"If only we had some kind of braided rope to lower down there." 

Alas, it was not to be. Rapunzel just pulls the kid up with her hand and is rewarded with meeting her "hot" older brother.

They talk. Apparently there is a feud going on with the neighboring kingdom. Something about a missing daughter, I don't know. I didn't pay much attention to this part. I was much more focused on how in the middle of the conversation, Rapunzel just runs back to her life of imprisonment, enslavement, and abuse without any reason at all. Well, I suppose she needed to go back and gossip with Penelope about "meeting the most handsome man in the world."

Hobie: "And you've met how many men exactly?"
Me: "Someone on this writing staff was secretly
taking the piss out of this movie." 

Note that everything up to this point was never in the original tale. Now, I understand that a tower and only five characters make for a rather boring story and honestly everything up until now wasn't so bad (Rapunzel's idiotic decision to return nonwithstanding). But it's like the producers suddenly realized they had a story they were supposed to be sticking to and decided to cram all those bits in one section.




Exile in the tower appears when Gothel - um -magically transforms her room into a tower until she gives up the name of the boy she met in town.

"That'll teach her not to refuse to tell me things she doesn't know!"

There's a pointless intervening scene where we go back to the castle, learn the boy is actually Prince Stefan (shocker), and listen to him begin to fall in love with Rapunzel because he is describing her to his dad. When we return to the castle, the camera takes its sweet time showing off this.

Jesus, how thick was that braid? Did she have some pinned under?

This is more like it. Though the thought just occurred - hair like this would require crazy amounts of time spent at maintaining it. Gothel wants Rapunzel to spend all of her time cleaning the manor and should then discourage long hair. So the movie makes even less sense than it did when I started writing this thing (not that  should surprise anyone). Anyway, a familiar face soon arrives to re-enact a familiar scene.

"Release thou lengthy golden extruded proteins." 

My notes on this scene went a little something like this: "Wait, what? Stefan, aren't you supposed to be out patrolling? Did you just stumble across this place? Did the magic invisible wall disappear and no one told me? What? Where was Hugo? Why is her hair suddenly long? WHAT'S GOING ON?"

Then:

Please insert your own Inception joke here. 

I'm not sure what to make of having a nightmare about being in the fairy tale that you are technically in, but let's not linger on that little detail too long. After Rapunzel goes back to sleep, her hairbrush from earlier transforms into a paintbrush.

Spontaneous transformation is just
one of silver's lesser known qualities. 

No fairy godmother, no angel from above, she just vows to be free and the thing turns itself into a paintbrush.Can it transform into any kind of brush? A toenail brush, a wire brush, a saddle brush, or even a cleaning brush, which as a servant I'm sure she could use a few of. Granted, maybe this sort of thing is common in this quasi-magical setting because the next morning Rapunzel's only reaction is, "I don't understand." Her reaction is a little more realistic when she tries painting on the wall with some berry juice.

"Holy shit balls! Which one of you put LSD in my paint?" 

Meet the magic paintbrush. I don't know what the hell it could have done as a hairbrush. I'm kind of afraid to ask. But now apparently all you have to do is think of something and it will appear. You don't even need to have paint. You don't even need to be a good painter. With one light touch she recreates a lovely portrait of the town from yesterday. But it gets better. 

I'm trusting you to provide your own Portal jokes.
Don't let me down. 

Just imagine where in the painting you want to go when you step through and you'll arrive there in the real world. 

Seriously, what was in that paint?

This handy little plot device allows Rapunzel to return to the prince and secure an invitation his birthday ball that night, and then just paint another portal home when she needs to go. She actually gets a reason to go back this time - Penelope comes to find her because she's afraid of what Gothel will do to her father if Rapunzel goes missing. 

What happens if you visualize the outside of the tower?

Can we just take a moment to imagine the implications of this brush? You can paint as many lasting, one way portals to anywhere in the world that you can visualize. Move massive armies in a single minute. Enter secure bank vaults. Re-direct an avalanche or a flood. Shipping costs would vanish overnight. Hell, planes, trains, and automobiles would vanish overnight. It doesn't need any sort of power supply and it can fit in a slender pocket. That's loads better than any other portal device currently on the intellectual property market.  

And it's not burdened by cumbersome cubes or theoretical cake. 

It gets better. Because Rapunzel cannot reveal the name of the boy she met, Gothel is content to leave her alone in the tower for hours on end. She could just walk through the painting-portal that they successfully hid from Gothel. But first she needs a dress for the dance. 

So she paints one. 

And walks into some magic wall-dimension to put it on. 

And discovers the secret to creating matter.

It's not just a matter of portals and pretty paintings anymore. This paintbrush can make anything. Cheesy as it, the only limit is her imagination. Which may explain why she uses it to have a fashion show.

However, there is a waste product in this creation of new matter - sparkly lights. 

This inevitably attracts the attention of Otto and Gothel, who has decided that if she may as well stick to the original story even if no one else is. She destroys the painting-portal and the magic paintbrush and then cuts off Rapunzel's hair so that she may impersonate her at the ball. 

This movie also is fixated with telling the truth for its moral lesson. It's like they thought having that point would make it sell better with parents or something. Gothel constantly calls Rapunzel a liar like she's accusing her of being a baby-killer and eventually casts a spell on the tower to imprison liars there forever.

Luckily, because Rapunzel's not a liar she can jump safely through the spell onto Penelope's back and fly off to rescue the prince from chasing Gothel through the palace maze garden.

Prince cannot tell 60 year old woman from 18 year old girl.
I'd get that eyesight checked, your highness. 

Again, this is actually a case of Gothel trying to stick to the original tale. I don't know why she started so late in the movie, but props for trying. I mean, technically she should have tossed Rapunzel out of the tower to wander the world alone and then lured the prince up into the tower with the cut hair and scratched his eyeballs out. But she's working with shorter material than usual and no one's perfect.

Indeed, Gothel's pretty far from perfect. The grand climax of this movie is the reveal that Gothel was dated King Wilhelm (also had to look that name up a shit ton of times), Rapunzel's father. When he didn't marry her and make her queen of the land, she decided the appropriate response was to steal his daughter and frame the neighboring kingdom.

Gothel: "She should have been my daughter!"
Everyone with a brain: "So that's why you treated her like a slave? What?" 

Rapunzel defeats Gothel by tricking her into falling through that painting-portal to the tower she had made earlier.

Of course, because Gothel has always been a liar, she is now trapped in the tower forever. It's a nice little call back to the actual story of Rapunzel, where Gothel either fell to her death when she was climbing back out of the tower or starved to death because she dropped the hair-ladder and had no way to get down. 

So now Rapunzel and Stefan are free to get married - after they wait for Rapunzel's hair to grow back.

I think there's some law about horse-drawn
carriages and princesses. 

And then Kelly can finally start painting. 

Kelly: "I wish I had a magic paintbrush."
Barbie: "You do! You can paint anything you want."
Me: "Oh, that's such a load of crap."

Oh Jesus, that's right. There was a point to all of this; inspiring some little kid to paint. I'm not exactly sure how being afraid to paint something and being honest and whatever other morals you want to pull out of all of this fit together, but that's it. That's the movie.




It's not that the movie was bad. If I had some small girl creature that need entertaining there are certainly worse movies to show them. I just don't understand why this movie need to be about Rapunzel, especially when they take so many cues from other Disney movies like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. The magic paintbrush thing was really interesting for a deus ex machina, but it wasn't really showcased in the movie. On the other hand, the parts of the movie that are identical to the original are awkwardly integrated.




My guess is that they wanted the name recognition of the story of Rapunzel (even though it wasn't a very popular fairy tale until recently). Maybe they just wanted to sell a princess doll with longer than normal hair. I'm frustrated by the potential in this movie. Take at look at the IMDb page for Barbie as Rapunzel and you'll notice a lot of talented and recognizable actors. I know the animations is nothing great to look at but the music was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and is quite pretty throughout. I think the people behind the Barbie movies eventually figured out that they would be better off telling original stories and so started making things like Barbie as the Island Princess and Barbie and the Diamond Castle.

Progress...maybe. I don't think I could stand to try the
one about the Three Musketeers.

In the case of Rapunzel v. Barbie of Rapunzel, I find the movie to be a recognizable adaptation suffering from Adaptation Decay.

Barbie as Rapunzel Part 1: A Brief Introduction to Fairy Tales and Bitching About the Characters

I was never an "in-demand" babysitter.  


Shocking, I know. 


Maybe the parents had one of those teddy bear nanny cams and disapproved of the way I would whistle at their kids like I did with the dogs. 

See? Almost identical. I really have to squint to see any difference.

Movies were my go-to technique for managing tiny humans. The charges picked what they wanted to watch (thus I have seen every single Pokemon film) and a large percentage of the wee ones had been conditioned to favor pink and princesses. So there was this Rapunzel movie that I got to watch a lot and I want to start off by reviewing it. 

I didn't want to start with something too easy.
The Aborted Franchises will come later. Much later.

In my bored teenage years, I thought it was a good enough to kill an hour or so before the bedtime arguments began. I’m sure you all know what movie I’m talking about.

Now, fairy tales aren’t as straightforward as say, novels, when it comes to judging adaptations.They're old, so there's multiple versions based on whatever the local storyteller felt like throwing in for shits and giggles. And the public domain status means that they are constantly reinterpreted for a quick buck fresh take.

Tell me which one of these seems fairest of them all. 

Besides, Wikipedia tells me that Rapunzel in its Grimm form is already an adaptation, stemming from Charlotte-Rose De Caumont de La Force's 1698 tale Persinette (and possibly a few others). A truly original review is going to have to wait until I learn French. This discussion will work just fine with the Brothers Grimm version. 

What do you remember about Rapunzel?

A tower, a witch, a prince, and a girl who probably spends 94% of her day on hair hygiene.


This is not that story.

This is also not that story,
but that's a completely different blog post. 

When a book becomes a movie, the bulk of my moaning is usually boils down to what's been cut. After all, books can (theoretically) be as long as an author wants. The attention span of an average movie goer seems to max out somewhere around two and a half hours. Some trimming is required.

Sometimes a lot of trimming. 

With fairy tales, however, the problem is the reverse. The short length encourages additions, elaborations, and side plots. I'm not saying those things are automatically bad. Like how a skunk isn't automatically smelly.

Let's finally take a look at Barbie as Rapunzel, shall we?

Barbie, sea shore painter extraordinaire, has a problem. Her little sister, Kelly, when faced with a heap of fresh paint, gets performance anxiety and wants to be told what to paint. 

Let's not kid ourselves here. You're going to paint a rainbow.
Just accept it. 

I'm not sure why the traditional "once upon a time" need upgrading to a full framing device, but whatever. Like a naive camp counselor, Barbie has yet to meet a problem she can't solve by telling a story. Because when I need to motivate someone into trying something new I immediately think of ... Rapunzel? Sure.

"You know," recalls Barbie, "this reminds me of a story about a girl whose paintings saved her life." 

"The arts are important dammit! They save lives!" 

That was oddly ... threatening. Maybe Barbie takes the Tiger Mother approach to child-rearing. 


Okay, okay, that little bit of grounding realism over and we can move into the real story. 

Meet Rapunzel. Or rather, Barbie as Rapunzel. 

She's a painter while Original Rapunzel was a singer. That's not a change I can get too worked up about. When you're locked away from the world, multiple hobbies are probably necessary to preserve your sanity. I'd make a bigger fuss if she were a book-worm. It's a good thing that she's not because aside from that little detail, Rapunzel is basically Belle from Beauty and the Beast. A kind, caring, intelligent young woman who frequently vocalizes her hopes and dreams. She works towards a type of independence, in spite of a society that would rather she not. 

Pictured: Polite rebellion in pink. 

Well, that sounded dull and academic. Let me play film student for a moment.

The camera makes a point of entering this shot at the bottom of her permanently braided hair and slowly seeping up the length of it. Probably to distract from the fact that her hair only goes to her feet. 

You could maybe get to a second floor with that, if the window  had no lip.
And she laid on her back. And the prince had a ladder. And some rigging.

I've met people in real life with hair that long (mostly for religious reasons, but still). Stranger still, the movie never ever mentions her long but not-Rapunzel-long hair. And there is no reason for this character to have hair like this. It doesn't have any magical properties. 

Still not that post.

It might be okay, because this Rapunzel (as you may have already guessed) doesn't live in a tower. She lives in a manor hidden behind an invisible wall, spends her days slaving away at chores to keep the house in perfect shape. 

I'm just saying, for an evil manor it sure looks like a Malibu beach house.
I wonder if you could buy this as a playhouse? 

The manor belongs to Gothel. 

Mother Gothel in the original tale is a pretty intriguing villain. She was a witch who took Rapunzel as her own daughter as payment for some rampion (the whole point of the name Rapunzel, actually) her birth parents stole.

At least it wasn't artichoke? 

But once Gothel had Rapunzel, she was apparently a kind and loving mother. The problems started cropping up when her little girl started noticing boys - basically a crazy helicopter parent. What I'm saying is there was a foundation for an intriguing and nuanced character. What the movie uses is a carbon copy of the stepmother from Cinderella.

Didn't you know weasel tail face masks ensure a restful slumber?

And then there's the Prince. The plot does this thing where it delays naming his royal highness so that Rapunzel can honestly claim she doesn't know who he is. But of course he's the prince. He's the only eligible male that she meets in the entire movie. 

Hello Prince Stefan. Do you mind if I call you Prince Basic. I swear to god, I had to keep looking up his name because this ponce may as well not here at all.   He just wanders around and has stilted conversation with everyone. 

"Hello favored brother, how doth you fair on this fine summer's eve?"
 - Still less cringe-worthy than the actual writing for this scene. 

Stefan and Rapunzel also have a ridiculously tiny amount of screen time together for two characters that end up marrying. So hey, finally something that's accurate to the original story.

So...you like to paint?

I'm going to end this part of the review soon, but there's only last thing I want to touch on - sidekicks.

The original sidekicks? 

Honestly, I can't think of a Disney main character who does come with a few extra hangers-on. Price of fame I guess. 

It was only the beginning. 

But dear God, do they over-do it in this movie.

Gothel, Rapunzel, and Prince Stefan all come with their own groupies.The effect is a landslide of side characters that range from pointless to annoying. At best, they have slightly interesting side plots, like Penelope and her Dad. At worst, it's really obvious that the producers wanted to have a Tommy doll.

Rapunzel gets Penelope, the dragon with performance anxiety worried about pleasing her father, and Hugo, the annoying fluff ball. 90% of their conversations is snark. 

Gothel gets Otto, the standard "evil" weasel, and Hugo, Penelope's father. 

Prince Stefan get his father, stolen straight from the cheerful, useless, chubby royalty school of character design. 

Remind you of anyone? 

There's also Tommy, Melody, Lorena, Katrina, and their horse Botticelli (not shown). Altogether about as useful as tits on a boar.

And award for biggest waste of animation goes to....

Did they think the kids watching this need an audience surrogate? Because that's probably a little hard for characters that spend less than seven minutes on-screen to accomplish. And when I talk about awkward, stilted dialogue it's always with these four. 

Small animated children, look at your life, look at your word choices.  

Part 2 coming soon! Maybe I actually get to the plot soon. 

Part 2 can be found here.