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.