You might not realise that the 2010 Disney movie Tangled, which was based on the Rapunzel fairytale, was almost called Rapunzel Unbraided. Ultimately, studio execs thought it didn’t represent the fact that the movie also featured Flynn Ryder pretty heavily, so they changed the name.
It seems this is not the only change the movie went through, either.
In a recent TikTok video, illustrator and designer Ryan Lynch (@outridercreative) responded to a comment which read: “The fact that Tangled was almost in the style of watercolour painting keeps me up at night.”
But is that true ― and if so, what would that have looked like?
Well, it was certainly a consideration
Disney animator Glen Keane shared that his colleague and Disney 3D animator Kyle Strawitz “took the house from Snow White and built it and painted it so it looked like a flat painting that suddenly started to move, and it had dimension and kept all of the soft, round curves of the brushstrokes of watercolour”.
Glen also shared that a major inspiration for the movie’s look was the oil painting The Swing by French Rococo artist Jean-Honore Fragonard.
“I’ve never [worked] on a film where just showing an image of a tree on the screen causes everyone to applaud in a theatre,” Glen said of the finished look.
“These are huge steps but in seemingly mundane ways. To be able to do a dimensional tree where the leaves turn, but it still feels like it has calories if you look at it too long. Very painterly.”
A peek at the movie’s visual developer Claire Keane’s concept art for the movie, which is available on her site, shows the kind of gentle, pastel hues and watercolour-style pigment that Glen refers to in his quote.
“You can see how her soft lighting and lived-in look carried over to the final film,” Ryan Lynch explained in his video, showing a side-by-side of her original concept for the inside of the tower against its final design.
And the artist’s original vision for Rapunzel’s hair was a lot more... well... tangled than the sleek golden ropes we see in the movie (which, as a long-haired girl myself, makes a lot more sense).
People loved the original designs
Commenters gushed about the movie’s gorgeous concept art under Lynch’s TikTok ― while others noted that Claire Keane is in fact Glen Keane’s daughter, and the pair both worked on the movie.
“Her art screams girlhood and beauty and fairy,” one commenter said, while another opined, “we were ROBBED of green dress Rapunzel” (referring to some concept art where the star wore a pastel green dress).
Still, fellow Tangled animator Hyrum Osmond shared a video of the animation process on his Instagram, revealing that for a brief while in the development process, the princess had no skirt at all. It’s all relative, right?