Short Review: Tangled (2010)

Nathan Greno and Byron Howard's Tangled is pretty much as close to a throwback animated film as you can get. Refreshing the classic German fairy tale, Disney has crafted a beautiful and exemplary insta-classic that's a bit too sickly sweet, but inevitably, irresistible. 
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Emphasizing its characters as more than their blatant archetypes (the dashing hero Flynn Rider is, rather contradictorily, a nobody and an egomaniac), the film has a wonderful simplicity about it that's lacking from the more schizoid, modernized animated films of recent memory. (The dopey science-fiction spoof Monsters vs. Aliens comes to mind).
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And even if there is an air of disappointment at the film's relative comfortability (or the muffled, half-hearted musical numbers) we must remind ourselves that this type of romanticized animation is a dying breed - and that, my friends, is just as sad as Repunzel's lofty imprisonment. [B+]