Compare and Contrast the Movie Tangled to the Book

Tangled is a film that narrates a story of a lost princess who has magical blonde hair who has been hidden in a secluded tower after she was stolen by her mother. The girl was stolen from her biological parents who are the king and the queen. Once the queen conceived the child, she fell ill and was treated by a flower which had the powers of healing. This is the same flower that Mother Gothel has used over the years to keep her young. The queen gives birth to Princess Rapunzel who in turn acquires the healing power of the flower in her hair. Gothel kidnaps the child and brings her up as her child out of the public while the king and the queen release sky lanterns on their child’s birthday every year in a hope that she sees them. 

The movie tangled is created from a short story book known as Rapunzel. In the story, Rapunzel is a girl who was given to sorceress because her mother used the rapunzel plant growing in the sorceress garden when she pregnant. The sorceress kept her in a high tower where no one could get her. The only way to get to the tower is through Rapunzel’s hair. A prince discovers the tower and they spend time with Rapunzel without the knowledge of her mother. They soon fall in love and she gets pregnant and Rapunzel is left in the wilderness to die by the sorceress after an accident happened that left the prince blind. Later on, the prince follows Rapunzel’s voice and she heals him. They live happily ever after with their twins.

In the movie, Rapunzel had long hair that was magical; it healed and also had the ability to make people young while in the book the girl just has extremely long hair. In both the movie and the book, Mother Gothel and the sorceress express some motherly qualities in a way that they both could not harm Rapunzel. Gothel in the movie wants to keep the girl for her hair that keeps her young; she is self-centered while the sorceress from the movie wanted a child her only problem is that she wanted to keep her for herself only. In addition, Rapunzel falls in love in the book as well as the movie. However, in the movie, she falls in love with a thief who is in pursuit by the palace police for stealing while in the book the man who she falls in love with is a prince. The movie also makes her a princess while in the book she is an ordinary girl who becomes a princess through marriage to a prince.

There is also a clear difference in Rapunzel’s hair. It has a lot of powers in the movie which are absent in the book. For instance, it glows when it works and even helps her and Flyn overcome several challenges. Another major difference is that no one in the book knows that her hair has powers until she heals the prince from blindness whereas in the movie it is clear that her hair has power because it is for that same reason that she is abducted when she was a child. The main difference in the plot is that in the book Rapunzel was given up by the parents unlike in the movie where Gothel stole her from her parents due to the magical powers of her hair so she could remain young forever. This fact changes the story completely. 

Substantially, one would say that tangled tells a story of a girl who has been empowered and she shows this by fulfilling the goals she has set for herself. This is quite contradicting to Rapunzel’s original story which shows her lack of initiative on her own. Rapunzel is a classic fairytale book which is not friendly to the younger age. As for tangled, it has done a good job to make it friendlier to children even with a little violence.