In 2010, the Walt Disney Animation Studios released a 3D animated film called Tangled, which was based off the German fairy tale, Rapunzel. In this film, the main character is a young princess named Rapunzel, who was kidnapped when she was a child for her long golden hair which had magical properties in it. The women who kidnapped Rapunzel acted as her mother and used Rapunzel’s hair to stay young forever. She then meets Flynn Rider who she blackmails into taking her to the castle so she can see the ‘floating lights’ on her birthday, which are actually lanterns that are released so that the lost princess may find her way back home. A character in this story doesn’t actually have any lines but a big role and a quite controversial one: Rapunzel’s hair. As we follow Rapunzel on her adventures, the laws of physics are pushed and tested through the use of her hair.
There were quite a lot of scenes where Rapunzel was doing quite miraculous things with her hair. One of the scenes in the very beginning is the opening sequence where we see Rapunzel start her day, bright and early, playing with Pascal, her pet chameleon. She is able to find him by using her hair like a whip when he tries to hide behind a flower pot. The scenes continues into song as she continues to describe her morning and how she does her everyday chores and activities with her hair. She is able to mop the floor while keeping her hair in check so that she doesn’t make a mess, climb all over the heights of her tower with her hair, painting the walls by using her hair like a rope, and many other tasks. First of all, her hair is ridiculously long, like inhuman lengths long, so it’s believable that her hair can be used in all these ways as shown in the movie, however, according to Kelly Ward, a senior software engineer for Rapunzel’s hair, she said that Rapunzel’s hair would weigh 60 to 80 pounds and would have been 70 feet long. It’s quite a feet, when a short, dainty girl can run, leap, and keep her head perched when she’s got 70 pounds weighing down on her neck and shoulders. Also, with that amount of weight, her hair wouldn’t look as bouncy as it did in the film. The way her hair moves and interacts with the wind is an indicator that there are boundaries of physics being broken here. There is a particular scene where she is holding all her hair in her arms and runs around while throwing her hair all over in the air as they neatly land in a circle around her. Rapunzel looks over 90 and not a pound over 115. Her being able to hold more than half her body weight is in an incredible feat that she shouldn’t be able to do if the laws of physics were being followed.
Speaking of Rapunzel’s strength, in the film, it also shows how Rapunzel is able to use her hair to pull up Mother Gothel and Flynn Rider into the castle by climbing her hair. Now, while it looks believable in the film, I was already doubting how that was possible, but for the film’s sake, I passed it off as movie magic and chose to believe it for the film. However, there was an article that studied the physics of Rapunzel’s hair and how strong it was. In the article, they explained how Rapunzel lives in a 70 foot tall tower. The writers of the article assume that Rapunzel’s hair could support the weight of both itself and that of a man, if the assumed man was 60 kg. Later, they had come to the conclusion that Rapunzel’s hair can actually support the weight of 2750kg, which is almost 5 times the weight of Flynn’s assumed weight as well as Mother Gothel’s, who would weigh less than Flynn. So, according to the article, it is actually physically possible that Rapunzel is capable of lifting people into the tower. Of all the things that I thought was physically possible, it turns out they actually stuck to the rules of physics when it came to these scenes. With all the running, cartwheels, and swinging she does with her 70 pound hair. The factual representation of her hair is that she can pull up people up with her hair.
Now, what Disney movie isn’t complete without some magic in it. Rapunzel’s hair has shown to have magical properties that range from curing illnesses and wounds to being able to turn back someone’s external appearance. In the beginning of the film, the source of the power was from a golden flower that Mother Gothel used to keep herself young for many years. Then when the queen fell ill while she was pregnant with Rapunzel, the King had his soldiers go find the flower for her. Successfully finding the flower, despite Mother Gothel’s efforts to hide it, they make it into a soup and feed it to the queen who is magically healed and gives birth to a baby girl with long, golden hair. This little baby girl is Rapunzel who now has those properties transferred into her through her hair. Mother Gothel discovers this and tries to take Rapunzel’s hair but once it’s cut, the hair turns brown and loses its magical properties, as well as ceasing to grow at rapid speed like the rest of her blond hair. I don’t think you need to be an expert in physics to know that magic doesn’t pertain or acknowledge the laws of physics and just chooses to do what it wishes. Especially in these fairy tale stories. In reality, hair could never grow to those lengths and the pull of gravity on 70 pound hair would be quite the strain on your neck. Also, hair can’t glow or heal people or make you younger, we can only wish.
At the end of all this, there is something to remember however, Tangled is a fairy tale and like all fairy tales, they aren’t real. They use the imagination and take things out of this world to create an enjoyable story and teach us something in the end. Without these feats of wild imagination and defying acts of physics, the film just wouldn’t be as enjoyable and frankly, I doubt anyone would want to watch it. Animations like these are made to be out of the world and defy these logics and show us what creativity can do when you just think outside the box a little bit.
