Tangled: Audio Description

The 2010 computer animated film featuring Mandy Moore, Zachary Levi and Donna Murphy is a pure cinematic masterpiece whose audio description doesn't do it any justice.

Loosely covering the Brothers Grimm folk tale Rapunzel published in 1812, Tangled tells the story of a girl who was kidnapped as a baby for her magic hair with healing qualities by a witch with some very narcissistic tendencies and an obsession with staying young forever. The young princess (who only turns 18 in the middle of the film) meets 26 year old Flynn Rider when he climbs in through her window after fleeing the local kingdom for his crimes. They go on an adventure to find the lanterns that happen every year on her birthday which unbeknownst to her are to commemorate her kidnapping in the hope that she’ll come back. Something her kidnapper could’ve prevented by changing her birthday by a minimum of 24 hours.

Having watched the film enough to know the script off by heart you can imagine my disappointment to go back after losing my sight only to find american audio description and the word “Fry Pan” every few seconds. This can be forgiven with the catchy musical numbers and dry humour but it all goes downhill again with the amount of detail and visual gags that the audio description does not cover.

It can be difficult with musicals to get the balance right with explaining what is going on and not interrupting the music which does mean that unfortunately as people who rely on the Audio description we miss out on the magic of the boat scene and the lanterns in favour of the lyrics. I think that considering the challenges the audio description just provides enough info to make sure we still understand what is going on and combined with the very literal lyrics of songs such as “I’ve got a dream” most of us can add two and two together and still enjoy it although we do miss out on some of the visual juxtaposition of armoured thugs baking muffins.

Despite its obvious red flags Tangled is and will always be one of my favourite films but lets just hope that the work out some way to make audio description better to include everyone