Here's what the Grimm's versions have in common with Tangled:
1. Hair
2. Desirable vegetation
3. Involvement of royalty
4. Magical tears
That's about it.
I won't spoil anything about Tangled except to say that the filmmakers have made Rapunzel a princess because the world can't have enough Disney Princesses. She also has eyes so large they make anime drawings look subtle and understated. In the mode of contemporary Disney princesses--as opposed to those squeaky-voiced, moony-eyed, prince-adoring classic princesses--Rapunzel is spunky. Really spunky.
In the original Grimm tale Rapunzel is not a princess. She has the misfortune instead of being born to a remorseless salad addict and her enabling husband. Maybe Rapunzel herself, in utero, is to blame for her mother's salad cravings, I don't know, but the mother claims "she'll die" if she doesn't eat some of their sorceress-neighbor's (and who doesn't have one of those?) enticing greens. So the husband jumps the fence and steals her some. Twice. The second time (first time's always free) he gets caught and threatened by the sorceress. The sorceress (evil fairy in one version) decides that in exchange for the junkie's daughter, once she's born, the couple can have all nutritious leafy veggies they want. This is apparently fine with them. After Rapunzel is born, they make the exchange and, it seems, live happily ever after in Sweet Tomatoes heaven. Rapunzel meanwhile is locked in a tower and forced to grow her hair out for tower-climbing purposes. (No mention is made of how the baby is cared for while hairless or short-haired.) A passing prince catches on to the hair trick and "visits" (if you know what I mean) Rapunzel in the tower. Rapunzel, being tower-schooled and all, hasn't developed much in the way of people smarts and figures it's just fine to tell her captor about the prince's visits. The sorceress doesn't take kindly to this news and Rapunzel gets shorn and banished to the desert (the tower banishment thing having failed). In the desert, apparently all alone, she gives birth to (the prince's?) twins. (Now we're talking spunky. She probably goes through her whole pregnancy without a single leaf of magical salad as well.) Back at the tower, the prince comes visiting, and the witch hauls him up by Rapunzel's stolen hair. The sorceress blinds him and sends him on his way. So with the prince blind and Rapunzel out mothering in the desert, there's no way the two are getting back together, except of course the prince wanders into the desert and trips over Rapunzel or maybe one of their kids. Seeing the prince blind makes Rapunzel cry, but Rapunzel's tears have magic healing powers (because of gestational exposure to really good escarole?) and the tears drip from girl eye to boy eye and the prince regains his sight so that he might complement Rapunzel on her new do.
The thing I love most about reading these tales as published by the Brother's Grimm is how they defy our normal narrative expectations. This is by turns quaint and brutal. The fact, for example, that Rapunzel's parents pay for their crime with a more abhorrent one and then get away with it is flatly offensive. Nothing bad happens to the witch either. It's this moral logic, rather than the internal logic, that needs to get fixed when these tales are Disneyfied, or turned into modern picture books. The magical tears thing makes no more sense in Tangled than it does in the Grimm version, but Disney grants Rapunzel decent parents from the start, and in the end the evil sorceress gets what she's got coming.
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