Rapunzel Let Down Your Hair

From the Grimm Brothers' story (immediate inquiry into the nature of fairytales - eternal truths or patriarchal fantasies?) emerges a very attractive, perceptive film, which encompasses several knotty problems relevant to feminism today. Breaking with a traditional narrative, Rapunzel's story is retold and reinterpreted, each version using a different movie genre accompanied by a wonderful music score. Thus the super-seductive animation of dream and symbolism; the opportunist male voyeur as film noir detective; a raunchy cartoon Venus, her roots firmly in witchcraft; the family melodrama of menopausal angst; and finally Rapunzel's own tale, a live-action narrative which completes the film's substructure of the stages of womanhood, and leads firmly out of an urban desert to a finale of feminist celebration. Fairytales were always appealing, but they never made quite so much sense.