Tangled Ever After (2012)

Tangled Ever After runs six minutes and spends nearly all of them on the comic misadventures of a chameleon and a horse. The occasion is the royal wedding of Rapunzel and Eugene Fitzherbert, and the crisis is the loss of two gold bands. The film proceeds through a cascade of soup pots, ice sculptures, frying pans, doves, lanterns, and barrels of juice, arriving at last in a tar factory. The architecture is that of silent comedy, and the short wears it without apology.

A survey of the thematic inventory returns a clean shelf. The wedding is royal, which is to say traditional, and no character pauses to interrogate the institution or the arrangement. The voice cast is inherited from the 2010 feature and offers no commentary on who is permitted in the room. Questions of race, class, labor, and climate go unmentioned, because the kingdom has other problems, chiefly a missing ring in a bowl of soup. Pascal and Maximus behave strangely, but their strangeness is slapstick, not diagnosis. At one point Maximus is dressed in gowns and cosmetics, a male horse mistakes him for a female, and the film treats the whole matter as a gag with no further ambition. The tar, the cake, the doves: none of it signifies anything beyond the fact that it is funny.

This is a short that entertains without instruction. In an era when even a six-minute curtain raiser is expected to arrive bearing a message and a pamphlet, this one simply carries a wedding cake off a trolley and lets it roll. We can respect the discipline. A film that declines to lecture is not thereby virtuous, but it is restful, and restful has become scarce. The inventory is bare, and the classification reflects that honestly. Recommended for anyone who wants six minutes of doves, tar, and no homework afterward.