The Easter eggs of Disney’s Tangled

Off the back of its significant success in the US, Disney’s latest animated feature, Tangled, arrives in the UK finally this weekend. It’s a lovely film, too, and a fitting one to be the studio’s 50th official animated movie.

Perhaps with that in mind, though, the filmmakers have put a few little Easter eggs and nods to other Disney movies in there. Take, for instance, the brief nod to Pinocchio in the pub scene. Or the homage to The Little Mermaid. You might even see something not a million miles away from the rose in Beauty And The Beast, too.

To find out more, we had a chance to talk to the film’s directors, Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, for a detailed interview about making Tangled that we’ll be running on the site tomorrow. But ahead of that, we asked the pair about the Easter eggs that they tucked away in the film for those who love their Disney movies of old.

“Well, besides that Pinoochio is hidden in the pub,” revealed Nathan Greno, “in the town in the kingdom, there’s this book at the bookstore, where they’re looking at a book together? There’s about a million things hidden in there.”

“Once the Blu-ray comes out, it’ll sharpen up. Freeze frame that and take a zoom around!” added Howard. That said, it’s possible to see a few tips of the hat on the big screen, but you need to be sharp to spot them!

Take a look, too, at Rapunzel’s tower. “On the stairs that go up,” says Greno, “there’s these posts on the stairs, and on each one has a symbol for a different princess. The one that you see most clearly, there’s an apple at the bottom of the stairs for Snow White. And then all the way up, you’ll see a slipper for Cinderella, Mermaid, a rose…”

“I think we ran out of posts in the end!” says Howard.

On the musical side, keep your ears peeled, too, because as composer Alan Menken told us, he’s slotted in a musical cue from Enchanted. Want some help in finding it? Over to the man himself: “There’s a two-measure, big swell, that is basically the same. I don’t know if it’s the same key, but it’s right out of Enchanted. It’s in the film, and it’s almost in an analogous spot from the spot in Enchanted.”

If you spot any more, do post them in the comments below…!

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