Tangled

The movie Tangled is about a teenaged girl’s journey to freedom. The audience follows Rapunzel on her adventure to breaking free from being locked away her whole life in a tower by Mother Gothel, who kidnapped her at a young age, to preserve her magical powers from her long hair. The film does a good job at exemplifying several developmental differences in children, such as perceptual to conceptual processing. The film demonstrates this concept at several points throughout the movie, specifically through the scene where Rapunzel is cleaning, reading, painting

and singing to occupy her time. Preschool-aged children watching the film may have trouble getting past visual and audible features that stand out to them during this scene, because they have not yet developed the cognitive level that is needed to enjoy these perceptual features and follow the plot of the film simultaneously. This is referred to as perceptual boundedness, where young children use an overreliance of perceptual information at the expense of less obvious cues and information, in this case that may be crucial to following the plot (Strasburger). Older children watching this movie will be able to multitask and appreciate all of the animation and visuals that this scene has to offer, but will also be able to follow the storyline and pick up on messages in the scene.

Another concept that emerges in this scene is centration to decentration. Young children might focus on one object or feature from the scene that initially grabbed their attention, such as the broom Rapunzel is sweeping with or the book she picks up. The point of the scene is to demonstrate the various activities that Rapunzel’s day consists of, not to demonstrate one isolated object encompassed in the scene. Older children watching Tangled would have the cognitive ability to recognize this and consider the objects and activities she’s using as the overarching business of her day she uses to pass the time.

An example from another scene that does a great job illustrating the concept perceived appearance is when Rapunzel and Flynn stop by a pub and are greeted by frightening looking ruffians. It is understandable that the ruffians would frighten younger children because of their physical appearance. Older children would be able to break through their unpleasant exterior and get to know them as people with dreams much like Rapunzel. Younger children lack the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, (Strasburger). Their  understanding is based around the concept that, if it looks real and acts real, then it must have some basis within their reality. This understanding correlates with the concept magic window, reflecting the idea that young children naively assume that television provides a view of the real world, (Strasburger). It isn’t until children are of the age of five that they can start to differentiate between what is real and what is not.  

An example of empirical to hypothetical reasoning in the movie Tangled is when Rapunzel asks Mother Gothel if she could take her to see the floating lanterns for her eighteenth birthday. Mother Gothel sings, “mother knows best” as a way to explain to Rapunzel that there are bad people out in the world who will want to hurt her in order to obtain some of her magic hair. Even though she still wants to see the lanterns, she knows that she cannot make it alone if what her mother tells her is true. Younger children will only understand what Mother Gothel is saying at face value - they understand that she is concerned for Rapunzel’s safety. Because their cognitive abilities have not yet fully evolved, they are unable to see the truth behind what Mother Gothel is really saying. Older children would be able to take what she says to Rapunzel about keeping her safe from other people, and infer what she really means. “Adolescents become increasingly able to understand abstract concepts, use formal logic, and think hypothetically. Along with this abstract thinking comes an ability to engage in inductive and deductive reasoning, as well as conditional reasoning” (Strasburger, 28). As a result, they are able to deduce that there is an underlying truth to what Mother Gothel is telling Rapunzel.