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University of North Dakota UND Scholarly Commons Librarian Publications Chester Fritz Library 3-27-2018 Tangling with Dragons: Growing Up Fairy Tale Style in Tangled and How to Train Your Dragon Randy Rasmussen University of North Dakota, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.und.edu/cfl-lp Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Rasmussen, Randy, "Tangling with Dragons: Growing Up Fairy Tale Style in Tangled and How to Train Your Dragon" (2018). Librarian Publications. 3. https://commons.und.edu/cfl-lp/3 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Chester Fritz Library at UND Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Librarian Publications by an authorized administrator of UND Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Tangling with Dragons: Growing up in the Animated Fairy Tales Tangled and How to Train Your Dragon by Randy Rasmussen Table of Contents Introduction: Magic Hair and Fire-Breathing Dragons ................... 1 1. Un-Tangled: Out of the Tower, Into the Frying Pan............... 12 2. How to Train Your Dragon: The Ugly Duckling Takes Flight.. .124 3. How to Train Your Dragon 2: The Reptile Strikes Back ......... .236 Selected Bibliography ...................................................... .344 Introduction: Magic Hair and Fire-Breathing Dragons Each fairy tale is a magic mirror which reflects some aspects of our inner world, and of the steps required by our evolution from immaturity to maturity. --Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses ofEnchantment (309) In his fascinating book, The Uses ofEnchantment: The Meaning and Importance ofFairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim asserts that fairy tales are about "rebirth to a higher plane. Children (and adults, too) must be able to believe that reaching a higher form of existence is possible if they master the developmental steps this requires" (Bettelheim, 179). Max Luthi, in Once Upon a Time: On the Nature ofFairy Tales, adds an obstacle to be overcome before that journey can begin. "Only with great difficulty does one take leave of his old, familiar form of existence; he tends to cling desperately to what he has" (Luthi, 113). And in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell refers to "keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self," resulting in a necessary "destruction of the world ... and ourselves within it," followed by "a wondrous reconstruction, of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious and fully human life" (Campbell, 5). 1 2 Rapunzel, heroine of the 2010 animated fairy tale Tangled, must venture forth from her safe yet confining tower in order to find her greater self in a larger, more dangerous but potentially more rewarding world. Her reluctant companion, Flynn Rider, must endure his coerced adventure with Rapunzel to be re-born as the more open and generous Eugene Fitzherbert. In How to Train Your Dragon, an undersized and underappreciated Viking teenager named Hiccup has to confront a terrifying dragon deep in the forest outside his home before he can stop living in the shadow of his already legendary father, the village chief. "Victory is not over others but only over oneself and over villainy (mainly one's own, which is projected as the hero's antagonist)" (Bettelheim, 127-128). Campbell echoes this view. "The passage of the mythologized hero may be overground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward" (Campbell, 22). The various monsters, human and otherwise, that Rapunzel, Eugene and Hiccup battle are all reflections of the worst that lies within themselves. If the lesson of fairy tales is that there is hope for slaying the fire-breathing dragons, big bad wolves, wicked witches and evil giants in your life, and in the process gaining control over yourself and fulfilling the best that is within you, movies are full of characters who fail to do so. Growing up is not exclusively the job of children. Many adults never progress beyond, or for any number of reasons regress back into, childish states of fear, anger, compulsion and selfishness. As portrayed in live-action movies from a wide variety of genres, these grown-ups would seem, at first glance, to have little in common with their younger, animated counterparts. The terms of their struggle may differ from genre to genre, but the struggle itself is not so different. Consider a few examples. Horror films are the shadowy cousins of fairy tales. Larry Talbot, in The Wolf Man of 1941, is 3 a young man tragically consumed by violent compulsions arising partly from childhood insecurities and resentments lurking beneath his congenial facade and partly from powerful external forces that dominate him, all of which congeal into the supernatural, metaphorical curse oflycanthropy. The female leads in both Cat People (1942) and Son ofDracula (1943) likewise fall prey to obsessions that prevent them from achieving normal, healthy relationships with their would-be lovers. Like Talbot, they end up dead. The Shining (1980) features a middle-aged protagonist, Jack Torrance, who at first seems to have conquered his past demons, until he loses himself in a morass of frustration, resentment, alcoholism and fixation on a fantasized re-creation of a glamorous, bigoted, privileged past. By contrast, Jack's young son, Danny, liberates himself from dependence on his own crippling fantasy, his emotionally stunted alter ego (Tony), just in time to outwit and destroy the evil giant his homicidal father becomes. Film noir movies are adult fairy tales, of a sort. Decades of grief over his wife's murder, compounded by bitterness over the injustice of her killer going unpunished, plagues Sheriff Hank Quinlan in Touch ofEvil (1958). He's a brilliant detective who squanders his talents by framing criminal suspects and deceiving his best friend in order to administer his corrupt brand of justice. In essence, he becomes what he hates, punishing himself with booze and candy bars until he's a wreck of his former self. In Body Heat (1981), femme fatale Matty Walker, for reasons buried deep in her past and never revealed to the audience, is compelled to ruthlessly manipulate everyone around her. Incapable of emotional attachments, she plots her husband's murder with her gullible lover, Ned, then frames him for it and retires to an island paradise to lead a life of cold, solitary self-indulgence. Satire and black comedy too have their share of adults who backslide into infantile behavior. 4 In the 1964 Cold War comedy Dr. Strange/ave, rational and peace-loving President Merkin Muffley masterfully negotiates through a minefield of monstrously destructive weapons and unstable personalities, ranging from immature to psychotic, in order to save the world from nuclear doomsday. But in the end he succumbs to his own fear of responsibility and yields control to his lunatic double, the power-hungry, death-obsessed title character. In the realm of science fiction, the television series Star Trek features a compelling story about an adolescent who tries but fails to achieve maturity. Charlie X survives a traumatic childhood isolated from other people, including his parents. He is given special powers by well-intentioned aliens who rescue him physically but lack the understanding to help him mature emotionally. Suddenly thrust back into human society, Charlie desperately strives to fit in. But despite mentoring by several responsible adults, he falls prey to frustration and impatience, employing his special powers to satisfy his all-consuming, adolescent desires by violent means. Eventually he is returned to the stern, prison-like custody of his alien "parents," never to enjoy the fruits of human friendship and love. Films of no particular genre contain less violent but no less interesting characters struggling to lead more "fully human" lives. Citizen Kane's protagonist never overcomes the emotional wounds of separation from his parents at an early age. As a young, middle-aged and then old man, Charles Foster Kane compulsively spends his inherited fortune to surround himself with the cold comfort of material objects, fails at two marriages and betrays his closest friend by treating him and everyone else as nothing more than a means to a dimly understood end. Eventually he becomes a bitter recluse who retreats to an idealized fantasy of his lost childhood. We'll encounter his like in Tangled, in the guise of the charmingly irresponsible rogue, Flynn Rider. 5 In The Chalk Garden, a 1964 domestic drama, a troubled teenage girl and her possessive grandmother emerge from their destructive and self-destructive ruts thanks to the intervention of a middle-aged governess who previously survived a similar struggle of her own, and changed her name after doing so. An admirer refers to that discarded name as a relic from "before you were born," echoing the notion of re-birth described by Bettelheim, Luthi and Campbell. The aesthetic trappings of these various stories differ widely from film to film and genre to genre. Yet they are all about the difficult process of growing up and the hazards of failing to do so. Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces is primarily concerned with heroes of mythology. But his description of the stages of a hero's journey from immaturity to maturity, or from unconsciousness to super consciousness as he phrases it, is equally applicable to the fairy tales featuring Rapunzel, Flynn Rider and Hiccup. According to Campbell, the hero is "lured, carried away or voluntarily proceeds" from his familiar home to the "threshold of adventure" (Campbell, 210-211). Defying the instructions of her alleged mother, Rapunzel voluntarily leaves the sheltering confines of her tower to explore the alluring yet frightening world outside. Flynn Rider, an intruder in Rapunzel's tower, is blackmailed, in effect "carried away," and forced to escort her.

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