Excerpts from various interviews by the creators of “Tangled”:

What John [Lasseter] is always after us to do is create worlds…. That’s the first thing he says: “Think about the world,” because if you create a world, rather than just a character or a story, you can watch it, and and it can play out and resolve within its own reality, so that it never feels false or “written.” You believe that you’re actually this girl’s life play out and feel you want to go back and spend more time with these people. Be sure you have enough detail there so people feel like [the movie is] a full experience they can just lose themselves in.  

-BYRON HOWARD

That could be the motto of this website: You want to go back and spend more time.

On Rapunzel’s tower:

We had talked about it being a kingdom that was there, there were ruins around the area. The only thing that remained was this tower. There had been a landslide that caused a small tunnel that goes through the area. We had designed a lot of ruins in the area, but since we didn’t go into that, we took it out so it’s not begging the question. Now it just stands there.   -GLEN KEANE

On Rapunzel:

We were looking for ways that Rapunzel could show the transforming power that she has - with the horse, with the thugs in the pub, with the people in the town that she gets to dance with her, and ultimately with Flynn himself.   -GLEN KEANE

~

I think of Rapunzel as an example of the highest qualities of human nature, male or female. I see her as an illustration of every human being who is born with a divine spark, a potential to become something unique. And the walls that surround her, and hold her back, are symbolic of walls in anyone’s life, those things that hold us back from being who we really long to be.   -GLEN KEANE

~

The healing tear was an important element in the original fairy tale. It always symbolized for me that the true nature of Rapunzel’s gift came from her heart, not her hair. … Rapunzel finds that the healing power never left her and is actually released by love.   -GLEN KEANE

~

The sequence where Flynn is dying in Rapunzel’s arms. It was the most difficult and the most rewarding because the acting was so extremely subtle. The expressions of someone crying are inherently ugly. All the muscles in the face fight each other. No one wants a camera in their face at that moment. But we challenged the animators to go for the ugly face, and as Rapunzel fights and holds back tears, the emotions are so real and so true. And it’s so effective because when that tear comes from Rapunzel’s eye and heals Flynn, you believe there is enormous pain in Rapunzel’s heart. If you don’t believe that tear comes from a heart of love the movie doesn’t work. It was successful and emotionally gripping. I was never more proud of our animators then at that moment.   -GLEN KEANE

Glen Keane, the lead animator whose idea “Tangled” was, has said the inspiration for Rapunzel came from a well known passage in the New Testament. Now, I don’t think of “Tangled” as a religious movie, but I do think it showed the best of what religion can be: An honest heart moved deeply by beauty and grace, spontaneously and effortlessly uplifting others. “Tangled” touched me so deeply, I think, because it began with that spark of goodness and purity that would later come to infuse Rapunzel’s character so completely.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.   -JAMES 1:17

Keane said that Rapunzel’s ability to heal is an example of how we all have a “divine spark” when we touch the lives of others. “He works through us,” Keane said.