Design and layout of the tower valley.

OMS! (Oh, my satchel!) These are some pretty serious hills.

The hills in this scene always remind me of the famous landscape around Yangshuo, China.

The lights don’t look all that far away, actually.

Glen Keane said:

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

This is the only real screenshot that shows that. It puts me in mind of Gondolin, the Tolkien kingdom in the Silmarillion that can only be reached by a secret passage.

Heading for the hills, literally.

Whenever I see this screenshot, I’m struck by the size of the hills in the background. They’re almost mountains.

Gdynia, Poland, is the only place on the Baltic coast where hills of any size come right down to the sea, making it the best fit, landscape-wise, for a real-world Kingdom of Corona.

It looks like the plot changed a fair bit from when this was done. The “gypsy cart ride” only survived in the end credits, for instance. But I would guess that it still offers a pretty fair depiction of where things happen in “Tangled.” Perhaps the “guardpost” simply became the dam. I wonder, is the river that forms the dam the same one that falls into the tower valley?