Mandy Moore is Rapunzel – though she’ll be relieved that she won’t have to grow her hair.
The 25 year-old singer/actress will lend her voice to Disney’s 3D retelling of the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale, about a princess who is imprisoned in a tall tower, and escapes after she grows her golden hair to extraordinary lengths.
Disney’s animated tale will pick up Rapunzel’s story after she escapes from the tower, as she goes on the run from her evil captor, accompanied by a roguish bandit (voiced by Chuck star, Zachary Levi). We’re just guessing here, but we imagine that the two will fall in love somewhere along the way.
Rapunzel is something of a pet project for Disney chief, John Lasseter. Disney had been working on a new film called Rapunzel Unleashed for a while, but had yielded no results. So, when Lasseter came on board in 2006, he started from scratch, and Rapunzel is the result.
Bryan Howard and Nathan Greno will direct the movie, which is being primed for a release late in 2010. Alan Menken, the genius behind the Beauty & The Beast score and most of Disney's '90s hits, will write the music for what could be, should be, a good old-fashioned Disney musical, with some new-fangled 3D bells and whistles.
If there’s one note of caution we must sound, it’s the potential similarity to Shrek, which also featured a squabbling duo on the run in a fairy-tale world (indeed, Rapunzel cameoed in Shrek The Third, although we’ve tried our best to forget both that and the whole film…). However, the Shrek films have a fairly arch attitude towards fairy tales – we’d be surprised if Disney’s Rapunzel went down that road.