Among the animation community, which consists largely of unappreciated animators and people pretending to be unappreciated animators, Tangled (2010) is famous for two things. The first is that it killed traditional hand-drawn animation, forever solidifying CG as the “new cartoon”. The second is that it cost more than James Cameron’s Avatar (2009).

James Cameron is famous for his big budget movies. Terminator 2 (1991) was the first movie to cost 100m. Titanic (1997) was the first to cost 200m. By the time James Cameron was making Avatar in 2009, budget was enormous. The official budget is supposedly 237m dollars, but it’s not uncommon to see claims and speculations that place the budget closer to 280m dollars. But in the end, the budget for Avatar didn’t matter because it was an investment in technology. By backing James Cameron’s vision, they weren’t just funding a movie, they were financing new technology that would innovate and influence the entire industry.

And that’s exactly what Disney thought they were doing with Tangled, which is not only the most expensive animated movie ever, but the most expensive single-film production in history. To put it in comparison, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy cost 281 million. Tangled cost 260 million.

So what did Disney think they were buying? Disney only put 200m towards Toy Story 3, the most popular and well-established Pixar franchise, and it was guaranteed to be a massive success. (Which it was – Toy Story 3 of course made a billion dollars and another 2.4 billion in merchandise, not to mention all the Oscar attention.) But in the end, Tangled  only made 590 million, and was not successfully merchandised.

Well, it all ties into the vision of an extremely talented animator named Glen Keane, who worked at Disney for 36 years and is responsible for some of the greatest character work of the 90s (including The Beast and Ariel). As times changed and CG began to take over, Glen Keane avidly defended the pencil and paper method of animating and criticized the inhumanity of computers. It was impossible, he believed, to translate the whimsy and attractive motion of hand-drawn characters onto a digital canvas.

It wasn’t impossible, though. It just turns out that only he could do it.