Walt Disney, part LXX: All at once, everything looks different

TANGLED

2010

Directed by Byron Howard and Nathan Greno

Written by Dan Fogelman, plus innumerable others, over almost two decades

Spoilers: severe

As I've made it clear that I date Disney's Second Renaissance back to 2008 and the ever-underrated Bolt (which has the benefit of encompassing the following year's hoped-for rebirth of hand-drawn animation at Disney, The Princess and the Frog), I would not now contradict myself to declare another film to be the actual beginning of their renewed ascendancy.  Yet to the extent that others do recognize a Second Renaissance at Walt Disney Animation Studios, I believe that consensus pins its occurrence, instead, to Thanksgiving 2010—the weekend Tangled came out.

With it, Disney wanted to let you know they were back, and Tangled arrived as a landmark "event," declared the studio's dubiously-tabulated, extra-special 50th animated feature film (the WDAS logo itself has been retrofitted for the purpose), and even so, when the readiest comparison since is the way that the 100th birthday celebration of the entire Disney company only managed to push the corpse of their 62nd animated feature film, Wish, into the position of not being literally the studio's biggest-ever flop—for whatever you'd like to call this period of Disney history, it didn't last forever—it becomes conceivable that it was Tangled, the film itself, that compelled a certain pomp and circumstance.  (Though not so much that it wasn't hastily renamed from simply Rapunzel, for on-record sexist reasons, months before release.)  But Tangled deserved to be celebrated, and I can't begrudge those who point to it as a beginning.  It makes for clean periodization, at least, Tangled being the alpha, Moana the omega (after 2016, WDAS has had six or seven horsemen for their apocalypse), and it should not be overlooked that the two crown jewels of Disney's output in the 10s were guided by elder statesmen from their first Renaissance, in the 90s.  Regardless, Tangled served as an undeniable confirmation that, yes, Disney was back, and it proved two very important things were possible, despite those things seeming, beforehand, like they would've been largely incompatible with one another: that the Disney princess musical had survived the 00s, and could still make for an overwhelming aesthetic experience generating overwhelming box office success (Tangled grossed nearly $600 million), even if it, hypothetically, required slightly obscuring that it was a princess musical to get there; and also that somebody—besides Pixar—could make a CGI cartoon with all the vitality and delicacy of hand-drawn animation, even if, hypothetically, it required Pixar's senior management in place at Disney to get that.

Both of these things were, I repeat, tremendously important, even if the promise Tangled made has not, all things considered, been entirely lived up to.  But this also circles my rhetoric back around to what could seem like a contradiction, or at least a sub rosa self-correction.  I said Bolt laid much of the groundwork for good-looking CGI from WDAS (already transcended was the hideous learning curve of Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons), and I stand by that.  Because here's the thing: Bolt looks good, and then Tangled looks so damned good—to a shocking degree, I don't think you should even need to put on your "2010 glasses" to see it for yourself—that there's no reason to pretend both claims can't be true.  Bolt, a contemporaneously-set talking animal cartoon, was a quantum leap in the basic elements of just making any kind of animated film inside a computer.  Tangled has people in it, who live in a storybook realm that demands a special kind of artistry and atmosphere.  There's still a missing 10% (a number I made up, because it's obviously not really quantifiable) that will, occasionally, poke you square in the eyes (perchance making them tear up, after which they'll turn an unwholesomely-uniform shade of pink), and perhaps another missing 10% that doesn't matter for this project (e.g. "Moana's improvements on the automation of animating curly hair, as well as deep water light scattering") or even matter at all except to pathological animation nerds (e.g. "somebody, not me, would have preferred you to have set a supercomputer on fire in order to achieve the calculations necessary to precisely motivate the lighting in that overhead shot with a thousand incandescing light sources flickering to life"); but Tangled comes perilously close to being "the Disney CGI fantasy cartoon" in its final form.

That notion seem unlikely when Tangled sits in almost the exact middle of the history of CGI feature cartoons (at the moment of this writing, there's actually less time between Toy Story and Tangled as there is between Tangled and now), with numerous theoretically more-advanced ones still to come; yet I think it could be proven if I asked you to name as many CGI cartoons since Tangled as you can that offer the same vibrancy, delicacy, etc. in their animation, and even if it's inviting your contrarianism, can you really count them on more than one hand?  If I limit it, as I properly should—"what is a cartoon, anyway?" becomes a fraught question in the 10s—to "avowed cartoons," then I'd be curious (hostile, but curious) to know what would even occur to you.

If it achieves this, an enormous proportion is thanks to Tangled's First Renaissance elder statesmen, Glen Keane.  Tangled was Keane's baby, which he raised nearly as long as his actual baby—long enough, anyway, that visual development artist Claire Keane's work on her dad's movie wasn't her first film credit—having fixed upon the idea that Disney should do a movie on the subject of Rapunzel as early as 1996.  Keane did not, however, think merely that Disney should. He conceived his Rapunzel as very much his project, a feature directorial debut at Disney, coming from the unusual place of one of their star animators—some, including me, would say their single most accomplished animator (indeed, Tangled helps me make that case to myself even if he didn't animate a damn frame of it)—and this will ultimately involve some bittersweetness, for, as you doubtless know, Keane did not direct Tangled, and in the end never directed any feature-length cartoon until 2021's Over the Moon at DWA's Chinese spinoff, Pearl.  Still, in 2001, Michael Eisner gave Keane dispensation to pursue Rapunzel, with a catch: the self-actualizing passion project of Disney's most accomplished creator and supervisor of hand-drawn animation would be fully-rendered three-dimensional CGI.

In 2001, this was nuts (Dinosaur was a year old), and Tangled's development was dragging both its storytelling challenges and its technology behind it, until in 2006 it was shut down.  Then fortune intervened: barely a week had passed when Pixar's John Lasseter was given creative control over Disney's animation studio, and, the new boss looking kindly upon the old and busted institution he'd started out at, made it one of his first acts to restart Tangled, though presumably Keane and everyone else were too far gone down the CGI hole, at this point, to consider rebuilding it as the 2-D revival Lasseter wound up seeking elsewhere.  Yet it was around this time, at least, that it got reconceived in regards to its basic narrative approach, with much of its development till now having been devoted to snarking postmodernism (no one ever says "like Shrek," but they mean "like Shrek"), and Keane now took the opportunity to rededicate his film to a sincere engagement with the myth, even if it remained quintessentially "Disney myth," so it was still going to have many jokes and much nonsense.  (Yet C. Keane's concept art from around this time seems to have considered the possibility of a very serious Tangled, with character designs for Rapunzel blatantly conceived as "hollowed-out."  Then again, in the same portfolio there are as many drawings that say, "fine, dad, she's Ariel, very creative."  As for the art under Tangled's end credits, I have no idea what stage of development that came from, or who did it, except its Rapunzel is only even recognizable because of the one thing, seemingly built-to-order for sarcastic glibness.)  Meanwhile, although I've never seen it mentioned as something Tangled's creators were reacting to, it's impossible to imagine they had no reaction to Disney's own sanded-down, self-regarding counter-Shrek, Enchanted, quite the success in 2007.  I'm convinced Enchanted must've been salutary for Tangled, despite not personally liking it very much, for it did the thing that Tangled itself had been initially intended to do, thereby creating space for Keane's film to do something not wholly dissimilar, but clearly different.  There is, blatantly, still much 21st centuryism in the movie we got, but it's been reoriented towards ends so much more useful: a "relatability" to the characters, even if that sounds like a jab these days; a surface whimsy that's been tuned for breezy fun, rather than sneering satire; and, in its heart, a capacity for seriousness that isn't aching to inflict its superiority upon the characters of a primitive folktale but is interested in providing them psychologies and moral arcs—even if it's also going to move those characters through some comedy so affontively goofy it'll make you lightheaded.

But years passed, and Keane didn't make it to the finish line: in an either/or sort of way, in late 2008, between a movie that still wasn't showing signs of getting finished and Keane having a heart attack, Keane was induced to step down (tellingly, along with his co-director, Dean Wellin), whereupon he was replaced by one of Bolt's own directors, Byron Howard (now confirming his "Second Renaissance" significance), and Nathan Greno (a more nebulous figure, but hey, he made Tangled, legend enough for anybody).  Less than two years later, Howard and Greno, who are very likely to have been as instrumental or more in equalizing all the competing tones that Keane had considered over the course of Tangled's development, delivered their movie into theaters, without further serious snags.  (It does appear to have been Keane who secured composer Alan "all of Disney's best musicals to date, which you unfairly attribute entirely to Howard Ashman's genius" Menken, who came with lyricist Glenn Slater; the team's previous Disney film was Home On the Range, so whatever, but Tangled does represent a later-career high for Menken, for Tangled does more-or-less get to call itself "one of Disney's best musicals," even if that comes with some asterisks.)

But Keane only stepped down from directing, and maintained a place on the film as its animation supervisor—maybe it's a DGA thing, but given what "directing" even entails on cartoons, I reckon you could call Keane one of Tangled's directors if you wished, and not be truly wrong—which made him, in a sense, albeit only briefly, arguably the most Walt Disney-like figure in modern Disney history, given that his principal role in the production phase of Tangled was to look at the work of artists whose art he could not replicate, and did not even understand the technical underpinnings of, and tell them it sucked until it didn't.  The champion Glen Keane quote regarding the production of Tangled is, "You guys work so hard just to come up with something that looks bad."  And, given his unlimited importance in the kind of animation that was (indeed, is still) considered more prestigious, more skill-intensive, and simply more "human" in all senses of the term, I don't know what could have been more useful, than being prodded by a legend into figuring out how to make an art form still finding its way do all the incredible things that that legend's art form had once managed as if by second nature.  Also: figuring out what the hell to do with "Rapunzel," a mutant freak whom the animators and layout artists don't ever let us forget, even if the storytelling itself somehow does, is probably the most visually-bizarre protagonist in cartoon history.

So, how exactly did these 21st century digital boys and girls approach the ancient tale of the maiden in the tower with the long flowing hair?  Well, at first, exceedingly awkwardly, though there's no version of the classical fairy tale that isn't itself awkward about explaining why an unrelated woman is raising this baby in a tower, and it's true that it'd help if she had a good, pragmatic reason for it.  I can, then, admire the blunt efficiency of how Tangled drops its anvil of exposition directly on your head so as to never need to deal with it again, though I've found it increasingly abrading with every rewatch how it hits the most intense notes of flip cultural anachronism it will ever reach within seconds of starting, by way of Flynn Rider's (Zachary Levi's) narration, which isn't even "telling a story" but seems to be aware we're watching a montage in a movie, everything short of a silhouetted hand pointing at the screen.  That awkward and awkwardly-expressed exposition, then, goes like this: in an early modern European kingdom* there grows a plant (that might be "rapunzel," and it's more useful than parsley) that glows when a special song is sung to it, and in exchange for a serenade it will restore youth and heal wounds, granting immortality as long as you have access to it; to this end, this plant has been concealed by one Gothel (Donna Murphy), who wishes to hoard its power for herself, though rumors of its existence have managed to circulate.  When the pregnant queen falls deathly ill, the kingdom is mobilized to chase this phantom plant down, and lo, they discover it, uproot it, and destroy it to make a healing potion for a single aristocrat, which works, though Gothel—Gothel, to clarify, is the movie's villain (later, the heroine enslaves a man)—suspects that the power has passed to the newborn princess.  She steals the princess, renames her from "something" to "Rapunzel," locks her in a tower while claiming to be her mother (after watching this many times, it has also occurred to me that I don't know where Gothel lives, or why she lives elsewhere), every so often returning, and bidding Rapunzel let down her hair for this is the only way into the tower, where Gothel sings to activate the rejuvenating power within Rapunzel, concentrated in seventy feet of blonde.  If you cut the hair—Gothel's first impulse, to avoid the foregoing rigamarole—it loses its luster and the power dies.  Tangled blitzes through this much faster than I did.

Eighteen years later—Disney has seen what you do, and they've surrendered to its inevitability, and frankly it's for the best—Rapunzel has become a lonely and excruciatingly bored teen, with only a chameleon for company and having authored a floor-to-ceiling-and-wall-to-wall mural (C. Keane's most directly-translated contribution) that's as much a testament to a bright spirit dimmed by the stultification of captivity as the scene-setting number "When Will My Life Begin?" is.  (It's a funny song, that starts to feel increasingly just-plain-sad the more times you watch the movie.)  Rapunzel wants is to leave, if only to satisfy her curiosity about the floating lights that appear on her birthday, which Gothel declares to be "stars," not that telling Rapunzel her actual birthdate was all that intelligent either.  Rapunzel keeps pressing, and Gothel flips over to cold fury, belying the already thin veneer of loving motherliness that is, nevertheless, the only kind of relationship Rapunzel knows exists.  But as chance would have it, Rapunzel is about to meet someone new for the first time: that's Flynn Rider, who's just completed a royal heist and betrayed his compatriots (twins played by Ron Perlman**) to keep it all for himself, presently getting chased into a secret tunnel into a secret valley, where he's supposed he'll hide in this secret tower.  Instead, he receives chronic traumatic encephalopathy from the frying pan-wielding birthday girl (for the record, I didn't like Tangled's trailer, where this slapstick was heavily showcased, and it's partly why I didn't see it for a couple of years, and, a couple of years after that, I finally got used to consequence-free cartoon violence in fully-rendered CGI where, on eyes trained on 2-D animation and then Pixar animation, the weightiness of 3-D models makes violence feel like it ought to be consequential).  Well, at Rapunzel's mercy, and with his loot hidden, Rider is coerced into escorting Rapunzel to see those floating lights—lanterns, Rider explains, for the lost princess—while Gothel is bamboozled into a sojourn to get exotic paint for Rapunzel's birthday.  This goes well until it doesn't: Rider is a wanted fugitive, plus he's already trying to screw Rapunzel over, whereas Gothel soon realizes Rapunzel's escaped, and dedicates herself to hunting down her wayward "daughter," destroying any friends she's made along the way and any chance she'll ever escape again.

Tangled's so self-justifying I almost don't even want to explain why the above is great (hell, it's in the upper percentiles of Disney fairy tale faithfulness, if that matters), and—maybe pausing to make one more dickishly snide comment about the plotting that I don't even mean, since at least it's a doozy, because other than the power of True Parental Love, I have no idea, and neither do you, how now-differently-pigmented Rapunzel (or her sentenced-to-death thief/conman boyfriend) prove her identity to her royal parents—I almost want to just skip to the detailed aesthetic/technical discussion, since much of why the story's great is aesthetics and technique.  Besides, the particular big relevance of Tangled has been discussed to the point that bringing it up is uninteresting as criticism; the basic relevance of Tangled, anyway, and the "relatability" of Rapunzel, keen now as ever, is probably just the desolation of having no place to go but into the increasingly tapped-out realms of your own imagination.

Tangled makes that universal feeling into a vampiric monster, and I don't think there was some calculated design for it to be "big relevance," just the deepest possible investment into making Mother Gothel as hissable a villain as any Disney cartoon's ever had.  They pretty much nailed it, so if she isn't as joyously sinister as the other big guns (she is, certainly, top tier), they haven't forgotten you should love to hate her, which isn't even necessarily the case with her most obvious precursor, Lady Tremaine, despite being even more manipulative, conniving, and plum evil in her perversion of the mother as a parasite upon the child.  Anyway, she's abusive, you know—is she gaslighting? not really, at least not very well ("stars!"), so "lying" covers it, except for when she calls Rapunzel fat, which is probably the movie's single laziest line (technically its laziest lyric) in its "abusive parent autogenerated insult" way (let's say Rapunzel got fat: the fuck does Gothel care?)—but the attempt at breaking Rapunzel's very soul is terrifying, even before the unstable mask finally falls forever and she's just outright murdering her daughter's boyfriend, entailing some of the cruelest lies ever told in a movie, intent on proving that love exists nowhere in the world for Rapunzel except in the poison embrace of her so-called mother.  Murphy is invaluable for not letting the camp elements of her belted-out villain numbers, or the frivolities to which she prefers to confine her conversations with Rapunzel, undermine how vicious she is, and those songs, though some of the Broadwayest here (something I potentially mean pejoratively), are tuned surpassingly well, with the reprise of the broadly-comic phony overprotectiveness of "Mother Knows Best" stripping away any comedy in favor of not even being fun anymore, like a Disney villain song's supposed to be, offering only the sensation of the knife over Rapunzel's back.  But I can slip some technical discussion in already: Gothel is superbly crafted for her purposes, your solid Cheresque MILF, adult film-defined, so roughly 26-looking (and startlingly physically imposing against Rapunzel, which is more "tropish" than "good"—Rapunzel being full-grown—but tropes are tropes 'cause they work), but with a design that can seamlessly transition to haggish grotesquerie in how her face has been built to intermittently reveal her malignity, even before getting to the body horror ending that, after references to Raiders and Temple one atop the other in an adventure sequence an hour earlier, at last pays off (and how!) on the evident desire to homage every movie in Indiana Jones's original trilogy.

Meanwhile, we have Rapunzel and Eugene, together leading Disney's best romance, which, for me, isn't even the nonexistent bar that others try to act like it is, and I still believe it's almost objectively the case.  It's a canny mismatching, for one: there's an element of we-can-pretend-it's-real danger to Eugene, already demonstrated to be capable of slitting a friend's throat (barely metaphorically), but recipient of a surprisingly patient, incrementalist shift as Rapunzel's sheer guileless niceness effectively resets him, so he can start over on better terms with himself; when he tells her his real name, this is, essentially, Eugene getting to switch to the alternate history where he hadn't choose to be a dickhead.  (Amusingly, the movie kinda argues that the only person who could ever love Eugene is the person who's literally never met anyone else—which is irrelevant, for Flynn's Rider hot and Levi, though saddled with the movie's most bozo lines, like "here comes the smolder/you broke my smolder," is charming, and great with Moore, occasionally even pitiable in contexts where everybody just looooves the open-hearted pixie dream girl.)

Rapunzel's sheer beguiling niceness is the subject of the movie's very wildest swing, "I've Got a Dream" (i.e., the song where Rapunzel induces a tavern full of varlets to reveal themselves as sweethearts, just like her, unlike Rider), which contains the moment I still recall with crystalline clarity from my first watch—the lacuna in the music when the bucket-helmeted one does a "running man" in front of a spotlight in notional Editing Space—where I decided I would surrender to how Tangled would be navigating itself across some very divergent tones, swinging from silly to sumptuous to severe, and often working miracles with it.  The film likewise bursts with its adventure elements, affording our quietly-romancing heroes plenty to do—some terrific chase scenes benefiting from cartoon physics without too badly abusing cartoon physics, so "getting trapped in a flooding cave," for instance, still has deadly stakes—though the action does occasionally allow the film to indulge its galling weakness for vocally congratulating itself for weaponizing that Goddamn frying pan.***  (For the record, the "worst" thing about the movie isn't remotely the movie's problem: just how often it's made me feel like a moron whenever I try conceptualizing in detail how Rapunzel's hair-based "elevator" mechanically works—because people would mention it, if it didn't work... right?)

Rapunzel and Eugene's world-class Disney romance does come from an accumulation of little things—not least in the intoxicating "Kingdom Dance" montage that is by a lot Menken's no. 1 hit here, not that I mean to diminish Slater by declaring the instrumental to be the movie's obvious best song—but, in the final analysis, it surely rests mostly on just two titanic, towering things.  The first: WDAS having cracked that thing called "lighting effects."  The army of lighting supervisors is testament to how important this was here, and it's true all over Tangled, which witnesses an improvement to Bolt's "painterly" backdrop technology and is a far mightier use of it, so in Tangled's combination of dappling, tree-mediated light with the endless Rococo garden that's nearly the entirety of Rapunzel's kingdom, Tangled becomes the culmination of Disney's decades-long quest to make a feature-length moving painting out of beautifully-manicured woods.  But that does pale in comparison to the centerpiece.  So: I must confess that a tiny fraction of my mindblown reaction to "I See the Light" when I first saw it, in 2012, was that I, as a Rapunzel-like rube, did not know floating lanterns actually existed.  (They shouldn't actually exist.  29 states and Vietnam agree.)

But it might as well have invented them, and, after wringing my hands about it for years, I'll commit to "I See the Light" as the single finest sequence in any cartoon of the contemporary era.  As sublime as sublime gets, it reduces me to a weepy pile of happy feelings every time I watch it.  It's even trained me to genuinely love the song that goes with it, so that if I think about the melody I have a Pavlovian response in my eyes that takes a mild effort of will to dispel (as I said about Menken and Slater's soundtrack, it's great, asterisked).  It's so perfect: there's the obvious way the flawless reflectivity of the still water combined with the flowing dissolve transitions create a sensation of floating into mystical space where time doesn't exist, suffused with the most beautiful golds and pinks; there's also how it ends, with that brutal, cone-disorienting slam into ghastly green as Gothel's evil brusquely reasserts itself.  Maybe less obviously, there's how this sequence begins, with one of the innumerable moments where Rapunzel does something splendid and heartmelting and specific to her personality, where she startles—at most just semi-comically—at the sight of the thing she's came all this way to see, clutching the mast out of objectless fear.

And that's the second titanic, towering thing, just Rapunzel herself, a miraculous confluence of choices, Moore even giving a Disney cartoon its best performance in however many years, setting a baseline that the animators are living up to in every imaginable way, from the pyrotechnics of touching grass for the first time to the very specific way they animate Moore's "hm's," with this constant unstressed anxiousness that gets carried through into the very smallest aspects of her physicality (and the largest, for, as noted, she's pretty fucking goony a lot of the time, too), which gets strategically and powerfully broken by moments of focused desire or explosive joy or militant resolve (consider the particular body language and blocking of her confrontation with Gothel, which is literally titanic and literally towering, despite Gothel physically overshadowing her the entire movie beforehand****), itself a palpably different thing from her faking militant resolve.  Somehow it barely occurs to me, now, to describe the spectacle of Rapunzel, the mutant freakishness I mentioned, even though they had another whole army of hair supervisors to make that work, an entire silent character attached to the lead's head like a monster from the vaults of Yoh-Vombis (and in a way they kind of didn't "make it work"—as you could probably have told Keane without running the simulations, the 147 tubules and their own constituent parts naturally scattered until they started riding herd on that hair, so that, with exceptions like the super-cute braiding beat, it's modally this bold slash of yellow against the greens, often criss-crossing the frame in its crazy-making ways, and of course materially adds to the sheer gorgeousness of the film.*****)  And sometimes "lighting effects" and "hair" even have to be the same thing.

But, while that spectacle's important to Tangled, Rapunzel would remain Disney's finest CGI creation if she were her ultimate brunette self the whole movie: there are just so many grand moments of animated "acting" that her descendants haven't been favored with so often (Moana competes, mostly because her animators crib from Rapunzel directly), from the microscopic ways Rapunzel looks at things, or glances away, or how they were willing to make her mouth remarkably ugly when she cries (even the technological failure of those pink tennis ball eyes almost makes it more successful, because you just don't want to see this heroine cry; the collapse of the lighting effects and texturing when required to present wetness, either from tears or deadly floods, on the other hand, is only failure, representing the worst technical aspect of a film that otherwise has such startlingly far-along effects animation.)  So forget hair, the real spectacle is the astonishing way Rapunzel's weight becomes a tangible thing in coordination with the animation on Eugene in the post-climactic denouement, rolling over him and suspending herself from his neck in a pose that, for a Disney movie, is pleasantly shocking in how it wants to communicate the definite capacity of its romantic partners to fuck, conceivably in-between cuts at the end of the actual movie.

The legacy of Tangled is strange: simultaneously, it's a benchmark that Disney's only ever lived up to once more; a film that ushered in a new era of success for the company; a promethean achievement for CGI in its most promethean year, the year of Toy Story 3, How To Train Your Dragon, and even, in "live-action" cinema, TRON: Legacy; a triumph of the Keanesque design mentality that's defined Disney's characters since 2010 even more completely than when Keane actually worked there; and a mode that Disney's somewhat abandoned, going from "they definitely fucked" to "romance is dead" for perplexing non-reasons, while even the princess musical, though represented to even-more-enormous financial success in 2013 with Frozen, again began to vanish, for besides Frozen's obligatory sequel and the equally-obligatory form that Wish had to take, there was only Moana to come.  And yet legacy it has.  They're even doing a damnable live-action remake.  Somehow, I expect its flesh-and-blood actors stranded in a greenscreen will feel much less like people than these cartoons do.

Score: 10/10

*An atlas depicts the New World; Rapunzel also owns a fair few printed books.

**Er, sorta?  They're twins, but only one of them gets dialogue.

***I've never been settled on how much this needs, specifically, Maximus, a fascist horse; but I should mention the movie's fourth most important character and observe that his pantomime Javert is funny.

****Though Rapunzel would've been better off keeping her realizations to herself, and bashing Gothel's head in with, of course, her frying pan.

*****And not, actually, getting tangled.  Or getting covered with filth, or ever snapping her neck, as it obviously would.