Frozen
Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee
Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck, Shane Morris (story “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen)
102 min.
Idina Menzel, Kristen Bell, Jonathan Groff, Josh Gad, Santino Fontana, Alan Tudyk, Ciaran Hinds, Chris Williams, Stephen J. Anderson, Maia Wilson, Edie McClurg, Livvy Stubenrauch, Eva Bella, Spencer Ganus
PG for some action and mild rude humor
Since John Lasseter was brought on board to revitalize the Disney Animation empire, the company has shown a marked improvement in the quality of achievements they put into the marketplace. Although Frozen lacks the creative integrity of The Princess and the Frog, the joie-de-vivre of Tangled and the outright creativity of Wreck-It Ralph, it is a significant and compelling achievement.
Frozen tells the story of two princesses: Elsa, the eldest daughter of the King, and Anna, her younger sister. Elsa has been gifted with magical control over ice and snow, but accidentally injures Anna one morning while they are playing in secret. The wisened Trolls encourage her parents to hide her ability from everyone and wipe Anna’s memory clear of the incident, separating the sisters from the warm bond they shared for so many years and forcing Elsa to isolate herself in her room while Anna begs and pleads for more interaction.
After their parents die at sea, the siblings drift farther apart and it isn’t until Elsa comes of age that she and Anna meet again. Although they want to be together, Elsa holds back afraid her power will be discovered and the kingdom, and her familial relations, will be torn apart. Fear and desperation betray Elsa who never learned to control her powers and she lets loose a torrent of frozen bleakness on the kingdom as she escapes into the mountains to be free. Anna seeks out her sister to try and bring her back and remove the curse on the kingdom while nefarious forces are at work back home plotting to kill Elsa and hopefully end the mid-summer winter.
Although this isn’t a complex plot by thriller standards, for Disney and animation in general, the richness of detail in the screenplay make a compelling case for this being listed as one of the company’s most mature scripts. Even though the story is ostensibly a princess fable, Disney has shown more courage in recent years to present more modern takes on such stories. While they introduced the first black princess in The Princess and the Frog, they regressed a little with Tangled. Here, they push boundaries further much as they had in 1991 with Beauty and the Beast.
Disney’s princess have slowly emancipated themselves from traditional roles. While Brave gets flack for being too much like a traditional Disney prinecss tale, it set the stage for strong, powerful female characters who don’t need romantic entanglements to succeed in life or to be happy. Frozen follows that line of thought to its natural conclusion. Not only are they able to present Anna as a romantically-minded young woman, Elsa is a fiercely independent woman who needs the love of family, but little else to be truly happy. Giving young girls a character that can be comfortable in her own skin despite being different is one of the reasons this film resonates so much more than I initially expected it to.
Bell and Menzel are fantastic voice-over actors, infusing each character with the needed persuasiveness, courage and determination. That they can both carry a tune (Menzel has a Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, so I’m a bit facetious with word selection here) aids this latest musical endeavor succeed. The problem is that they are givn a song score by husband-wife team Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez that doesn’t have the distinctiveness of the Alan Menken/Howard Ashman collaborations of the 1990’s. They are good songs with some strong lyrics, but they don’t have the hummable verve those ’90’s masterworks had.
Having had to rebuild Disney’s animation division from the ground up, Lasseter has left his Brain Trust at Pixar to languish in his absence. Although he devotes time to both endeavors, the sudden drop in creative quality at Pixar is mirrored in the reinvigoration of the Disney brand. It’s clear from the over-reliance on sequels and prequels that Lasseter may not be able to devote attention to both studios. Yet, now that Disney’s back in its wheelhouse, hopefully we won’t have to worry about Pixar any longer and both studios can have a suitable and acclaimed path over the next decade.
Frozen is both conventional and non-traditional in many ways and while I may rank it third in the new era of Disney animation (behind Princess and the Frog and Wreck-It Ralph), it’s still a terrific film that I’d recommend to anyone with small children or even for grown ones.
Guarantees: Animated Feature, Original Song
Potentials: Sound Mixing, Sound Editing
Unlikelies: Original Score (not on shortlist)
January 2, 2014
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