As someone who grew up with Disney's animated musicals (and who even cried a little at the end of Beauty and the Beast) I was genuinely saddened when it appeared that that the Disney musical, at around the beginning of this millennium, was slowly dying out as a medium, having been increasingly upstaged by the newer, slicker computer-generated product being produced by Disney stablemate Pixar. Soon, even Walt Disney Animation's "homegrown" (i.e. not Pixar) product felt either utterly generic (Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, The Wild) or loosely inspired by plot points from Pixar hits (e.g. Bolt, which borrowed its deluded-hero conceit from Toy Story). Songs were basically taboo, unless they were popular songs that didn't come out of the mouths of the characters. It got to a point where Disney was basically parodying itself in 2007's live-action animation hybrid Enchanted. In 2009, they tried to sell a "princess" musical with The Princess and the Frog, only to be met with cold indifference at the box office. Although 2010's Tangled was still, strictly speaking, a musical, it felt oddly parsimonious with its actual musical numbers. Then, quite conspicuously, the next year brought a distinctly non-musical offering, Wreck-It-Ralph. Now, I'm a huge fan of WIR, and truth be told the fast-talking speed demon Vanellope Von Schweetz from that film is one of my favorite Disney characters EVER, right next to Finding Nemo's Dory and the sous chef voiced by Will Arnett in Ratatouille, but the thought of Disney abandoning the musical altogether left a distinctly bad taste in my mouth.
Fortunately, with Frozen, co-directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, Disney has put that particular fear to rest.
Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Snow Queen, Frozen tells the story of two sisters Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell), whose parents, the King and Queen of Arendelle, a fictional, vaguely Norwegian kingdom, separate them at a very young age because Elsa has fantastical but dangerous ice powers which actually hurt Anna when both of them are very young. In fact, Elsa's powers are so dangerous that the castle's gates are closed to the entire kingdom for years. When the two princesses are a bit older, they are orphaned by a tragic incident at sea, and as a result, when Elsa, the elder, comes of age, the gates of the kingdom are opened for her coronation. Anna, now a blossoming young woman, cannot be happier, as she yearns to meet people, and in particular hopes to catch the fancy of a young man, while Elsa is nearly paralyzed with fear at what could happen if people find out about her secret. Suffice it to say, although Anna meets her dashing prince Hans (Santino Fontana), things go awry, and Anna, together with traveling ice salesman Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), his reindeer Sven, and the magically-animated snowman Olaf (Josh Gad) embarks on a journey to save her sister and her kingdom. In the process, she will learn a thing or two about the bonds of sisterhood, and the power of true love.
The Snow Queen was always going to be a tough story to adapt, as it really doesn't follow a whole lot of the usual Disney cartoon story beats. The protagonists are children not lovelorn adolescents or young adults. The villain is, well, not much of a character, being neither particularly cruel or comical, and in fact, at the time the story is resolved, she isn't even around. It's a small wonder, therefore, that the movie is only an adaptation in the loosest sense of the word. Disney kept the Scandinavian setting, the queen with the fantastical ice/snow powers, and the importance of true love, but it all other respects they've come up with something altogether different, not only from the story they adapted, but from their usual fare. This movie is something quite special.
It's hard to talk about the storytelling virtues of this movie without spoiling it, but I will say that anyone wanting to keep their little girls from getting too preoccupied with finding Prince Charming at such a young age will have next to nothing to fear from this film, and that parents who have at least two young daughters may delight at the message this movie delivers about sisterhood. I have two little girls who fight like cats and dogs so this resonated with me something fierce.
The film does have some flaws; apart from three or four central characters, everyone else in it was given short shrift in terms of characterization. The actual villain of the film, if I may be honest, didn't leave much of an impact at all, and felt more like a story device than an actual character. Still, the patented Disney humor was there in generous doses.
Also, call me old-fashioned, but I miss the Alan Menken tunes from Beauty and the Beast, and which were featured as recently as 2010 in Tangled. Still, that's more a matter of taste than anything, and while not all the songs here, written by the husband-and-wife team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, were necessarily my cup of tea, I appreciated the craft behind them, especially the ones that involved powerful vocals like the centerpiece, "Let It Go" as sung by Menzel's Elsa midway through the film. It was gratifying to see Disney finally make up for casting Menzel, a Broadway veteran and one of the stars of the beloved musical Rent, in their 2007 musical Enchanted and yet failing to give her a single musical number. I was also a fan of Kristen Bell going into this movie, and came out of it an even bigger fan after hearing her sing.
Another quibble I had with this movie was how in some ways it felt like a wasted opportunity; Disney was basically rewriting the form book on a lot of their storytelling conventions here, and yet from a visual perspective, Anna and Elsa look, in many respects, like sooooo many other Disney princesses that have come before them. Considering that they had two uniquely attractive actresses playing these characters, it would have been nice had they at least tried to imbue them with some of their performers' features. As it is, both lead characters seem to have been designed primarily to sell dolls (now available at a Toys 'R' Us near you!), just going to show that while some things may have changed, others remain woefully the same.
Nitpicking notwithstanding, I can't really find that much fault with such an expertly-staged production. As it is with every new film, Disney just keep managing to top themselves on a technical level, and are now pretty much at level with Pixar in terms of pure production value, due in no small part, I imagine, to John Lasseter's creative guidance. And with something like eight new songs, this is easily their most ambitious musical effort since the 1990s.
I seem to be detecting a trend here in Disney Animations release pattern: 2010 had the princess-themed Tangled, while 2012 had the video game action fantasy Wreck-It-Ralph, clearly geared more towards male audiences. Next year, Disney's trading princesses for a team of C-list Marvel superheroes as they adapt the little-known Marvel Comic Big Hero 6. It seems, then, that they're alternating between movies "for girls" and movies "for boys."
If they're all as good as Frozen, though, I'll be back no matter who their principal audience is.
4/5
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