Review of Frozen (2013) by Crunchygranola — 01 Jan 2014

A charming, delightful movie. Not in the same league as Beauty and Beast (what animated movie is?) but a solid addition to the Disney canon, which continues an interesting evolution in their approach.

The plot is little weak, but the characters are fine and the songs are good to excellent.

Kristin Bell's Anna is a tsunami of adorableness I hope to see a lot more animation voice work from her.

Her character has a delightful song-and-dance number early on that is staged exactly like in a 1940s romantic comedy (I suspect it was actually performed that way live and shot in motion capture).

One bit that is extremely effective, but also an obviously calculated central element of the project, was Idina Menzel's Elsa delivering a knock-em dead, show stopping, power ballad "Let it Go". The parallels to her "Defying Gravity" in Wicked are blatant, the theme of the song is identical (a magical girl deciding not to hide her power any longer and let the chips fall as they may). Clearly the whole project was built around her and this song.

But if you don't see the movie watch "Let it Go" on YouTube. Its that good.

Disney's evolution away from the old-fashioned (and tired, out-dated) girl-seeking-true-love story line continues. In Brave we saw the princess reject the need for romance (at least, right away). Here they tease and confuse the audience with TWO possible love interests for Anna, while in the end going in an entirely different, and emotionally satisfying direction.

The goofy animated snowman Olaf, whom I had sort of dreaded from the promotions, turned out to be delightful with a very funny song, and the source of some good lines from other characters.

(The Mickey Mouse short before the film... ran too long. Once the 3-D gimmick was revealed it got old fast, very fast, with a surprisingly unimaginative stagnant repetitive action sequence. I hope these shorts become standard with the regular feature, there are few showcases for short films, but I hope in the future they are up to the standard of the positively stellar Paper Man.