Runtime: 1 hour, 42 minutes
Rating: PG
Directors: Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee
Quick Impressions:
We’re big Tangled fans at our house. Tangled was the first movie my daughter saw in the theater. (She had just turned two and kept folding up into her seat because she wasn’t heavy enough to keep it in position.) She absolutely loved the movie, but we almost didn’t go because all the previews for Tangled we saw on TV made it look abysmally stupid, full of cheap jokes and forced pop culture references. (This was especially distressing because I was following the movie while it was in development, and I worried that by gutting and re-hauling their original classic fairy tale concept they’d destroyed the whole project.) Fortunately Tangled was great. The actual movie didn’t have the same feel as its promotional marketing. It had heart, humor, adventure, music. All of us loved it.
When I heard Disney was making an animated version of “The Snow Queen” starring Idina Menzel, I got really excited. But when I saw the very early promos, my excitement turned to grave concern. I kept reminding myself of what had happened with the Tangled previews, though. Two fairy tales revamped with computer animation and single-adjective titles should have a lot in common. “I’m sure Frozen will be good,” I kept telling myself. (I mean, something has to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature!) Then I started hearing comparisons to Beauty and the Beast and excitedly dragged my entire family (the four of us, my parents, my sister and her boyfriend) to see Frozen the day before Thanksgiving.
We all really enjoyed it. Tangled is funnier and benefits from faster pacing and a more compact story, but Frozen is definitely going for a grander, more dramatic feel. What really sets it apart (aside from Idina Menzel’s show-stopping diva ballad) is the masterful way Frozen tackles a criticism long plaguing Disney’s princess movies and manages to conjure up an unexpected ending that should please both little girls and their parents (and everyone else watching, too).
The Good:
The film looks great and features catchy songs and fantastic vocal performances from a very talented cast. Children should warm quickly to the characters. Both princesses are very charming, and honestly, it’s refreshing to have two female protagonists. Both Anna (Kristen Bell) and Elsa (Idina Menzel) have their personality flaws, but neither even approaches being evil. They’re both sympathetic characters, yet they are totally different from one another (and not just in their coloring or choice of dress). That’s nice variety. Little girls deserve more than one appealing female per film, and they’re getting two fairly well drawn characters here.
To my surprise, though, I really loved the performances of the male characters. Before this movie, I’d never even heard of Santino Fontana (who brilliantly plays Prince Hans) and knew little about Jonathan Groff (Kristoff), but both of them give fantastic performances.
For me, new life was injected into the film with the arrival of the adult Kristoff. I really liked Groff’s line readings. He sounded very natural, very warm.
I was also astonished to fall in love with Olaf the Snowman (voiced by Josh Gad). Ordinarily I’m leery of comic relief. I usually prefer leads who can be dramatic and funny at the same time to a verbose clown who pulls focus from the central story. I really had my doubts about Olaf, but he turned out to be totally cute, and a really great character (yes, he’s comic relief, but he’s also deeply invested in the main characters. This sounds odd because he’s a magic snowman, but he’s a real person, not just a joke machine.)
I also liked Alan Tudyk as the Duke of “Weasel Town.” (Meanwhile I had no idea Ciarán Hinds was in the movie until the closing credits.)
While I’m on the subject of the closing credits, be sure to stay until the very end. We were the only ones who did, and there is a short, cute post credits scene.
As I said before, the highlight of Frozen—the thing that makes the movie particularly memorable—is the way writer/director Jennifer Lee and director Chris Buck create a happy ending without reducing the princesses to passive pawns waiting around for someone to save them. What it gives us is brilliant, but saying it too succinctly would be a major spoiler.
Best Scene:
For me the best moment in the movie comes as Anna prepares to receive her true love’s kiss. My almost-five-year-old (who had been totally—even uncharacteristically—enraptured with every scene of the movie up to this point) totally lost it here and had to go sit on her father’s lap. I, however, thought this was the highlight of the entire film. Besides being a particularly well played scene, it’s also a moment that provides the high drama on which this production clearly thrives. It also introduces a third act that’s a welcome departure from Disney tradition.
For what it’s worth, my daughter’s favorite scene is the initial reveal at the end of the coronation ball. (She loved that scene before going to the movie, and watches the promo clip over and over.)
Best Show-Stopping Diva Ballad:
A few days before we saw the movie, my daughter and I discovered a treasure trove of promotional spots for Frozen on Roku’s Disney Channel. (We’ve also seen quite a few on the actual Disney Channel.) These include scenes from the movie, interviews with the cast, and—of course—Demi Lovato’s pop cover of “Let it Go.” As a result, all the way to the theater, we were treated to my daughter’s cover of “Let it Go” (which consists mostly of the first line sung on an endless loop with just a hint of a “y” sound in the “l.”)
I like every version of the song. For me, Idina Menzel gets a slight edge for enunciation. If you were sitting in an actual theater hearing the song for the first time being belted out from the stage, you would understand every lyric as she carefully closes “door” without making its final “r” sound weird. (Of course, my daughter’s take on the song is the sentimental favorite.)
To be honest, this is probably the reason some people are comparing Frozen to Beauty and the Beast—it feels a lot like a Broadway show. Not only are there several songs, but often they define the essence of a character and for that reason have a particularly Broadway feel to them.
“Let it Go” is the kind of number that’s clearly in the movie because Idina Menzel is. In most Disney animated musicals, the female lead gets a song. (Believe me, I know. The summer after The Little Mermaid came out, on our vacation my little sister—then five—could always be found dead center in each and every hotel pool, twirling in a circle in her floaty and belting out “Part of Your World” at the top of her lungs, oblivious to any onlookers.)
The female lead almost always gets a song, but she doesn’t always get a song like this. I don’t know its exact runtime, but it feels long, much longer than what an animated Disney woman usually gets, particularly if she’s just singing about herself. Usually they’re either singing about how they want to find love or how they want their lives to change. In Disney princess movies, we don’t get a whole lot of, “This is who I really am, and I am awesome!” (Pocahontas does sing, “This is what life is about, and you’re stupid,” making her different from the others as well, but Elsa’s grand acceptance of herself/architecture project/winter celebration is entirely unique among Disney heroines as far as I can remember.)
I remember being so puzzled when Menzel showed up in the movie Enchanted, a musical, and then didn’t get to sing. (She said she was flattered to be valued for her acting ability, but I still think casting Menzel and then not giving Nancy a song—or even a part in a song—was a weird choice.)
“Let it Go” is a pretty great song (particularly when Menzel sings it), and it’s a very strong point in the film because watching her build the castle magically is highly appealing visually.
I would say it’s a shoe-in for winning Best Song at the Oscars, but I know the movie Inside Llewyn Davis is supposed to be packed full of great music, so that makes it harder to predict.
Best Other Song:
Honestly I think the best song in the movie belongs to Olaf the Snowman, who is a great character even when he’s not singing. Husband and wife Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez wrote the songs for Frozen. They also did the charming little songs for Disney’s most recent Winnie the Pooh (2011), and I honestly think that charming little songs is what they do best. (I’m not trying to insult their other songs. They just particularly excel at sweet, simple little numbers like the cute song they give Olaf.)
Best Scene Visually:
Elsa’s snow fortress is pretty impressive, but that’s not the only thing. The whole movie looks great. Cartoon snow always looks strangely warm. I’m also fond of the way that the trolls come to life. (Now while I’m on the subject, I do think the trolls needed a bit more development, but there’s a nice, energetic, organic, unexpected quality to their animation.) I also like the way the movie shows us what happens to the parents. That’s quite well done.
Best Action Sequence:
I’m very fond of the scene with the wolves because 1) It’s exciting, 2) It’s funny, 3) It’s also used for character development, 4) I can’t resist wolf chases in the snow. There’s just something so wintery and wonderful about wolf attacks that makes me wish I were in England—being attacked by wolves? Probably not. This tangent clearly doesn’t lead me anywhere logical, but I’m not likely to be attacked by wolves in the snow in Texas any time soon. It’s not that I want to be attacked by wolves in the snow, but there’s just something romantic about having the possibility out there.
Anyway, my daughter also loves this scene. (We watched a promo clip of it over and over. It is awfully funny.)
The Negatives:
Is Frozen as good as Beauty and the Beast? That’s really hard to say. My gut instinct is to say “no” because while I enjoyed the movie, I didn’t walk out of the theater feeling emotional and blown away as I would if the production had its claws in my soul. Of course—as I remembered later that night as my stepson and I cut up our fingers making apple pie—I wasn’t blown away by Beauty and the Beast either, not initially.
My family saw Beauty and the Beast for my sister’s seventh birthday. At the time, I felt a bit let down by it. Yes, I liked Beauty and the Beast, but not the way I had passionately loved The Little Mermaid. That bothered me at the time. I thought in some distress, Is the difference that I’m in seventh grade now? Have I gotten too old to lose myself in children’s movies? Will I never connect to anything ever again?
(Fortunately, these melodramatic thoughts were swept out of my head rather quickly as we arrived at dinner, and Chuck E. Cheese proceeded to stalk me for the rest of the night for reasons beyond my comprehension. (Seriously, he was putting parmesan cheese on my pizza and helping me play ski-ball. All night. My parents were like, “I think he likes you.” As I look back, I imagine them saying that in a Homer Simpson stage whisper, but at the time I was just very, very confused by the whole bizarre episode.))
Anyway, my point is Beauty and the Beast really grew on me over the years. With more viewings, I knew the songs better and better, liked the film more and more. It’s now my second favorite Disney movie (after Sleeping Beauty because how can you beat a medieval tapestry set to the music of Tchaikovsky? Plus Princess Aurora clearly has a grip on how to handle life. I’m with her. When life gets stressful, go out in the woods and dance around with the animals for a few hours, then fall asleep and have sweet dreams while your problems are helpfully solved by everyone else.)
I’ve only seen Frozen once, so I can’t tell yet how I’ll feel about it in the end. I will say that my four-year-old absolutely loved it. She watched most of it on the edge of her seat. Late in the film, there was a moment that made her cover her ears in horror and seek comfort. (She’s not scared of monsters, just interpersonal conflict.) But she still left in high spirits eager to listen again to her new favorite song “Let it Go” in the car.
My stepson liked it, too, and so did my husband and I (though when I gave him the choice, he said he thought he liked Tangled a bit better, and for the moment, I’m with him, though Frozen is certainly a more lavish production. My sister said that she liked Frozen more than Tangled.)
Early on, my sister and I had some definite concerns. When she arrived Monday night of Thanksgiving week, my sister introduced us all to the reality show My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding. During Hans and Anna’s first song, my sister and I were exchanging glances, and even my ten-year-old stepson asked with a grin, “I wonder if she also brushes her teeth with bleach. It saves so much money.” We were definitely all very concerned about the way things were headed. Fortunately, what the movie finally does here is quite brilliant and nearly unprecedented in a Disney animated feature. (It’s not that nothing like this has ever happened before, but this was sufficiently well done to elicit gasps.)
The only thing that really bothered me about the movie is that the set-up feels a little contrived. Why does Elsa have this magic? I mean, yes I get it. She was born this way, but why doesn’t anyone else ever turn up with these powers? Is there any precedent for this kind of thing? The king and queen both seem so matter-of-fact about it. The world is not explained to us very well. The trolls, particularly, need a lot more development and more explanation. I wish we had either more background information or more songs (because we get almost all of the character development in the songs). Still, the film is already close to two hours, and that’s quite long for a Disney animated feature. Any longer, and half your audience misses their nap.
Overall:
After the movie, my sister declared, “Movies about sisters always make me cry. So I think I’d be Anna, and you’d be Elsa because” ever so diplomatically “you have blue eyes.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “And I’m the older sister.” Clearly I am the more Elsa of the two of us. There’s really no doubt.
My whole family really enjoyed Frozen. The animation is beautiful, the characters are likable and well-drawn, the ending is pleasantly unexpected, and the songs are upbeat and enchanting. If you’re looking for a good holiday movie for the whole family, this is it. You’re kids are probably begging to see it, so let them go, let them go, don’t hold them back anymore…
I’m sorry. I dream that song now. My daughter sings it instead of breathing.