Frozen review

Is there a point to reviewing Disney's Frozen?

I'm among the last people to see it, at least from the crowd of people prone to seeing Disney movies.  I waited for it to come to Amazon Instant Video before I saw the whole thing (though, as a children's librarian, I assure you, I was fully spoiled and knew the songs and the characters).

But what the heck?  I have this whole blog thing going on, and I haven't done that much lately.

So, Frozen.

In a nutshell, BEST DISNEY SINCE THE LION KING.

I loved The Princess and the Frog and Brave, but something wasn't clicking.  I saw Tangled, and I still can't say I follow the fuss about that.  But Frozen hits its marks and really just hit the spot for a fairy tale movie.

Before I start on the movie proper, I'll admit: I don't care for the new style of animation particularly.  I so  hoped when TPatF came out that we'd be seeing a real renaissance of normal Disney animation.  I thought it was beautiful.  But I realized when I saw Frozen that my problem wasn't with the style so much as with the movies that tended to be made in it.   When  I go to an animated film, I want a fairy tale, not a robot on a polluted planet.  Maybe that's a flaw, but that's the sum of it.  I associated the style with, "Animated movie that I probably won't care about all that much," and wrote it off.

Frozen's art is beautiful, and while I won't say it made me a convert, it did make me realize that this kind of animation doesn't bother me in and of itself.  I don't understand why we can't have both kinds of animation out there and enjoy both, but I won't automatically do an eyeroll anymore.  The story is always what matters.

Basically, Frozen is a complete return to form.  It's a lavish musical with a strong emotional heart.  It's a high-stakes fairy  tale plot with queens and princesses and knights.  It's everything I go to an animated movie for.  Animation frees movie-makers to do things that simply aren't possible in live action, but are accepted in the milieu of animation because the very form makes it possible to have a dress that really looks like it's woven from ice, or to see a character slowly turning into an ice sculpture.   You can actually tell this kind of story when you're using animation, which is something the Disney studios recognized a long time ago, then seem to have temporarily forgotten.

Okay, elements:

Plot
Don't go in expecting "The Snow Queen."  There are very few commonalities, though it's certain that if they hadn't said they were adapting it, someone would have screamed bloody murder that they'd "stolen" the story.  So, no snow bees.  No mirror shards.  Gerda and Kai are older servants in the palace.

The plot involves two sisters, the princesses of Arandelle.  The older sister, Elsa, is born with vast powers over ice and snow.   The younger, Anna, is a joyous little girl who just worships the ground her big sister walks on... until an accident with Elsa's powers almost kills Anna, at which point the girls are separated, and Anna's memories of her sister's powers are removed.  They grow up isolated from each other, and on Elsa's coronation day, they have a huge fight, which ends up revealing Elsa's powers.  Elsa, in fleeing, accidentally sets off an eternal winter everywhere.  The remainder of the story is Anna's quest to heal the land by healing her sister.

There is a secondary plot about Anna's love life.  She's been so isolated that she's ripe to be manipulated, and is.  Badly.  But she does find friendship and love with the Sami boy Kristoff, who is her guide up to Elsa's mountain hideout.  There are also trolls, a reindeer who Kristoff speaks for, and a charming sentient snowman named Olaf, who represents Elsa's more innocent side.

Theme
Weirdly enough, the theme is stated clearly in a very odd and otherwise out of place musical number from the trolls:
We’re only saying that love's a force
That's powerful and strange.
People make bad choices if they’re mad,
Or scared, or stressed.
Throw a little love their way...
And you’ll bring out their best...
Father! Sister! Brother!
We need each other to raise
Us up and round us out.

Ultimately, the story rests on this old saw, but with one of the best twists going: It's not either of Anna's love interests who saves the day.  It's Anna  herself, expressing her true love for her sister.  This doesn't diminish the other love story, by the way.  They all become a family together and, well, round each other out.  Nice theme work, Disney.

Of course, if you want to go totally symbolic, it's a nature play about the change of seasons, with Elsa in whites and blues representing winter (naturally) and Anna in greens and pinks representing the coming of spring.  That's there and pretty obvious, but it's not much to chew on, in terms of story.

Style
Show tunes and very Disney-esque 3D animation.  Beautiful work on the ice and snow, nice integration of the musical numbers.  Here's Anna confronting Elsa at the ice palace, a scene which encapsulates the style pretty well:

Setting
Vaguely Norwegian.  There are complaints, I  understand, that the subtleties of the culture aren't captured -- apparently, as opposed to the deep understanding of French nobility in Beauty and the Beast, or zoological psychology in The Lion King.  It's a fairy tale.  It exists on the edge of a mirror reality. So, yes, it's a sketched environment, with the kind of relationship to real Norwegian culture that Middle Earth has to English culture.  A few specifics to give the grounded feeling, but the rest is just meant to be evocative, a sort of Platonic ideal of a Norse-ish culture.  It's a feature, not a bug.

And what's there... it's so beautiful.  The way the light glints on the ice, the eldritch light of the Aurora Borealis ("The sky's awake, so I'm awake!" Anna exclaims early in the movie),  the winter wonderland on the mountain... Really, if you're trying to find it on a map and worried that Google road view doesn't show it to you,  you're probably at the wrong movie.

Characters
The characters are what makes the movie work as well as it does.  The two core characters, Elsa and Anna, are welcome additions to the princess world, Sven the Reindeer and Olaf the Snowman are charming funny sidekicks, and Kristoff is one the best Disney "princes" (though of course, the character is actually a commoner) they've had (he actually does stuff, but isn't The Rescuer... how much better is that than the dull Prince Charmings who stood around at balls?).

Specific notes:

Elsa is so far the only princess who actually becomes queen in the course of her movie.  Go, Elsa.  She's also, bar none, the most powerful Disney princess, and certainly the most flawed. (Heck, in original drafts, she was the villain.)  Her anxiety and depression become manifest in the endless winter she brings on when she isolates herself. Worth noting, though, is that she does not hate her powers or wish them away.  She is at her happiest when she's using them of her own free will.  Her problems come when she tries to run away from her power -- both the ice power that her people fear, and her power as queen. It's in embracing both of these powers and understanding them that she becomes a wise ruler.

Anna starts out a little too naive, a little too child-like.  It seems at first like they're trying to force the cuteness... only it turns out that's that point.  While her sister was forced into adult concerns early, she's been sheltered so severely that she is incredibly vulnerable to a con.  The course of the movie is Anna first being broken, then finding her real, actual strength.

Kristoff, the ice harvester who loves his business so much that he wants to cry at the beauty of Elsa's ice palace ("Go ahead," Anna tells him, "I won't judge").  Raised by boisterous trolls, he's had a life completely opposite from Anna's, and is at least surface-cynical.  I'd argue that he's more of a realist than a cynic, actually.  He doesn't ever disparage love... he just questions Anna's love-at-first-sight story.  And it at least occurs to him to tell a living snowman that looking forward to summer isn't really that great an idea.

Olaf is maybe a little too cute, but unlike a lot of the sidekicks, he has an actual psychological point.  He began his life in the childhood scene of Elsa and Anna playing, where Elsa provides him with a voice and Anna loves him unconditionally.  Elsa creates him almost as an afterthought, and it's he who leads Anna to her, and who keeps Anna alive (at serious risk to his own life) long enough to solve the problem.

The trolls are a little annoying, yes.  I can't argue with that.  The Fixer-Upper song comes out of nowhere, and -- theme statement aside -- does nothing for the plot.  I think they were probably meant to show Anna the boisterous family she never had (and, Kristoff's embarrassment aside, she actually seems delighted throughout the scene), so they don't actively bother me, but I could do without them.  I think I might have liked it better if the trolls were saved for the mystical stuff, and Kristoff just had a big, boisterous human family.

And there are my thoughts on Frozen.