I've been quite busy recently (mainly due to having a wonderful time travelling in South America), so I haven't been able to make many posts here recently. I finally saw
Frozen last weekend with my parents and brother (my mother particularly wanted to see this film), so here are my thoughts on the matter.
I will admit that I had somewhat mixed feelings while
Frozen was being developed/produced. On the one hand, I'm a great admirer of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales and would actually consider them as a collection to be one of the greatest influences upon my imagination and creative output. I've always thought "The Snow Queen" would be a great idea for a Disney animated film, and was glad it was finally coming out no matter what it looked like. On the other hand, I felt that it was shaping out to be "Tangled II" in many regards. I wondered if there would be any touch of Andersen left, and I was a bit put off by the marketing buzz surrounding the introduction of two new princesses to the line-up. As such, I didn't go in with the same level of eagerness that I did with
Tangled or even
The Princess and the Frog; in fact, I went in with perhaps a more critical attitude.
However, it seems that
Frozen melted my icy heart, and I'm actually considering seeing it again before it leaves the cinema. And that says something.
The story was brilliant; they payed homage to the spirit of the original "Snow Queen" story (I spotted a good few elements of the original throughout the plot), while making it a wholly modern story. The characters are really easy to relate to; of the protagonists, I related to the pluckiness of Anna, the cynicism of Kristoff and the summer-yearning Olaf (though I'll never melt in the sun, it has to be said that I'm more likely to burn than tan
). Yet I particularly related to the character of Elsa, and her song "Let it Go" felt like a true anthem for a new generation. The only real problem is that there are so many characters that some are perhaps not as developed as they could be. None of them seem throwaway or useless to the overall plot like in
The Princess and the Frog, but some of them could have done with some fleshing out or increased screentime (I'm thinking primarily of the trolls). Having said that, that's more a flaw derived from the excellence of the film itself. I'm also glad that there was some screen credit given to Hans Christian Andersen, something that
Tangled forgot to give to the Brothers Grimm.
The animation was also fantastic; it takes what
Tangled did well and timesed it by ten. The subtleties of the humans has really improved since 2010, and this is coming from someone who thought
Tangled had some of the best CG animation of humans ever!
The score stood out to me as the best Disney song score produced since the 1990s. That's not to say that the scores produced after 1998 are bad;
Tangled and
Enchanted are great, and I did like some of the songs in
The Princess and the Frog. However, aside from "First Time in Forever", which I felt was a bit syrupy, I loved all the songs and came out the cinema with them still stuck in my head. As I previously said, I particularly loved "Let it Go", and thought it was staged brilliantly. If that does not win the Best Song at the Oscars or the Golden Globes, I will scream. While I still would consider myself a Menken fan, I do think that other talent need to have a crack at producing song material for Disney, and the Lopezes are just right. Their tunes are catchy, and their lyrics are witty as well. I hope that they are used in other projects in the future, be they fairy tales or otherwise.
And as for
Get a Horse, I thought it was fantastic. To discuss it in detail would spoil it completely, but in the spirit of it bridging classic Disney with modern sensibilities and styles, it fits perfectly with
Frozen.
