Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Disney released their recent animated film Frozen, a story about two sisters who live in the kingdom of Arendale. One of the sisters Elsa (Idina Menzel) has the ability to produce snow and ice, however she must keep her powers a secret from the outside world. Her sister Anna (Kristen Bell) is a happy-go-lucky young lady who feels neglected by Elsa ever since she accidently inured her with her powers, nearly freezing her to death.
After that time, Elsa and Anna parents have kept them safe in their castle until Elsa can control her powers. Elsa is constantly told by her father to conceal her feelings because she loses control of her powers as her emotions take over/
A few years later, Elsa is now of age and is now prepared to become queen, everything goes well, all the way up to the after-party where Anna falls in love with a young prince named Hans whom she just met. A conflict occurs between Elsa and Anna over Hans.
Elsa’s emotions get out of hand, she accidentally freezes her sister in a block of ice. Realizing what she has done, Elsa ends up running away from the kingdom into the North Mountains.
As the village and the duke of Weaslton (Alan Tudyk) get ready to go after Elsa with hostel intent, Anna offers to go after her sister alone. This then leads to a journey in which Anna must try to reach out to her sister Elsa, and bring her back home as well as convince the kingdom she isn’t the monster they see her to be.
Along the way, Anna is accompanied on her epic quest by a young ice gather named Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) and a Snowman come to life that Elsa and her sister created when the were kids named Olaf (Josh Gad).
First off, I had my doubts about this movie, as many people did. The comments ranged from the film looking like something that should be a direct to DVD release to everyone saying the snowman was going to kill it, (and not in the good way).
However, Disney once again delivered another timeless classic since (wait for it, hold on to you winter hats, mittens and scarves) The Lion King.
Now I know, this seems like a bold statement considering Disney’s slew of great films in the past years, not counting any films before 2008; this film out of all of them delivered something really special and so deep that one has to read the film beyond the surface level.
If you have a sibling, and you and you bother or sister were close for a very long while and then one day, all of a sudden, your sibling decides to never speak to you again for the next ten years; You don’t know why or how, all you know is that now you are bored and lonely and on top of that can’t go outside to play with other children your age. In the film this is Anna’s reality, she has a musical number called “Do you want to build a snowman” which sums up most of the Elsa and Anna’s childhood together.
The animation in this film is also very mesmerizing, the way they animated the shards of ice and how they were able to simulate the characters tread through the snow perfectly was just astounding. The world of Frozen is also very beautiful and the set pieces, while limited, still are strikingly beautiful. The character, while many-said look like Tangled characters on ice, actually are way visually different from Tangled.
The artist who worked on Tangled’s main character design ,Glen Keane, was not in charge of this project’s main design – this time it was completed by Jin Kim. One particular portion of the film I loved was the opening title sequence; the ominous humming of the choir, then the forming of snowflakes before the title appears.
Idina Mendel delivers a very powerful performance as Elsa, and Kristen Bell’s as Anna her sister, while at first I had my doubts, she voiced the part well.
All in all, everyone’s performances were good in this film, Olaf was the biggest surprise, due to expectations that this character was going to be the annoying side character, but know came in when the story required it and he was enjoyable and funny.
This film is a musical, and I have to say the music in the film is excellent; the songs are sung with such passion and feeling, that conveyed the lyrics beautifully. I loved Elsa’s solo song “Let it Go”. Idina Mendel does a fantastic job with this song, and Demi Lovato also does a great job singing this song during the film’s end credits.
Some instances of song were not needed, however. For instance when Anna gets to Elsa’s ice castle, (which is awesome looking by the way), Anna reprises the song “First Time in Forever” when she tries to tell Elsa that the kingdom is in ice she sings it, then Elsa is about to sing it but then stops in mid-song and they just start talking regularly; this is an awkward transition.
After all of the commotion over this film, it turned out amazing and a true Disney classic, that I’m sure we will remember ten years from now, I sure will.