Frozen (2013)
Directed by Chris Buck
Young princess Anna of Arendelle dreams about finding true love at her sister Elsa’s coronation. Fate takes her on a dangerous journey in an attempt to end the eternal winter that has fallen over the kingdom. She's accompanied by ice delivery man Kristoff, his reindeer Sven, and snowman Olaf. On an adventure where she will find out what friendship, courage, family, and true love really means.
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38 films that influenced Frozen
What critics say influenced Frozen
Headed by Chris Buck (2007's " Surf's Up ") and Jennifer Lee (writer of 2012's " Wreck-It Ralph ," making her directorial debut), "Frozen" reminds, if doesn't quite match, 2010's glorious "Rapunzel"-inspired " Tangled ," right down to its fairy tale inspiration and delicious musical leanings.
Its songs, too, are wonderful, echoing Disney’s 2010 hit, “Tangled.”
Following closely in the footsteps of 2010’s Tangled, right down to the fraught family relationship, the character design, and the oversized quadruped who acts like a puppy, Frozen hits many of the same beats, and finds some of the same freshness in a complicated family dynamic.
Anna's traveling companions are an earnest rustic named Kristoff, who cuts and sells ice for a living (his business has taken a hit from the local climate change); Kristoff's mute but savvy reindeer, Sven; and a funny little snowman, Olaf, whose habit of detaching and reassembling his body parts recalls Mr. Potato Head from Pixar's "Toy Story" trilogy.
Frozen is really about a powerful subtext, just like Toy Story is really about figuring out who you are, and Toy Story 2 is really about the existential crisis of choosing who you want to be, and Toy Story 3 is about reminding people what Toy Story 2 was about (yeah, I said it).
Meanwhile Pixar stepped in and stole the company’s animated show with “Up,” “Cars,” “Toy Story” and “Wall-E,” to name a few.
And if you prefer the hand-drawn animation of latter-day Disney releases like “Aladdin” to Pixar ’toons like “Toy Story,” you might be beguiled by the visuals.
The year after The Lion King, Pixar released the first CGI-animated feature, Toy Story, launching a string of 11 consecutive box-office smashes and artistic triumphs, including such masterpieces as Finding Nemo, WALL·E, Up and Toy Story 3. Disney floundered for a decade until the company bought Pixar; and Pixar creative guru John Lasseter took creative control of both groups, with the mission of reviving the invaluable brand of Disney Animation.
…did have baddies -- Michael Cohn?s bloody 1997 Snow White: A Tale of Terror does not match the 1937 original?s…
Hans and Anna’s whirlwind romance seems no more hasty than the love at first sight of Sleeping Beauty or Snow White , though Frozen jerks us back to reality when a shocked Elsa tells her sister that she can’t marry someone she’s only just met — and Kristoff tells her the same thing.
Ever since “Snow White,” the cute craftsmanship of Disney cartoons has blotted out the homicide and sorcery in the source material, which is often the folklore of central Europe.
They’re not the stepmother from Snow White.
Disney is at its best when it’s working with classic stories and/or fairy tales (think “Aladdin,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Snow White” and “Cinderella”).
Following closely in the footsteps of 2010’s Tangled, right down to the fraught family relationship, the character design, and the oversized quadruped who acts like a puppy, Frozen hits many of the same beats, and finds some of the same freshness in a complicated family dynamic.
The quirky thing about "Frozen" -- not to be confused with the 2010 stranded ski lift horror film -- stems from the husband-and-wife songwriting team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, the former being the creative force behind the Tony-winning musicals "Avenue Q" and "The Book of Mormon," two sexually frank, adults-only works that would never, ever, bear the Disney logo.
The pointless, image-darkening theatrical 3D presentation notwithstandingthe 2D version is the one to seek out"Frozen" joins the ranks of Pixar's " Disney's 53rd animated feature has nothing to do with people stranded on a ski lift, but the studio has felt the need to repeat the same title, "Frozen," already used for Adam Green's white-knuckle 2010 thriller .
With songs from husband and wife team Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez (2011’s Winnie the Pooh; Lopez was also part of the Tony award-winning writing teams for Broadway musicals Book of Mormon and Avenue Q), Frozen is almost a full musical.
But unlike 2009’s throwback The Princess and the Frog, which felt like nothing more than a tired retread of the pursuit-of-romance motif that had long since been laid to rest, Frozen is — we can hope, anyway — the start of a new era for the wonderful little subgenre Disney has claimed for itself.
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While it is technically a “princess movie” in the vein of Cinderella (1950) and The Little Mermaid, the story’s fixation on love and its role as the ultimate redeemer is not limited to romantic affection.
For Buck, who’s been in Disney’s animation trenches since 1981’s “The Fox and the Hound,” “Frozen” is his third feature — and his best — as a director.
Instead, writer-directors Chris Buck (a veteran Disney animator with credits dating back to “The Fox and the Hound”) and Jennifer Lee (who co-scripted “Wreck-It Ralph”) give us a more conventional tale of two sisters, younger Anna (Kristen Bell) and elder Elsa (Idina Menzel), heirs to the enchanted Scandinavian kingdom of Arendelle (also a return of sorts to Disney tradition after the dutiful PC dues-paying of “Pocahontas,” “Mulan” and “The Princess and the Frog”).
She and co-director Chris Buck, a Disney veteran whose credits date back to The Fox and the Hound, make a compatible team who understand how to balance the traditional and the new.
The tactile, snow-capped Arendelle landscape, including Elsa’s ice-castle retreat (imagine Superman’s Fortress of Solitude with a more feminine touch), is “Frozen’s” other true marvel, enhanced by 3D and the decision to shoot in widescreen — a nod to the CinemaScope richness of “Sleeping Beauty” and “Lady and the Tramp.”
Headed by Chris Buck (2007's " Surf's Up ") and Jennifer Lee (writer of 2012's " Wreck-It Ralph ," making her directorial debut), "Frozen" reminds, if doesn't quite match, 2010's glorious "Rapunzel"-inspired " Tangled ," right down to its fairy tale inspiration and delicious musical leanings.
Directors Chris Buck (Tarzan) and first-timer Jennifer Lee (who previously co-wrote the script for Wreck-It Ralph) use Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen as an inspiration — not a foundation — for a funny, exciting and visually dazzling adventure that qualifies as a full-blown musical.
The script from " Wreck-It Ralph " co-writer Lee, inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen story " The Snow Queen ," has lots of cheeky, contemporary touches but is firmly and safely rooted in Scandinavian fairy tale traditions.
While it’s found a few viable candidates (Tangled, the exceptional Wreck-It Ralph), it hasn’t discovered the right combination of character, concern, and charm — until now.
Lee was one of the writers of last year's inspired Wreck-It Ralph, and her Frozen screenplay has some of the same baroque plotting, if not much of the wit.
Much of Frozen feels mighty familiar, right down to the character models: Young Anna is Vanellope from Wreck-It Ralph, facial tics and all, while teen Anna and Elsa are both Rapunzel with different hair.
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At one point, former animation A-listers Linda Woolverton and Alan Menken were involved but, although neither lent their talents to the final version of Frozen, Christophe Beck's score echoes Menken's work for The Little Mermaid and the mix of whimsy, romance, and energy Woolverton brought to Beauty and the Beast is in evidence.
Here, they push boundaries further much as they had in 1991 with Beauty and the Beast.
While Disney figured out the latter in 1989, the former continuously proved troublesome as it failed to come together in both the 1990s and 2000s, with its most recent stint in turnaround coming after a version from Beauty and the Beast’s creative team (Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise, Linda Woolverton, and Alan Menken) fizzled.
It returns to the late-’80s/early ’90s Alan Menken/Howard Ashman Broadway musical style that rejuvenated the animation division with The Little Mermaid (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1991) while also fully embracing the vast visual possibilities of computer-generated animation, whose ability to render glistening vistas of sun-dappled snow, weirdly refracting walls of ice, and the intricacies of the most delicate of snow flakes makes the idea of the film being done any other way almost unthinkable (for some time the plan was to produce it using traditional hand-drawn animation).
(READ: Do Females in Animated Features Need to Be Pretty? ) A soft-shoe number with brilliant choreography of character, voice and visuals (it ends with a swirling tracking shot that quotes the one that accompanied Julie Andrews singing “The Sound of Music”), “In Summer” makes Olaf’s weather delusion sound and look deliciously delirious: “A drink in my hand, / My snow up against the burning sand, / Prob’ly getting gorgeously tanned / In summer.