Frozen (2013)

Proving that I’ll probably never outgrow Disney movies, I’ll confess right off the bat that I thoroughly enjoyed Frozen – but not out of mere nostalgia for a childhood nearly twenty years gone.  Frozen manages to blend the classic Disney moviegoing experience with a very innovative revisionist take on the whole princess fairy tale genre, succeeding at both where other studios would struggle with only one.

After her magical ice powers accidentally injure her sister Anna (Kristen Bell), princess Elsa (Idina Menzel) shutters the kingdom until her 21st birthday.  On coronation day, however, when the palace doors are opened, Anna meets love-at-first-sight Prince Hans and is immediately engaged to him until her sister’s subjects exile Elsa out of fear of her powers.  As the kingdom falls into an unflinching winter, Anna goes in search of her sister with the help of ice vendor Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) and enchanted snowman Olaf (Josh Gad).

Frozen is a clear update of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Snow Queen,” and if the synopsis sounds unoriginal it’s because I’ve taken some pains to limit my summary to the broadest details.  In fact, Frozen contains a number of inversions on where the classic Disney formula might take that general plot.  For instance, the issue of “true love” comes up several times, only for the narrative to take a quick turn away from cliché and move in the direction of something more creative; when Anna and Hans sing about the all-encompassing joy of finding your soulmate, it’s acceptably saccharine in the fairy tale kind of way, but when the peppy musical number is abruptly followed by a quick marriage proposal, it becomes apparent that the filmmakers are up to something smarter.  We know – though the characters don’t – that true love takes a little more work.

I won’t spoil where the film lands on the issue of love, but suffice it to say that Frozen offers several models of love with varying degrees of truthiness before the story is done.  I will give the crew a big round of applause for, without spoiling, taking the film in a number of unexpected and fresh directions, even offering me things I’ve never seen in a Disney movie before (the sophisticated approach to love being one of the foremost).  And when you get an entire audience to gasp in surprise at a clever plot twist, Disney or not, you’ve accomplished something spectacular.

The marketing on this film has been, to my eyes, a little vague, focusing more on ambiance than on the actual plot.  Wisely so, I think, both because the plot is too fresh to be previewed and because the film looks astonishingly gorgeous.  Where its predecessor Tangled animated the heck out of Rapunzel’s hair, Frozen presents several tableaus that can only be translated as bragging rights; here, Disney presents itself the undisputed leader when it comes to animating ice.  The various snow drifts, ice palaces, and frost giants all glint and move like embodied snow ought to behave, to say nothing about the perfected-to-a-tee “house style” of Disney’s computer-animated fairy tales.  Don’t underestimate the value of consistency, which helps audiences settle into the film without too much laborious plot instruction; it’s not hard to imagine Frozen in the same universe as Brave or Tangled (and keep your eyes peeled for a Rapunzel/Flynn cameo).

The other curious move the advertising has taken is emphasizing the role of Olaf the snowman and his reindeer buddy Sven.  While these teaser vignettes weren’t especially compelling and played like a bad “funny animals” skit from a lesser movie studio (even giving me pause about seeing Frozen), I can safely say that’s a wholly inaccurate representation of the film.  Not only are Olaf and Sven far from the focus of the film, they’re actually quite engaging when stripped of the need to appeal to a target audience.  As members of the cast, Olaf and Sven are essentially Frozen’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a cartoon Vladimir and Estragon who are good for a plethora of laughs both physical and verbal.  Even Olaf, with the potential to descend into irritating yet obligatory comic relief, hits the quirky derpy spots without grating on our nerves.

And at the center of Frozen is an immensely compelling and vigorously original story about family, love, obligation, and difference.  The voice cast are exceptional, but the visual direction even more so.  I think someday we’ll look back on the present moment as a kind of second golden age for digital animation – Toy Story heralding the first – and I predict that Frozen will take its place in that canon, both for its breathtaking animation and as that movie to which you can point when people jeer that Disney gives its viewers unrealistic expectations about love.  Frozen, I have no doubt, will thaw the hearts of even Disney’s iciest objectors.

Frozen is rated PG “for some action and mild rude humor.”  Both action and humor are quite tame, mostly slapsticky and oriented more toward “kisses are yucky” than actual inappropriate-ness on the affectionate spectrum.