FROZEN MOVIE

Lest you forget amid all the noise made by Marvel Studios and Star Wars rumors, Walt
Disney Pictures still does big business in princesses, and they’re aiming to prove it with their
mammoth new holiday season release Frozen. Very, very loosely adapted from Hans
Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, it’s the story of a vaguely Nordic kingdom and the two
orphaned sisters, Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell), charged with running it. The
spunky heroine and lonely castle hearken back to recent hit Tangled; the sisterly conflict feels
like The Little Mermaid; the knowing fairy tales riffs are pure Enchanted. This is rigorous
Disney hit-making at its finest, but with enough charm to get away with it.

Even before Elsa’s powers of shooting ice and snow from her fingertips run rampant, the
animation guided by directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee is stunning– Elsa and Anna’s
parents perish in a single shot of a howling storm at sea, and the stony cliffs surrounding the
village of Arrendel are dramatic even before coated in ice. Elsa revels in her powers as a little
girl, but after a close call with Anna and a poorly aimed bolt of ice, she’s convinced to hide
her strengths and retreat from their tight sisterly bond. The death of the king and queen means
Elsa must take over, but the stress of her coronation (and Anna’s dumb-cluck decision to get
engaged to a hunky prince she just met) makes her lose control. Elsa storms up into the
mountains, leaving ice castles and blizzards in her wake and belting the power ballad “Let It
Go.” Especially as sung by Menzel it’s a shameless riff on Wicked‘s “Defying Gravity”; that
hasn’t kept it from sticking in my head for weeks now, and good luck shaking it out of yours.

Anna’s heroic journey is, refreshingly, not about a boy or even about herself– she travels into
the mountains to convince Elsa to return, and teams up with rugged ice salesman Kristof
(Jonathan Groff) to get there. Kristof and Anna are going to fall for each other eventually, of
course, and she’ll ditch that princely fiancé Hans (Santino Fontana), but the focus remains
firmly on Anna and Elsa, as Lee’s screenplay repeatedly subverts fairy tale tropes to make
them about sisterly, not romantic, love. The beats of the story and the catchy songs can feel a
bit factory-produced– funny sidekicks in the form of mountain trolls show up at the exact
right time for a laugh, and the old man villains are shipped directly from Gaston’s mob
in Beauty and the Beast. But Frozen has all the right modern touches too, without falling into
winky-wink Shrek territory.

It also pulls off a miracle in Olaf, the buck-toothed snowman you’ve seen in every ad and
voiced by Book of Mormon‘s Josh Gad. The goofy sidekick is usually an exasperating pander
to younger kids who might get restless after too much story, and even in the
brilliant Mormon Gad tended to overplay his schlubby goofball hand. But Olaf is
consistently, actually funny, and even has the film’s best song in “In Summer,” dreaming of
how great a snowman’s life will be in warmer times (Anna and Kristof don’t have the heart to
tell him the truth). Even Olaf’s origin story helps highlight the relationship between the
sisters– Frozen‘s story may sometimes feel machine-made perfect, but there’s satisfaction in
watching a production this big stay so resolutely on point.

Debuting her serious pipes after making her name on television, Kristen Bell is a righteously
spunky and funny heroine, while Menzel ably shoulders the film’s heaviest drama (and by far
the best princess dresses, to be seen on Halloween racks everywhere next fall). Both girls are
heroines on the level of Belle, Jasmine or Ariel, and do them one better by choosing family
over more conventional romance– a nice contrast to, say, Bella of Twilight. Big animated
movies are under crazy pressure to teach kids the “right” lessons, but Frozen wears that
pressure lightly, putting much more focus on its gorgeous animation, its insanely catchy
songs and its well-earned emotional highs. Especially as Disney turns toward revamping
older princesses like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella for live-action dramas, it’s a pleasure to
see the studio go back to what they’ve always done well and prove they’ve still got it.