A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.
Disney’s Frozen
is a loose (very loose) adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy
tale The Snow Queen. As an example of
classic Disney animation, it succeeds wonderfully. This is gorgeously rendered
computer animation. The palette is beautiful icy blues blended with crystalline
whites with lots of shine and sparkle. The story, by Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee,
and Shane Morris is at least more contemporary in theme than Disney’s princess
movies have typically been, by which I mean this isn’t strictly about a young
woman desperate to meet a man to marry. Buck and Lee directed the film.
Elsa is the young woman with the often uncontrollable
power to turn the world around her to ice. She’s spent the majority of her
youth and first years of adulthood locked away from the world. Her sister Anna
has no memory of what she can do. Both women want the best for each other and
their primary goals are, in the case of Elsa, to avoid hurting her sister, and
for Anna, to have a normal life with access to and a relationship with Elsa.
Unable to resist the temptation to include adorable
non-human characters, there is a snowman come to life named Olaf (voiced by
Josh Gad), who has the best musical number in the movie in which he sings about
his desire to experience summer and warm sunshine. There’s also an interesting
colony of little trolls with the film’s second best number. Unfortunately, the
rest of the songs are close to dreadful. They capture little of the classical
style Disney used to do best. The music by Robert Lopez sounds like
contemporary pop rock: the same spiritless, over-produced music for mass
consumption that we get from any of the TV talent contest shows. Kristen
Anderson-Lopez’s lyrics often don’t help, performing the function that too many
modern musicals utilize which is to have dialogue and narration sung rather
than spoken. Songs in musicals should express ideas and emotions rather than
actions and instructions. Incidentally, the singing by Kristen Bell as Anna and
Idina Menzel as Elsa veers into ear-splitting awfulness. When Menzel strikes
the high notes in her big song, I literally cringed and winced at the piercing
shriek. But this is what passes for good singing today – the tightly strained
and forced cries that would never pass muster outside popular opinion. It would
have been much better movie without the songs.
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