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The transitions from dialogue to singing are also handled smoothly, with characters often talking their way into them instead of just spontaneously breaking out into song. It's kind of surprising at first, but not unwelcome given that the songs, written by Robert Lopez & Kristen Anderson-Lopez, are all incredibly memorable and do a great job of advancing the story at hand.

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As musical a musical to come from Disney in years, Frozen delights in stacking up song after song for the first act of the film, developing pretty much the entire plot of the movie via singing. Ultimately, Frozen is one of the best looking CGI films I have ever watched.Īnd, of course, there's the music. The color palette is wisely kept extremely vibrant and varied to offset the monochromatic nature of the snow that dominates so many scenes. It doesn't appear that the technology limited the artistry in any way for this film. More than most CGI films, there were several scenes in Frozen that made me simply sit back and say 'wow.' Some of the imagery conjured up by Elsa and her icy powers is extremely beautiful. A number of specific sequences were positively awe-inspiring. The stakes are still high enough without one for the audience to get invested in the plot and a traditional mustache-twirling bad guy would have felt unnecessary. The film is a bit strange in that it does not feature a true villain, but I'm actually glad that it doesn't. The pacing is well balanced and it's fun that a few plot points deliberately take jabs at the expected formula of a Disney princess movie. The plot is a bit predictable and delves into cliched territory a few times, but it's in a comfortable fairy tale kind of way that's difficult to criticize. You'll really come to care about the heroes (yes, even Olaf) by the end of the film. Wreck-It Ralph with the equally hammy Duke of Weselton. Alan Tudyk returns after his brilliant performance as King Candy in Also along for the ride is Prince Hans, a character who, for most of the film, mostly exists to poke fun at the Disney formula of love-at-first-sight.

Sven is really the character who provides most of the comic relief. The result is a character who is much more lovable and endearing than I'm sure anyone expected. Olaf is wisely relegated to the role of humorous punctuation, usually providing a goofy joke or line at the end of a larger scene. Speaking of annoying, there's also the character that everyone expected to hate, Olaf the talking snowman, voiced by Josh Gad. A great deal of comedy is derived from the fact that, while Sven does not talk himself, Kristoff, voiced by Jonathan Groff, often 'speaks' for him. But it's hard to fault Disney for returning to such a likable character archetype and the story that Anna inhabits is quite different from Tangled, so the film never feels like a rehash.Īnna's main companions throughout the film are Kristoff, a traveling ice salesman, and his vaguely canine reindeer Sven. Anna is confident and energetic, if not a little ditzy and naive at times. That role falls to her younger sister Anna, voiced by Kristin Bell. Her struggle to accept her visually impressive but potentially threatening powers proves to be the primary driving force for the film's plot, but Elsa is not the main protagonist of the film. The elder sister Elsa, voiced by Idina Menzel, possesses mysterious powers that allow her to create and control snow and ice. Very loosely based on a Hans Christian Anderson tale, Frozen primarily follows the story of two royal sisters. (But what would that make Winnie The Pooh?) I suppose Wreck-It Ralph is The Rescuers Down Under in this metaphor. Neither film feels like it belongs to the Disney Renaissance period, but there is a similar sense of continuity between the films. In the same way that The Little Mermaid felt like the model for which later Disney films Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin were based on, Tangled appears to have served as the model on which Frozen was based. The similarities to Tangled don't just stop with the name change, either. And the further upcoming, long in development film The Snow Queen became Frozen, the subject of today's review. As a result, the then-upcoming feature film Rapunzel received a name change to the much more gender-neutral Tangled. When The Princess and the Frog failed to bring in the big audiences Disney was hoping for, they concluded that, apparently, having the word 'princess' in the title was to blame. It seems to be a new rule for Disney that princess movies have to have their names changed to generic adjectives.