REVIEW: FROZEN
The first time I saw Tangled, Disney’s last fairytale musical, I loved it with a full stop. The first time I saw Frozen, their latest fairytale musical, I loved it with a ‘but…’. So I watched it a second time.
And that’s all it took.
It’s funny just how reliably history repeats itself. It’s pretty easy to look at Disney now and see an unstoppable entertainment behemoth, especially lately; they’ve been gobbling up intellectual property left right and centre, clearly not content with the substantial stake in your childhood they probably already had. That said, the house of mouse is no stranger to tough times. The 70s and 80s saw the studio struggle to stay relevant amidst massive internal and external changes, only finding success by revisiting the past and returning to the princess fairytales that made them in the first place, not to mention the help of some incredible broadway talent. Roughly a decade later their magnificent renaissance just kind of fizzled out and their struggle began again. With new technology and new blood came a flurry of new ideas, and as audacious as some of them were, none of them managed to find an audience.
Not that you’d be too aware of any of that lately though as Disney are officially in the middle of yet another explosive renaissance. By once again revisiting their fairytale roots in The Princess & The Frog and Tangled, they’ve managed to mesmerize a whole new generation of kids with that trademark Disney magic and with Wreck-it-Ralph and upcoming Marvel adaptation Big Hero 6 they seem to have finally mastered the art of the calculated risk. With Frozen, they’ve done both these things and a hell of a lot more.
Frozen, loosely based on the story of The Snow Queen, is a tale of two sisters, Anna and Elsa. Elsa, born with mysterious powers that she has been raised to be ashamed and fearful of, locks herself away from the rest of the world after an unfortunate accident involving said powers that nearly takes Anna’s life. When it’s time for her to become Queen, she reluctantly takes part in the celebrations which, inevitably, don’t go according to plan. When Elsa flees the kingdom, she inadvertently curses it to a perpetual Winter, leaving Anna no choice but to follow her and try to set things right. Along the way Anna will meet a dashing prince named Hans, a homely woodsman named Kristof, his playful reindeer, Sven, and an enchanted snowman named Olaf. The entire cast are instantly likable and the voice talent is, unsurprisingly, superb all the way through. Especially during Frozen’s many musical numbers.
Frozen is the Disney debut of broadway composer, Robert Lopez who has penned the tunes alongside his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez (who had previously written songs for 2011’s Winnie the Pooh) and just like the last time Disney took a shot on a couple of broadway hot shots the results are nothing short of stellar. The Lopez’ made their names on comedy musicals Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, so naturally there’s a smirking, self-aware sense of humor to just about every song we hear, culminating in a sweet but kind-of-a-little-bit sadistic number about all the fun things that a snowman can do in summer. It’s all the more remarkable that the duo find room for some serious sentiment amidst the silliness. Do You Wanna Build a Snowman? starts off cute but ends with gravitas that it somehow manages to earn in its reasonably short runtime. Let it Go is as powerful a statement of self-acceptance as you’re likely to ever hear and For The First Time in Forever instantly feels like it’s been in the pantheon of great Disney wishing songs all along, just waiting for you to find it. The songs generally lack the instant emotional punch of Part of Your World or Reflection, but what they might lack in immediacy they make up for in heart.
This becomes even more apparent when the melodies are recalled and referenced in Christophe Beck’s wonderful score. If his breathtaking work on Paperman didn’t tip you off, Beck has a knack for simple, elegant, melodic writing that doesn’t need to overcomplicate things to impress. The score sways and swells in all the right places and his use of team Lopez’s thematic material is nothing short of majestic. However powerful Frozen’s melodies might seem first time round, your feels are not prepared for Christophe Beck’s masterful refrains.
Frozen works as a film. It has a great story, carried by a cast of memorable and interesting characters. Even when it’s silly (Anna leaves Hans in charge of her kingdom after knowing him for less time than I’d been in the cinema at that point), the film doesn’t shy away from pointing it out. Not everyone will buy that, and some might wonder if there could have been a more elegant way to get through the, admittedly rushed, exposition, but most its quirks are forgivable for how simply entertaining it all is. Besides, Frozen doesn’t even need to work as an ordinary film, so long as it works as a Disney film and that particular microscope is a lot more interesting to look through.
Since the beginning of this new wave Disney have been taking a few interesting risks with the established Disney paradigms. Tangled saw the heroine fighting to find her family rather than adventuring her way away from them and The Princess & The Frog had the audacity – SPOILER ALERT – to outright kill a main character. It’s pretty clear that we’re not in Kansas anymore, and Frozen certainly isn’t bringing us back there. None of the characters fall into any established fairytale moulds and there’s even a brilliantly clever twist on the true-love’s-kiss cliché. It’s the subtext that really matters though, and even if you believe people have a tendency to read political or social agendas into these films, the fact that those arguments can be made at all is a sign of the time in which it was made.
So while this is all baseless conjecture, I couldn’t help but feel an undercurrent of sexual liberation to Elsa’s story. Not in a sexy way, but in a societal one. She’s different from Anna. Her powers are a mystery to her and she grows up ashamed of them. Her life is one of almost relentless isolation and tragedy as a result. It’s not until she breaks free from her self-inflicted confinement and accepts herself that she realizes the true source of her anguish was her repeated attempts to hide them; repeated attempts to “conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know” before deciding to just “let it go”. There’s no denying that the pressing issue for this generation is that of gay rights – and gender acceptance on a wider scale – and while Disney are never going to acknowledge it, Elsa’s story feels, on more than one occasion, like an allegory for the struggles many young people still face in coming out and/or finding and accepting who they are. Whether it was intentional or not, Frozen is a pretty powerful story of self acceptance and will probably be remembered as much for what’s beneath it’s surface as the surface itself.
Visually, Frozen is truly a sight to behold, but after Tangled that pretty much goes without saying. Its vistas are astounding and it’s directed with exuberance and excitement. The character designs are so charming you’ll want to look at them all day. Honestly, Frozen creates a world so beautiful you just won’t want to leave the cinema. Being a Disney film, visuals were never really going to be an issue. Thankfully the actors (who all perform their singing parts too) deliver phenomenal performances helped along by some incredible writing. There’s so much to love about Frozen that it’s really difficult to tie it down and put into words. There’s so much to love about it that, as I discovered, you might not even notice it all the first time round. What really matters though is whether or not you should go see it. Yes. Go see, Frozen. See it twice if you have to. See it as many times as you can until you see that behind the beautiful characters, beneath the spectacularly rendered snow and ice lies a film with a message that matters and a heart that beats.
[easyreview cat1title=”The Arcade Verdict” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”9″]
