FROZEN Is An Instant Disney Classic

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Frozen (2013) — ****

I wasn’t planning to see Frozen, let alone write a positive review of this new animated Disney musical. The truth is I haven’t wanted to see a Walt Disney Animation Studios film in years. It’s been more than a decade since anything watchable came out of that studio and almost 20 years since they produced anything that could be considered a classic.

Well, Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee’s take on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen achieves this and more. It doesn’t just capture the spirit of the late-80s and early-90s animated musicals from the Mouse House; it reaches their level of greatness.

The film tells the story of two royal sisters in the kingdom of Arendale, one of whom has the power to create ice and snow. As a child, Elsa (Idina Menzel), the one with the powers, accidentally zapped her sister Anna (Kristen Bell) with a cold blast to the head, knocking her unconscious. In an effort to save their daughter, the king and queen take Anna to the magical forest trolls, the elder of which saves Anna’s life by removing any memory of Elsa’s powers but leaving the sisterly fun.

After the incident, Elsa locks herself away in the castles she can’t harm anyone else. Her now clueless sister doesn’t understand why her older sister doesn’t want to play anymore. The two siblings grow older and during what was supposed to be a two week trip away from the kingdom, the king and queen of Arendale are both killed in a shipwreck. This leaves the sisters alone… and apart.

Eventually Elsa becomes old enough to take the throne as the queen of Arendale, which will reunite the sisters and force Elsa to come out of hiding. But on coronation day, Anna surprises her with an engagement to a foreign prince that she just met. This ends in a fight that upsets Elsa to the point that she inadvertently reveals her powers to the crowded ballroom. Elsa flees that kingdom but leaves it in a perpetual state of winter. And it’s up to Anna to find Elsa so she can end the cold spell.

That’s just the basic plot. Of course, there’s more magic in this instant Disney classic. There are love interests and evil princes. A singing snowman and an ice monster. And there’s a young ice harvester named Christophe (Jonathan Groff) who doesn’t have a talking reindeer but is happy to provide the voice for it. Rarely has a Disney movie resulted in as much joy as Frozen, and it does it on its own terms.

Rather than being encumbered by paying homage to the princess movies like Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, Frozen manages and almost unimaginable feat. It takes the same tonal sensibility and visual direction of those classics and for the first time ever successfully applies it to the CGI world. There’s something remarkably organic about the whole thing, and coming from the studio that produces product rather than art more often than not, that’s saying something.

The film also refreshes with a feminist streak that’s unusual for Disney’s animated musicals. Without spoiling anything, true love isn’t what you think it is here, and this tale of sisterhood and the lengths to which siblings will go for each other will likely be tremendously enduring.

To top it off, Frozen improves upon a rather stale musical formula. We’re all very much acquainted with the work of Alan Menken with lyricists Howard Ashman and Stephen Schwartz on films like the two mentioned above, as well as Aladdin and Pocahontas. It’s great musical work to be sure. But for the first time in forever, we have songs that are on par with the modern broadway standard for music and lyrics. This thanks to husband and wife team Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, the former being partly responsible for the Tony Award winning musicals Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon.

I’m sure there are many other people who can be credited with Frozen’s success, including the incredible voice talents of Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel. But Jennifer Lee, the film’s screenplay writer and co-director appears to be the film’s true heroine. Lee, who last wrote the screenplay for the enjoyable but hardly masterful Wreck-It Ralph, is one to watch.

As of the writing of this review, Lee doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. I’m sure that will change because she’s bound to be Disney Animation Studios’ brightest star after Frozen. How could she not be? She created what is quite easily the most visually inventive, cleverly scripted and unapologetically entertaining Disney film I’ve seen in years. Only Enchanted comes close. But given that Frozen isn’t a meta take on the princess movies, it’s hard to consider the two film’s comparable. Frozen is in a league of its own. Or rather, it’s in the same league as the best of both Disney and Pixar in the last quarter century.