Wreck-It Ralph was
a revelation: a fairytale for the videogame age about the true meaning of villainy
and heroism. Now Ralph’s cowriter, Jennifer Lee, has written and co-directed a
new film, Frozen, in which one of the all-time great fairytale villains gets a
whole new outlook.
Minor spoilers ahead…
Frozen is loosely
based on a
fable by Hans Christian Andersen, The
Snow Queen, in which the eponymous Snow Queen is kind of a nasty piece of
work. But in Frozen, the Snow Queen
is in a similar position to Wreck-It Ralph — she’s a misunderstood figure,
whom almost everybody sees as a villain.
Without giving too much away, Frozen is about two Princesses: Elsa (Idina Menzel) and her sister Anna
(Kristen Bell). Elsa has ice powers, somewhat akin to Iceman from the X-Men. But
she can’t really control them, so her parents encourage her to suppress them,
and keep her locked away. But that backfires (back-ices?) when Elsa grows up
and becomes queen herself, and winds up plunging the land into an eternal
winter when she loses control.
The thing that’s great about Frozen is that it refuses ever to turn the question of Elsa’s out-of-control
powers into a simple metaphor for female empowerment, or growing up, or
believing in yourself. Elsa and Anna both remain emotionally complex and flawed
characters, who behave foolishly and selfishly at times, but their bond as
sisters is always at the heart of the movie. The movie lets us see how Elsa’s confinement
has damaged both sisters, without ever offering us a capital-M Metaphor.
A lot of animated kids’ films fall into the trap of using
ridiculous plot contrivances just to shore up a simplistic message — but Frozen has the courage to be a bit more
messy, so that by the time you get to an ending that does bring everything
together, it feels less like a final plot hammer descending and more like a real
resolution.
Like Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen’s
Snow Queen becomes a villain because that’s what pretty much everybody expects
of her. She’s isolated and has a power that only seems to be capable of ruining
everything. Unlike Ralph, though, she can’t even imagine a version of the world
where she’s the hero instead of the villain — she’s just trapped in her role
as exiled monster, and can either embrace it or accept it.
The fact that Frozen
turns a fairytale villainness into a sympathetic and complicated character —
who gets the best songs — results in an escapist cartoon that’s feminist in a
subtler way than your standard “girl power” story. And the way this film puts the relationship
between two sisters front and center, while still offering up a strong male
characters in Hans (Santino Fontana) and Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), is also
very nicely done.
At the same time, Frozen
is nowhere near as good as Wreck-It
Ralph — which is to say, it falls short of perfection. The world-building
is a little scattershot, as compared to Ralph’s
richly imagined video-game multiverse. Some of the story beats are a little
murky, and some of the twists seem to come out of nowhere. Some of the set
pieces overstay their welcomes. Frozen
doesn’t have quite as much sheer cleverness or inventiveness, minute by minute,
as Ralph dazzled us with.
But the heart of Frozen
is really strong, and the major characters feel fully realized. This film has
the same genius for juxtaposing the archetypes that are placed on people with
the messy reality of being a person in the world. And there are some real,
solid, moments in the film that will grab you by the heart.
Frozen is
aggressively musical — it’s not just one of those animated films where a few
key moments have characters singing. Pretty much any time anybody wants to say
anything in Frozen, there’s a musical
number. Musical numbers end, only to segue into other musical numbers. The good
news is, the songs are the work of Avenue
Q/Book of Mormon co-creator
Robert Lopez and his wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez, and they are as catchy as hell.
And they massively amp up the emotional intensity of the story, when they’re
not adding a bit more comedy to the procedings.
And that’s the other thing — this film is goofy as heck. It’s
not over-the-top silly, so much as just gently wacky. From Olaf the dim-witted
snowman (read
our interview with actor Josh Gad here) to the nutty Duke of Weselton (Alan
Tudyk, fully bringing it) Frozen is just
a little bit addled, in a mostly good way. And there is some truly bodacious slapstick in this film, much of it having to do with ice-related mishaps.
https://gizmodo.com/how-did-that-silly-snowman-became-the-best-part-of-froz-1472030898
The other thing that’s worth mentioning about Frozen: it’s beautifully animated. For a
film in which ice and snow drive a lot of the story, Frozen devotes a lot of attention to getting their texture and
consistency just right. There are countless scenes where the powderiness of
snow or the slickness of ice is conveyed not just by how they affect the
characters who interact with them, but also how light plays across them. A
small army of computer professionals probably spent months cooped up somewhere
trying to get those textures right, and they did good.
All in all, it’s tempting to say Frozen does for fairytales what Ralph
did for video games — but it’s more like both movies take our current
obsession with heroes and villains and open it up a little bit, by showing how
those roles are just roles.
And with fairytales holding so much sway over our collective
imagination just now, it’s great to see films like this Frozen (and Brave) that replace
the usual opaque wickedness with something more personal, that opens a magic
window onto the real experience of growing up and finding yourself as a person.
