Frozen
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 🎵The cold never bothered me anyway.🎵
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Frozen is a 2013 American 3D computer-animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It is the 53rd Disney animated feature film. Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Snow Queen", the film tells the story of a fearless princess who sets off on a journey alongside a rugged iceman, his loyal pet reindeer, and a naïve snowman to find her estranged sister, whose icy powers have inadvertently trapped the kingdom in eternal winter. It premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California, on November 19, 2013, had a limited release on November 22 and went into general theatrical release on November 27. The success of the movie resulted in the film launching a franchise, including an animated short in 2015, an animated featurette in 2017, and a feature-length sequel, Frozen II, in November 2019. A live-action remake is rumored to be in developement.
Plot
When their kingdom becomes trapped in perpetual winter, fearless Anna (Kristen Bell) joins forces with mountaineer Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) and his reindeer sidekick to find Anna's sister, Snow Queen Elsa (Idina Menzel), and break her icy spell. Although their epic journey leads them to encounters with mystical trolls, a comedic snowman (Josh Gad), harsh conditions, and magic at every turn, Anna and Kristoff bravely push onward in a race to save their kingdom from winter's cold grip.
Why It Freezes (Except in a Good Way)
- Excellent music numbers including Let It Go, Do You Want to Build a Snowman and For the First Time in Forever.
- Beautifully done animation for the snow and special effects. The animation during songs like the orchestral "Let It Go" is simply breathtaking with not just the animation itself (although it is responsible for a majority of the reasons why it's such a beautiful moment, excluding the song itself), but also the color palette that plays a big part in why it's such an amazing scene.
- Likable and entertaining characters like Anna, Elsa, Kristoff and even the comic relief Olaf (who actually manages to be genuinely funny and not annoying at all).
- Anna's sacrifice in order to save Elsa from Hans is one of the film's most touching and emotional moments. As well as the aftermath of her turning into a frozen statue as a result.
- Funny moments like when Sven eats Olaf's nose but puts it back on his face as he was just kidding.
- A Disney princess with cryokinesis (ice powers) is pretty creative and original. Especially considering how not many Disney princesses up to that point even had any sort of supernatural powers. While they were some exceptions like Kida from Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Rapunzel from Tangled, and Ariel from The Little Mermaid, and it was later popularized with Moana from the movie of the same name, the concept of a princess with magical powers was still relatively new and very rare. Which makes Elsa stand out from the crowd that much more.
- It delivers plenty of powerful messages like the importance of self-control and never shutting your loved ones out.
- The movie does have a few action scenes, and they are very fun and intense. Like Anna and Kristoff being chased by wolves and escaping Marshmallow (along with Olaf).
- Great chemistry between the characters, especially between Anna and Elsa. Kristoff and Anna also established a pretty good relationship over their time together to find Elsa and it's later tested when they must save Anna once her heart is frozen.
- Christophe Beck's score is well-done.
- The soundtrack itself is also no short of magnificent. "Let It Go" was such a monumental hit that it managed to gain 747,866,690 views on Youtube. "Love Is an Open Door" is a borderline villain song due to Hans' presence, but otherwise serves as a cute love song in disguise. "For the First Time in Forever" is arguably one of the best "I want" songs in any Disney film (which is really saying a lot giving it's competition). "Fixer Upper" however, is arguably the weakest of the songs, due to it's lyrics (which, can sound corny or sappy) and how completely inappropriate it is considering the situation. The songs (excluding Fixer Upper) are also more well-integrated into the story than most Disney film songs (which is also really saying a lot given how well Disney weaves their songs into their movies).
- It has excellent character development. The most prominent example in the film being Elsa. Who, following the incident where her powers nearly killed Anna in the sisters' childhood, was led to suppress her powers and isolate herself from her sister in the process. And she continued to do so even into adulthood. But after her powers were exposed to the entirety of the kingdom, she ran away in fear and continued to isolate herself from society. But by the end, she sees the consequences of her actions as well as her running away from them. And she freely lets others in on her secret by the end.
- "You can't marry a man you've just met".
Bad Qualities
- The story itself is very predictable and clichéd.
- The songs can be to much to the point that the film feels short without the songs.
- This movie arguably has one of the most infamous Disney twist villain with Prince Hans, similar to Guy Gagne from Turbo. At first, Hans appears be one of the nice characters, but in the second act, there is the moment where Hans turned out to not really love Anna and only sought usurpation of Arendelle. This twist is often criticized for coming out of nowhere (i.e., being improperly foreshadowed) and because of this, the villain has weak motivations.
- Anna and Elsa's parents actions at the beginning are highly questionable.
- The scene where Anna hits Hans can be considered as a blatant rip-off of the exact same scene from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which came out approximately a decade before this film.
Reception
Frozen was met with praise for its visuals, screenplay, themes, music, and voice acting; especially those of Bell, Menzel, and Gad, some film critics consider Frozen to be the best Disney animated feature film since the studio's renaissance era. The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 90% of critics gave the film a positive review based on 241 reviews, with an average rating of 7.69/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Beautifully animated, smartly written, and stocked with singalong songs, Frozen adds another worthy entry to the Disney canon.". Metacritic, which determines a rating out of 100 from the reviews of mainstream critics, calculated a score of 74 based on 43 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews." CinemaScore gave Frozen an "A+" on an A+ to F scale, based on polls conducted during the opening weekend.
Videos
Trivia
- This film was negatively received by Norwegian critics and received negative reviews in Norway, with the general consensus being that of "generic plot and characters" and "forced and obnoxious musical numbers", while one particular review criticized the setting for "not really looking like Norway".
- Olaf's Frozen Adventure was negatively received in Mexico, because of the short being too long and people expecting to see the main feature it was paired with, Coco, to the point where the short was removed just a week after releaase.
- This film became a smash hit in Japan, France and the United Kingdom.
- Troubled production: This film had a relatively easygoing production — at least in terms of the people involved getting along with each other. The problem was instead the story.
- They spent several years changing the plot over and over. And then once production had gotten well underway, they were inspired by Idina Menzel's performance of "Let it Go" (which was written as a Villain Song accompanying a "Then Let Me Be Evil" epiphany for Elsa, but turned out much more positive and uplifting than they intended even for what was meant to be a sympathetic Tragic Villain) to re-write Elsa as a hero rather than a villain. Making sweeping changes to the plot to accommodate this new characterization, they were left with under fifteen months to finish the film.
- Due to this change in mid-development, there has been a lot of information and concept art on the "Evil Elsa" plot that's been dumped around compared to most Disney films, including concept art for Disney Infinity, unused models, a lot of concept art, and many unused songs.
- "Let It Go" was Disney's most succesful and popular song ever before being surpassed by "We Don't Talk About Bruno" from Encanto in 2022.
- The movie has spawned multiple controversies:
- Allegations of sexism occoured by the movie's head of animation who said that it was hard to animate the characters because it was difficult to go through the range of emotions and other characterstics and make the characters likable. Politics took this as them saying "if you're not drawn the conventionally pretty cartoon way, you're worthless".
- It had recieved LGBT parallels by the Christian community saying that Elsa's themes of characters were potrayed as homosexual in many ways and were different from the other characters in the film, calling Elsa a role model for the LGBT youth.
- It spawned a third controversy on November 24, 2017 when a musical artist named Jamie Ciero sued the artists involved in the song " Let It Go", saying that it was a rip off of his 2007 single "Volar".
- Some people were mad at the producers for making Kristoff blonde because he's Sami, and claimed that he was whitewashed because they thought he should have dark hair, even though if you look up pictures of Sami people, many of them have blonde hair.
Template:Walt Disney Animation Studios
External Links
Frozen at the Internet Movie Database
Frozen on Rotten Tomatoes
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