Why I Saw It: I'm a sucker for a good Disney animated feature and I was greatly curious to hear Kristen Bell as a Disney Princess.
[Voice] Cast: Might as well start with Kristen Bell. It's impossible to hate her and that comes through in the movie with Anna, who is already one of my favorite Disney Princesses. Idina Menzel provides the voice for Anna's sister, the Ice Queen Elsa and boy can she sing. While Pixar and Dreamworks go for A-list talent for voices, Disney Animation tends to go a little more obscure. So, I've never heard of Menzel, Jonathan Groff (Kristoff), or Santino Fontana (Hans) which means the voices carry no baggage which works in their favor. Josh Gad, unsurprisingly, is the comedic relief and he is a vintage Disney sidekick.
Plot: Disney doesn't tell complex stories. This one is basically, Elsa hides her ice powers until she can't and accidentally brings on eternal winter. Then, Anna tries to undo this. I won't pretend there's a lot of more to it or that it goes in a direction you don't expect, but there are a couple beats that I didn't see coming. I could harp on a couple small details with sequence of events or logic, but I don't want to because the whole thing is to damn enjoyable. You can always sum it up as a one sentence moral of the story. This one would probably be "Embrace what makes you and others different" or something like that.
Animation: This looked great. I'm used to looking at Pixar as the gold standard in animation, but this is as pretty as anything I've seen from them. There were a few years there around the time of Bolt, when Disney didn't seem to know if they wanted to do computer animation when they looked like an afterthought. That is no longer.
Elephant in the Room: I hear this has music. I never appreciated the days of the Menken musical numbers that brought on the Disney Renaissance but I do now and this is a major return to that. The songs in this are great, funny, and catchy. They fit in with the movie and are the best kind of distraction. I hope we will be getting more of them in years to come.
Mouse in the Room: There's a great Mickey Mouse short at the beginning of the movie. It's been a while since Disney has done anything with him and the short is a very clever use of old footage (complete with Walt Disney as Mickey's voice). No one else includes shorts like this before movies and I'm not sure how many studios could get away with it but Disney's made good with them.
To Sum Things Up:
Most of the time with animated movies you have to forgive a lot of things and say things like "well, it was for kids". That is absolutely not the case with Frozen. The story rings true to all ages. The jokes are legitimately funny. The action is actually exciting. The music is Broadway-level. After Wreck It Ralph and now this, I'm about ready to say that Disney Animation is back and I couldn't be more pleased.
Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend
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