Frozen

The clas­sic Dis­ney Princess entered a new phase of her career when the demands of mir­co-scale image analy­sis, demo­graph­ic pan­der­ing and brand vis­i­bil­i­ty dragged her into the com­mit­tee-dri­ven hell­storm of the 21^st Cen­tu­ry. No longer was she able to exist in the realms of bit­ter­sweet fan­ta­sy where anti­quat­ed gen­der stereo­types pre­sent­ed her as bray­ing, twin­kle-eyed arm can­dy for some sword swing­ing hunk. Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen may do much of the fan­cy nar­ra­tive and the­mat­ic foot­work, but there’s no way this sto­ry could be told with all its cul­tur­al his­toric bag­gage in tact.

Pos­si­bly tak­ing a leaf out of the Stu­dio Ghi­b­li hand­book for female empow­er­ment, this lat­est Dis­ney pro­duc­tion offers a neat, uniron­ic spin on the stan­dard issue princess mod­el with a sto­ry which, in essence, is about the very act of mak­ing these arche­types more palat­able for mod­ern audi­ences. Direct­ed and writ­ten by Chris Buck and Jen­nifer Lee, Frozen tells of two sis­ters, both of nobel blood, one, Elsa, is cursed with the abil­i­ty to freeze every­thing she touch­es (old school Dis­ney) and the oth­er, Anna, is a free-spir­it­ed, impul­sive, wise­crack­ing nymph who wouldn’t have been out of place chug­ging boil­er­mak­ers in Brides­maids (new school Disney).

The cen­tral quest nar­ra­tive sees Anna bull­ish­ly head into the snowy tun­dra to find her sis­ter when, dur­ing a fit of piqué, she freezes her entire town­ship and plunges every­one into a nev­er-end­ing win­ter. The fact that Anna reach­es her goal with­in the first half of the film allows much sec­ond-half plot bag­gi­ness, with the swift induc­tion of a com­e­dy snow­man draft­ed in to help each episode along its way.

The two male char­ac­ters in the piece also rep­re­sent a sim­i­lar diver­gence between the puffy-chest­ed hunk of fairy tales yore and the arro­gant, charm­ing lug that wouldn’t have been out of place chug­ging boil­er­mak­ers in The Hang­over. Although the film scores big for it’s sub­tly rad­i­cal finale which, if it doesn’t quite stick two fin­gers up at the sup­posed sanc­ti­ty of het­ero­sex­u­al part­ner­ships, then at least gets big points for at chal­leng­ing the norm.

The 3D ani­ma­tion is pass­able, with lots of effort hav­ing gone into mak­ing water and snowflakes look as pho­to-real­is­tic as pos­si­ble, but the over­all design of the land­scapes and cas­tles sad­ly harks back too far to the stuffy old Dis­ney this is try­ing to get away from.