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calimacDisney's Frozen. Finally saw it.
It's not the return of the Silver Age, that's one thing. But it's a far sight better than Tangled, that's another for sure. Better songs and far more coherent plot. Not as dazzling in visual design as The Princess and the Frog, but what can you do with ice, and the comic relief sidekick characters are so much less annoying.
The ending was a bizarre combination of far more satisfying than I'd have ever expected of a Disney cartoon and curiously unresolved and unsatisfying, but I'd best leave discussion of it at that. The way the plot went about supplying the missing element of the story, a villain, was quite bizarre and should have been done away with.
Originally, I understand, the villain was going to be Elsa, the Snow Queen, until the songwriters submitted her big character number, which was so self-justificatory that the screenwriters supposedly said, "We'd better rethink this," and it's good that they did, since that provided the key to the impressively good part of the ending.
That song is a power ballad that I came across the video of a couple weeks ago, and I was actually quite taken with it. B. says that Idina Menzel was bad casting as Elsa, since her voice is too earthy for a character who ought to sound icy, and I can't disagree (maybe they just thought, "Hey, she's played a wicked witch before"), but I was hooked anyway.
If you haven't heard it, you might like to. Elsa's uncontrollable power to create ice and snow has just been revealed to her shame and embarrassment, and she's fled the small city of which she is queen to go live up in the frozen mountains. This song marks the point where she decides to embrace her strange gift and run with it; she proceeds to use her power to redecorate her surroundings and then herself. And it goes like this:
This ought to be a major step in a terrific character arc, but the movie is really about her sister Anna, and Elsa's arc is stunted and full of ellipses. There's no opportunity for her to do anything with the ice palace she's built, and that's one of the movie's major frustrations.
Of several cover versions of the song I've also listened to, including the awful one over the closing credits, by far the best was also by Menzel, accompanied by a jug band of children's instruments on The Tonight Show. Even though she and the band get out of harmonic sync at the start of the last verse and don't recover for a couple lines, I found this utterly charming, and it goes like this:
It's not the return of the Silver Age, that's one thing. But it's a far sight better than Tangled, that's another for sure. Better songs and far more coherent plot. Not as dazzling in visual design as The Princess and the Frog, but what can you do with ice, and the comic relief sidekick characters are so much less annoying.
The ending was a bizarre combination of far more satisfying than I'd have ever expected of a Disney cartoon and curiously unresolved and unsatisfying, but I'd best leave discussion of it at that. The way the plot went about supplying the missing element of the story, a villain, was quite bizarre and should have been done away with.
Originally, I understand, the villain was going to be Elsa, the Snow Queen, until the songwriters submitted her big character number, which was so self-justificatory that the screenwriters supposedly said, "We'd better rethink this," and it's good that they did, since that provided the key to the impressively good part of the ending.
That song is a power ballad that I came across the video of a couple weeks ago, and I was actually quite taken with it. B. says that Idina Menzel was bad casting as Elsa, since her voice is too earthy for a character who ought to sound icy, and I can't disagree (maybe they just thought, "Hey, she's played a wicked witch before"), but I was hooked anyway.
If you haven't heard it, you might like to. Elsa's uncontrollable power to create ice and snow has just been revealed to her shame and embarrassment, and she's fled the small city of which she is queen to go live up in the frozen mountains. This song marks the point where she decides to embrace her strange gift and run with it; she proceeds to use her power to redecorate her surroundings and then herself. And it goes like this:
This ought to be a major step in a terrific character arc, but the movie is really about her sister Anna, and Elsa's arc is stunted and full of ellipses. There's no opportunity for her to do anything with the ice palace she's built, and that's one of the movie's major frustrations.
Of several cover versions of the song I've also listened to, including the awful one over the closing credits, by far the best was also by Menzel, accompanied by a jug band of children's instruments on The Tonight Show. Even though she and the band get out of harmonic sync at the start of the last verse and don't recover for a couple lines, I found this utterly charming, and it goes like this:
