Breaking the Ice: FROZEN

In Frozen, family dynamics ice over an entire kingdom and the thawing process takes down some of the typical Disney formula with it. The latest Disney animated movie is an earnest and refreshingly unwinking princess story with plenty of conflict, but no easy villain, and nice romance, without the ultimate fate of any character depending upon it. It’s not a total evolution for the studio, but nor should it be. Despite some staleness, the Disney formula isn’t broken and certainly has its charms, with big-eyed storybook characters, beautifully designed and exquisitely shaded landscapes, and heartfelt schmaltzy fairy tale endings. But this new film, like Tangled, Disney’s 2010 riff on Rapunzel, takes the raw materials of an old story, this time Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen,” and injects into it a great deal of musical charm and surprising psychological depth. Tangled built its drama out of a smothering mother/daughter relationship warped by mother’s wicked witch status. With Frozen, there’s a hint of magic powers powering sisterly tensions that explodes in metaphor to be thrillingly resolved.

Jennifer Lee’s screenplay is a built on a relationship between two sisters, a dynamic rarely explored seriously, let alone allowed to power the entire plot of a major Hollywood family picture. Here, the sisters are Elsa and Anna, princesses in the kingdom of Arendell. As giggly little girls, they’re best friends, eager to play with slightly older Elsa’s magical abilities to generate and manipulate ice and snow. But a near tragedy leaves Elsa feeling shame. She remembers what happened, how she nearly caused the death of her sister with her growing powers. Her parents, understandably worried, close the gates of the kingdom and sequester Elsa, the better to keep Anna safe unaware of her sister’s capabilities. But Anna doesn’t remember her near-death experience and so reads the events as an inexplicable icing over of a beloved relationship. This is a rather nuanced and powerful exploration of sibling dynamics, and it comes to drive the conflict of the story to come.

Through a series of misunderstandings, Elsa ends up in self-imposed exile at the snowy top of a mountain and it’s up to Anna to find her and bring her back to the kingdom. Their falling out is infecting the whole kingdom, Elsa’s uncontrollable powers unwittingly sending Arendell into a permanent winter, at least until this situation is resolved. There’s a great blue, purple and white color palate to the iced over land. It gives new meaning – and good metaphoric use – to having an icy relationship with a relative. The script allows both women to grow slightly into their young adulthood, finding maturity through crisis, and learn how to love each other, magic power or not. The plot depends upon it. So does their relationship and, by extension, their kingdom.

Elsa and Anna are charmingly and expressively voiced by Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell. They imbue their roles with nuance, wit, depth of feeling, and a fine sense of sisterly tensions and affections. They have great voices, relaxed, funny, and tearful, before leaping octaves and scaling effortlessly into terrific pop ballads and Broadway numbers of the kind associated with the Disney Renaissance style of the 90s, with memorable music and lyrics by veterans of 2011’s Winnie the Pooh and Disney Channel’s Phineas & Ferb, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez. Bell’s the star here, shouldering the bulk of the journey to the mountaintop and the struggle to reconcile sisterly differences and getting a few witty songs along the way. But it’s Menzel who gets the showstopper yearning ballad in which she begins the process of learning to love herself for who she is. It’s a family movie about princesses that’s all about how they get along by embracing what makes them unique and bolstering their self-confidence. What a refreshing sight.

Elsewhere in the story there’s a handsome prince (Santino Fontana) and a handsome young ice merchant (Jonathan Groff). The former starts out looking like the romantic figure, but stays behind, wishing Anna good luck on her journey, while the latter ends up helping her, tagging along as sidekick and maybe potential love interest. And, perhaps in a concession to Disney formula, Anna is joined by obligatory comic relief in the form of a big puppy dog of a reindeer and a small, funny, sentient snowman. He’s voiced by Josh Gad and gets a sort of clever little song about how much he wants to see summer. The little guy grew on me as the main characters make their journey and run into exciting complications.

The movie is a comfortable and comforting blend of Disney old and new. Directors Chris Buck (co-director of 1999’s Tarzan) and Jennifer Lee (in her directorial debut) oversee a production with sparkling fractals of visual delight, with rounded edges in the backgrounds and of the character design and giving it the best computer animated approximation of the studio’s hand-drawn house style. The music is lush and stuck in my head as I type this now, easily passing the leaving-the-theater-humming test.

Though I was enjoying the voice work, the dazzling animation, and wonderful songs, it surprised me how invested I was in the story. It’s involving enough I managed to wonder (or worry?) for a moment or two that Disney wouldn’t provide us with an uncomplicatedly happy ending. But maybe best of all is the way the conflict is built entirely out of the sister’s relationship and the villainous or romantic complications don’t ultimately factor into its creation or solution. Frozen’s commitment to making and keeping these princesses fully formed characters with a deeply felt relationship makes the film so satisfying and moving, even as it’s still a grand Disney entertainment in the best sense.

Stuffed with Fluff: WINNIE THE POOH

I don’t see how any lover of animation, and certainly any fan of Winnie the Pooh, could be disappointed in Winnie the Pooh, a lovingly hand-drawn animated feature that hews closely to the original tone and structure of the A.A. Milne picture books as filtered through the indelible visual design of the 1960’s Disney shorts based on them and compiled in the altogether wonderful 1977 feature The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. This new film collects the familiar characters in their familiar setting and allows them to behave in predictably mild and sweet ways. Perhaps the strangest and most notable thing about this feature, especially now in 2011, is how simple and unconcerned with posturing it is.

Directors Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall (along with their small army of writers and animators) are decidedly uninterested in straining for artificial hipness. There is ease and comfortability with which the production slips into the simple, charming rhythms of a life with Pooh bear in the Hundred Acre Wood. Winnie the Pooh (Jim Cummings) just wants his honey – his tummy, after all, is awfully grumbly – and the crux of the film is finding ways to thwart that desire, to create situations that will pull the character into choices between finding honey and helping others. Sometimes, he will fail, and succumb to the visions of honey pots dancing in his head like a Busby Berkeley number, but eventually Pooh learns to put others first. At least until his tummy starts grumbling again.

Between Pooh and his honey is a collection of familiar characters with various immediate goals. The depressive donkey named Eeyore (Bud Luckey) loses his tail. The bouncy, flouncy Tigger (Jim Cummings, again) thinks he just might need a sidekick. Owl (Craig Ferguson, an unexpected choice) is writing his memoirs. Rabbit (Tom Kenny) is tending his garden. Kanga  (Kristen Anderson-Lopez) is knitting a scarf for Roo (Wyatt Dean Hall). Piglet (Travis Oates) is – oh, d-d-d-dear! – so nervous. These are characters that are cheerfully stationary in their personalities, which have a kind of warmhearted purity of spirit in their sweet simplicity. It’s nice to see them again because we know they will fall into predictable patterns. The voice work, an eclectic mix to be sure, is comforting in its way of seeming to fit the memory of what they sounded like in the past. There are differences in some of the interpretations but by and large they fit. After all, the voices are a just as predictable part of the characters as their personalities

But that’s not to say the film itself is overly predictable. Simplicity is the key here, not a kind of watery sameness or dumb homogenized energy, but a simple reverence for childhood and a true respect for a very young target audience. Their surrogate, the imaginative little British boy Christopher Robin (Jack Boulter), serves as a bridge between the “real world” and the world of these ambulatory animated stuffed animals. He is never explicitly shown to be the creator of this gentle fantasy. He’s a participant and, when absent, a recipient of reverence and respect from these creatures. There’s a playful storybook atmosphere that harkens back to Disney’s earlier efforts of adaptation.

Narrator John Cleese will break into banter with the imaginary characters, sometimes even shaking the book or finding his patience tried when the drawings collide or otherwise interact with the text on the page. There’s a love of reading, of wordplay, present in the film that helps to create an atmosphere of sweet sophistication. It may seem all a bit simple and distant to a jaded adult audience, but for kids I would imagine that the film has a wonderful sense of being pitched at exactly the right level, with just enough to engage the very young precisely where they are and even occasionally thrillingly just enough beyond where they are. It’s a refreshingly small feature, topping out at just over an hour, padded to feature length with a delightful post-credits scene, a syrupy pre-feature short, and sweet songs sung by Zooey Deschanel. Its modest scale makes it entirely perfect for what it is, a grand first theatrical experience for a small child while also serving as a small dose of nostalgia for those who love and cherish the everlasting reliability that these characters will remain exactly who they are for now and forever.