{"id":405,"date":"2014-04-04T23:25:27","date_gmt":"2014-04-05T03:25:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kristinjanz.com\/?p=405"},"modified":"2014-04-04T23:25:27","modified_gmt":"2014-04-05T03:25:27","slug":"frozen-is-no-snow-queen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kristinjanz.com\/?p=405","title":{"rendered":"Frozen is no Snow Queen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald and I recently saw the latest Disney animated feature, Frozen<\/a><\/em>, and while it had some good moments and\u00c2\u00a0one great song, we didn’t enjoy it as much as some of the other recent Disney films (Wreck-It Ralph<\/em>, for instance).<\/p>\n

The biggest problem was the writing.\u00c2\u00a0 A major plot twist\u00c2\u00a0was not foreshadowed at all, the pacing felt off during the first quarter or third of the movie, and the tendency of characters to break out into song at the least provocation felt forced and awkward.\u00c2\u00a0 (Yes, I realize that it’s a musical, but ideally it should either feel somewhat natural that someone has started singing, or the song itself should be so memorable that you don’t care.)\u00c2\u00a0 Early in the movie, I felt myself inwardly sighing every time a character started to sing, and waiting for the plot to pick up again.<\/p>\n

For me,\u00c2\u00a0the movie\u00c2\u00a0also suffers by comparison with the Hans Christian Andersen story that inspired it, “The Snow Queen”<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 This isn’t the first Andersen\u00c2\u00a0tale re-imagined by Disney, but Frozen<\/em> has even less in common with\u00c2\u00a0the original story\u00c2\u00a0than The Little Mermaid<\/em> did.\u00c2\u00a0 “The Snow Queen” is about the epic quest of a girl, Gerda, to rescue her childhood friend Kay after he’s kidnapped by the eponymous queen.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s one of Andersen’s longest fairy tales, and the one that made the strongest impression on me.\u00c2\u00a0 I always liked that the girl got to be the one doing the rescuing (my Barbie dolls went on a lot of quests to rescue captive princes from evil sorcerers); also there are a lot of memorable characters, like the robber girl and the talking crows.\u00c2\u00a0 And some wonderful scenes.\u00c2\u00a0 The scene where the Snow Queen steals Kay away reminds me of Edmund meeting the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe<\/em>; although of course Andersen’s scene was written about 100 years earlier.\u00c2\u00a0 I wonder if Lewis was either consciously or sub-consciously inspired by it.<\/p>\n

So, see Frozen<\/em> if you need your Disney fix, but I don’t think it’s one of their better movies.\u00c2\u00a0 And go read “The Snow Queen”.\u00c2\u00a0 Right now!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donald and I recently saw the latest Disney animated feature, Frozen, and while it had some good moments and\u00c2\u00a0one great song, we didn’t enjoy it as much as some of the other recent Disney films (Wreck-It Ralph, for instance). The … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[282,280,175,281],"class_list":["post-405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","tag-disney","tag-frozen","tag-hans-christian-andersen","tag-the-snow-queen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kristinjanz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kristinjanz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kristinjanz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kristinjanz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kristinjanz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kristinjanz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kristinjanz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kristinjanz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kristinjanz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}