Frozen: The latest creation from the team behind "Wreck-It-Ralph"

Today, I'm looking at the acclaimed animated feature from the team behind Wreck-It-Ralph and Tangled.

Frozen:
This film is basically a reimagined version of acclaimed author Han Christian Andersen's famous fairy tale The Snow Queen, which is somewhat toned down from the original book. It follows two sisters/princesses in the fictitious kingdom of Arendell in the Alps, the older of which has cryokinesis (the power to control ice and snow). After a childhood accident, the older sister must control her powers and lock herself away in her room, while her younger sister is blissfully unaware of the powers and thinks her sister is shutting her out because she doesn't like her. When the older sister is finally able to become queen, she allows the public and other wealthy leaders to enter her castle and witness her coronation. She unfortunately loses control of her powers and brings on an eternal winter before retreating into the mountains. Now the younger sister, a prince, and a young working-class man and his pet reindeer must go and see if they can save the older sister from herself and end the winter. The voice cast in excellent featuring Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars, House of Lies, Fanboys, The Lifeguard), Idina Menzel (known for her stage roles in Rent and Wicked, and her screen roles in the Rent film and Glee), Jonathan Groff (Glee, C.O.G., Looking), Josh Gad (1600 Penn, The Rocker, Jobs, and the Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Broadway musical The Book of Mormon), stage actor Santino Fontana, and Alan Tudyk (Firefly, Serenity, 42, A Knight's Tale, Suburgatory, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Wreck-It-Ralph). The best two characters by far are Olaf the snowman (voiced by Gad) and Oaken (voiced by Bolt co-director Chris Williams). Olaf and Oaken are comedy relief, but aren't annoying like in most family films. Oaken only appears in one scene, but he's one of the most memorable characters, and he should have been in more of it. Olaf's just funny, plain and simple. Tudyk's character, the Duke of Weselton, is more of a minor role, but he's entertaining because he's such an obnoxious, stupid little asshole, you can't help but be entertained by his antics. The musical numbers are okay, I'm not a huge fan of a lot of Disney music, so I didn't particularly like the songs in this film, as they were kind of repetitive, however, they were short and bearable. This film, like Wreck-It-Ralph, opens with a cool opening short. This time, rather than going for sentiment like in Ralph's short "Paperman", they decided slapstick comedy was the way to go, and they did a short where the characters from a 1930's Disney cartoon pop out of the black-and-white screen and into a colorful, modern-day movie theater. The short is called "Get a Horse!" and is the first original Mickey Mouse cartoon in almost 20 years. The feature film is produced by John Lasseter, a major name in computer animation, as he is one of the founders of Pixar, and wrote and directed Toy Story 1 & 2, A Bug's Life, and Cars 1 &2. The film has great direction, and the animation is extremely well-done. Frozen is definitely one of the best animated movies of the year, it's smart, well-animated, and sentimental, which isn't surprising considering the large amount of talent behind it. 4/5 stars.

 (Image: Wikipedia)