Classic Disney at its Most Lifeless, Frozen is a Cold CGI Bore.

Rating: 4/10 (19 November 2019)

Frozen, the 2013 Disney ultra-hit had been floating around my peripheries since it was released. I would hear the songs everywhere, my friends would talk about it, I would watch parts of it on various screens in various places. By the time I sat down to actually watch the thing from beginning to end, I had thought I knew what my opinion would be. Frozen seemed like a riff on the classic Disney princess formula, an upbeat fairy tale with colorful characters and great music. However, upon watching it closely for the first time, I quickly developed an overwhelmingly negative reaction.
My dominating thought? Frozen should have been made using hand-drawn animation. Despite the movie's many strengths, I found this notion impossible to get past. Watching Frozen is a mildly enjoyable, but ultimately sterile experience. Against the memorable songs, the computer animation feels bland, uninspired, and, pardon the pun, cold.
The story is indeed a riff on the Disney formula, with princesses and magical kingdoms and goofy sidekicks. It's formally efficient, not really much different in structure from any other Disney princess movie. Frozen leans towards some kind of girl empowerment message (which critics unsurprisingly blew out of proportion with transparent praise), but not in any way that Mulan or Princess and the Frog or Pocahontas didn't. And all three of those films are much better than Frozen. Why? Because they felt alive. The voice actors do their best to prop up the missing verve. Idina Menzel is a very good singer, she helps. Josh Gad has an amusing moment or two as Olaf. Kristen Bell, for her part, tries very hard, but her skittish modern girl act gets tiresome quick, and straight-up annoying the longer it goes.
But it's not the story or the voice acting that makes Frozen feel dull. It's the animation. I have to preface my opinion by saying that I am open-minded about the strengths of CG animation. Obviously, it can be done tremendously well. It can work in tandem with the right story. Frozen is just not the right story. It is a classic Disney musical. It is crying out for classic Disney animation. It needs the warmth, personality, and texture of animation made by hand. Without that special touch, something feels "off". It is designed to look like an old-school cartoon, but it isn't one. The entire movie exists on an uneasy point between realism and idealism. Why try to awkwardly replicate an art style in the computer when the tools are there to do it for real?
This is a topic that really winds me up. I don't think it's impossible to make a nostalgic Disney movie using CG animation. It can certainly be done (Frozen shows the difficulty inherent in trying, but nevertheless). What I stand passionately against, is the belief that CGI should replace an entire separate art form. There seems to be a common belief that hand-drawn animation or "2D animation" as some call it, is technically obsolete, like fax machines or paper maps. Or that it's too expensive, so it should be phased out of existence completely (The fact that Disney themselves have led this charge is doubly maddening). Traditional animation is an art form. Done well, it has the exact same appeal today as it did in 1937. The same way oil paintings can still be uniquely beautiful even after the invention of the photograph. But don't tell the animation studios this. They are content with throwing the entire medium in the trash, as if they simply cannot afford to scare audiences away with a "dead" technology. But would Frozen have been any less of a box-office hit if it were frame by frame the same movie, only drawn by hand? Absolutely not. In fact, it'd almost certainly be a better film. A film with more personality and charm, with more energy and life.
I totally resent people's compulsion to simply declare Frozen's animation "beautiful" without any solid reasoning. What does "beautiful" really mean? That the snow looks like real snow? That the ice shoots across the whole screen in elaborate patterns? What does the increased complexity of computer animation really add if it forsakes the important charms hand-drawn animation provides? For a movie like Frozen, the answer is, nothing.
You're making a fairy tale. You need an artistic reason to animate it with computers. It can't be the standard. Frozen has no reason. It is technically proficient. You've got a story, characters, and music that basically work, but animation that does not. Just because CG animation exists, doesn't mean hand-drawn animation has to retire. In fact, if Frozen proves anything, it's that even some modern stories deserve the timeless personal touch of pencil on paper.
42/100