Nice cold

Rating: 7/10 (23 November 2014)

Yet another sumptuous PIxar animated feature and the first in a long time to actually be an adaptation of a classic fairy tale (Hans Christian Anderson's "The Snow Queen"). With a catchy soundtrack, witty and amusing dialogue and excellent artwork, this is one of the best latter-day Disney's and was deserving of its runaway (or should that be skateaway?) box-office success.
Young Queen Anna's ice-throwing powers are very-well illustrated by the animators on top of their usual mastery of movement, background and facial expressions. The songs come at you a bit like a snowstorm, thick and fast, but they are always apropos the plot and invariably stirring and moving (the soundtrack album topped the US Billboard album chart for weeks on original release, which must say something about the standard of composition).
Sure, the big-eyed, idealised forms of the human characters arguably overdoes the "cute factor" but it's not as if Pixar is going to abandon the formula which has brought it so much success from "Toy Story" onwards. I actually thought, about a third of the way into the movie, that the story was going to be carried wholly by "human" characters with no talking animals, in fact there was a nice spoof on this early in the film with Kristof having an amusing ventriloquist-type conversation with himself and his faithful reindeer Sven, but of course, the introduction of talking multi-part snowman Alf just couldn't be resisted. Funny as he is, I suspect commercial considerations aimed at the infant "want-that-toy" market were at work.
Also predictable was the introduction of a bad-guy protagonist just to reinforce Disney's perennial need for a whole "good versus evil" battle, but again, this time the quarter from where this arises was unexpected and seemed forced. In films of this type, I think it's better if the baddie is identifiable from the start rather than slipped in under the viewer's nose as occurs here. And while I'm carping, couldn't a better film title have been employed too, I mean I know they seem to like snappy one-word titles (c.f. "Up", "Brave" et. al) but what was wrong with tributing Anderson's source story properly?
Anyway, I did enjoy the film, there was lots of pithy and funny dialogue, the songs were varied and amusing and by the end, my heart of ice was probably melted, but while I would say it was one of the better Pixar productions, I wouldn't rate it as the very best. Maybe the inevitable sequel ("Deeper Frozen" anyone?) will rectify some of the minor failings I detected here.