Some people are worth melting forJust maybe not right this second.

Rating: 9/10 (14 May 2014)

The classic Disney animated films – the really classic ones, like the films made when Walt Disney was still alive – all possessed an uncanny ability to capture childhood emotions that were easily shared by adults and children alike.
Frozen is one of the few recent films to capture that classic Disney spirit. Very, very loosely adapted from Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, it's the story of the Nordic kingdom of Arendelle and the two orphaned sisters, Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell), charged with running it. The spunky heroine and lonely castle hearken back to recent hit Tangled; the sisterly conflict feels like The Little Mermaid; the knowing fairy tales riffs are pure Enchanted. This is rigorous Disney hit-making at its finest, but with enough charm to get away with it.
From the loneliness of children, and the fright and anticipation it breeds, to the fear of not being able to control your own fears and emotions, Frozen packs a lot of emotional resonance into its story.
Even before Elsa's powers of shooting ice and snow from her fingertips run rampant, Elsa and Anna's parents perish in a single shot of a howling storm at sea. The death of the king and queen means Elsa must take over, but the stress of her coronation (and Anna's dumb-cluck decision to get engaged to a hunky prince she just met) makes her lose control. Elsa storms up into the mountains, leaving ice castles and blizzards in her wake and belting the power ballad "Let It Go."
Anna's heroic journey is, refreshingly, not about a boy or even about herself: she travels into the mountains to convince Elsa to return, and teams up with rugged ice salesman Kristof to get there. Kristof and Anna are going to fall for each other eventually, of course, and she'll ditch that princely fiancé Hans, but the focus remains firmly on Anna and Elsa, as the screenplay repeatedly subverts fairy tale tropes to make them about sisterly, not romantic, love.
Is it perfect? No. The villain(s) feel shoe-horned into the story, and weren't necessary to tell the story. Had the story been about the two sisters, and their emotional journey, this could've been up there as one of the best animated films of all time, along with Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. But as is, it still is a wonderful story to watch with the whole family. Frozen is a fairly old-fashioned movie, even with a couple of the welcome twists it adds to the usual true-love- will-save-you storyline.