Fun..Especially for The Disney Store

Rating: 6/10 (15 March 2015)

I approached Disney's 'Frozen' with a certain trepidation, and many people whose opinion I respect have praised it as a radical revamp of the studio's approach to female representation. Hmmm. Well, it's not QUITE that. The requisite Disney princess gets her guy and, in keeping with rom-com tradition, the whole mis-matched couple thing is explored. That's not to say there are no surprises. The interesting tweak to the tale - VERY loosely based on Andersen's 'The Snow Queen' - is providing us with two Princesses, and two classic male-shirt archetypes...so the path toward self-empowerment and self determination is rather less clear-cut than the traditional Disney model. What makes this different from most such tales is not just that the female characters HAVE choices, but that the audience does, also, in determining which whom their sympathies should lie. The character designs, too, combine classic Disney styling with more modern fashion (be warned, parents, lots and lots of little girls are going to want Anna and Elsa toys from The Disney Store, this and every Christmas to come), the Trolls are delightful, and the purplish Sven the reindeer steals the show. Nice voice-work from the cast, particularly Kirsten Bell and the redoubtable Alan Tudyk (Wash now seems to be the go-to-guy for quirky cartoon baddies). My only real criticism would be that there are a few too many songs, the weakness of which is reinforced by having a genuinely memorable better of a song, the authentic 'Let It Go' at the heart of the narrative. While not exactly the radical reinvention of sexual like- minded it's been hyped as...it's still rather healthier an approach to the Princesses than we've seen of late from the House of Mouse ('Brave''s Merida aside, that is - she's Scottish, and we expect her to be troublesome!)