FROZEN (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013) ***

Rating: 7/10 (8 March 2014)

Given the mass of animated features of late, it becomes hard to discern which stable any given title derives from; given the Walt Disney Studios' monopoly of the market for so many decades, their efforts remain among the more popular but not necessarily the best with respect to both box-office performance or, for that matter, when accolades are doled out. So, when the film under review copped 2 Oscars (Best Animated Feature and Original Song "Let It Go") at last Sunday's ceremony, I thought of checking it out now rather than wait for the Christmas season â€“ for which period I usually leave such family-oriented fare!
In retrospect and, to my surprise, the end result was generally very satisfactory â€“ evoking favourable memories of some of the brand name's better efforts of the last 25 years! The narrative is inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale (of which I also own but have yet to watch a 1966 live-action Russian version). The icy setting is appropriately elaborate and nicely detailed, while characterization is reasonably appealing â€“ at least where the two female protagonists are concerned, and especially with respect to their unusually tense relationship, as well as the obligatory comic-relief sidekick (represented by a garrulous snowman called Olaf who has a carrot for a nose, is constantly getting dismembered and, at one point, even deadpans about having been impaled on a jutting piece of ice!). On the heroic side of things, we have a stocky woodcutter and his sympathetic reindeer but, oddly enough, the orphaned princesses are shown growing up sans guardians!
Conversely, the rogues' gallery â€“ involving an elderly foreign tradesman and a young, deceptively handsome but opportunistic visiting prince â€“ seems decidedly weak in comparison; similarly, the would-be sinister elements â€“ a group of wise and friendly trolls on one hand and a giant snow creature (whom we thought had been disposed of but reappears for the, by now inevitable, post-credits sequence!) on the other â€“ somehow feel like an afterthought! The climax, too, is sort of underwhelming because the sense of awe expected, after considerable build-up (and the film clocks in at a hefty 102 minutes), is rather lacking!; still, the songs â€“ which are definitely not what I look forward to the most in efforts of this type â€“ prove surprisingly tolerable on this occasion...which brings us back to "Let It Go", whose live performance during Oscar night was not only introduced by John Travolta apparently struggling with a bad hair day, but he also went on to spectacularly mispronounce singer Idina Menzel's name (incidentally, the star quality typically found among the engaged voice artists is conspicuous in its absence here) as Adele Dazeem while obliged to wax about her "wicked" talents!