Snow Queen

Plot synopsis:
Hans Christian Andersen's story is simplified in this animated version of his fairy tale. A little man, who introduces himself as "old Dreamy" ("Ole Lukøje"), he tells the viewer that on days when the master storyteller Andersen is not overtired, he puts him to sleep with his colorful, magic umbrella ("slumbrella") causing him to dream wonderful stories -- from which he then writes his fairy tales. Old Dreamy narrates the story of the Snow Queen. The young lovers, Kay and Gerda are in their window box garden, planting two roses together, which Kay calls "our roses".
On the next winter night, Gerda's grandmother tells the two children the legend of the Snow Queen. The viewer is taken to the Snow Queen's palace of ice in the far north (on Spitsbergen) where she sits on her throne and looks into her mirror. The Snow Queen's proud and frowning face is seen by Gerda through a frosted window who exclaims, "It's the Snow Queen!". Kay jokes, "Let her come in here, and I'll put her on a hot stove!". This angers the Snow Queen, who is watching the children in her mirror, who becomes angry and smashes the mirror with her scepter. The ice splinters of the shattered mirror go into the eyes and hearts of those who have offended her. Back at Gerda's home, the window bursts open and ice splinters enter Kay's eyes and heart. He becomes hostile toward Gerda, and when Gerda sees that the cold wind and snow have killed blackened their roses, Kay stomps on them and kicks them about in glee. He then leaves Gerda in tears to be comforted by her grandmother.
The next day, Kay goes for a sled ride in the marketplace of the city. Gerda wants to come along, riding on Kay's sled as she has always done. Kay pushes the horses into a race, knocking Gerda off the sled, but she tries not to cry. Kay ties his sled to the sleigh of the Snow Queen, which has suddenly appeared, to Gerda's horror. The Snow Queen pulls Kay on his sled out of the city, where she stops and confronts him, taking him into her arms as her willing captive, since his heart is as cold as ice. The Snow Queen's presence freezes a mother bird to death as she protects her young under her. These young birds will appear later in the story.
Old Dreamy's story continues with Gerda looking for Kay. She asks young birds and animals if they had seen Kay, to no avail. A little lamb says, "I know nothing, I was born yesterday". At the river bank, Gerda begs the river to take her in a row boat to Kay. She gives her new red shoes to the river, and her boat is guided down the stream to the home of a kind, old sorceress. She comes out of her garden to the trumpeting and drumming of four toy soldiers, who stand at her gate as sentinels. The old woman uses her crook to pull Gerda's boat to shore. She takes Gerda into her garden of eternal summer with sparkling flowers. In her house, the old woman puts Gerda to sleep by combing her hair. She wants Gerda to stay with her and forget Kay, but Gerda awakes when the old woman falls asleep. Gerda remembers Kay, but when she gets to the gate she finds that outside the garden it is already fall. She begs the toy soldier sentinels not to sound their bugles and drums to awaken their mistress, and they comply.
Gerda is next found by the seashore where she is met by a raven, "Mr. Corax" (Latin for "raven"). Gerda tells him that she is looking for a "good, kind, brave boy". Mr. Corax tells her that such a boy is now living at the palace of a princess with whom he is "palsy walsy." Mr. Corax takes Gerda to the palace to find his "lady friend", a female raven, named Henrietta, who knows the palace and can guide Gerda through it. They arrive at the palace in the midst of a ball with fireworks. When all are asleep, the ravens take Gerda into the palace and to the royal bedroom. Gerda takes a candle to see if the boy is Kay. But the boy is heavier than Kay. The shock awakens him and princess, who calls her guards. The intruders are apprehended, but when the princess is taken by the Gerda's tale of seeking her boyfriend. The princess and her consort decide to help her.
An interlude follows with the Snow Queen and Kay talking in her ice palace throne room. Kay is playing with ice crystals when the Snow Queen asks him if he knows what love is. He remembers Gerda, but he stays there because his heart is a lump of ice like the Snow Queen. The princess and her consort send Gerda on her way with a golden coach and attendants. While the coach travels through a dark woods, they are stopped by a gang of robbers, who take Gerda and strip the coach of its gold plate, sparing the attendants. An old hag takes Gerda, but when she is bitten on the ear by her daughter Angel, who is riding on her back, she listens to her request to keep Gerda with her other captive pets. These pets include a fox, little rabbits, the birds that were spared the Snow Queen's frost earlier, and a large reindeer, named Bucky Boy. The birds tell Gerda that they saw the Snow Queen take Kay with her to Lapland. The reindeer offers to take Gerda there. It remains for the robber girl to let Gerda and Bucky Boy go, which she does. She also releases the birds, the fox, and the rabbits, but they decide to stay with her.
Gerda and Bucky get to the Lapland woman, who warms them by their fire. She tells them that the Snow Queen had stopped there with Kay but went on farther north to "Finland". She directs them to her cousin in Finland who can direct them further, and she writes a letter to her on a fish that she sends with Gerda and Bucky. When Gerda and Bucky get to the cousin in Finland, she tells them that they are just 10 miles away from the Snow Queen's palace. Gerda and Bucky leave so quickly that Gerda leaves behind her mittens and cap.
Bucky, who collapses along the way, is unable to take Gerda up to the ice palace, so Gerda goes on alone. When Gerda finally gets to the palace through the blustery wind and snow, she encounters Kay, who is released from the splinters of ice in his eye and his heart by Gerda's warm embrace. Even though the Snow Queen suddenly returns, she and her palace melt away with the coming of spring.
Gerda and Kay are taken first by Bucky Boy to the Finnish woman, who takes them further on their journey home in her dog sled. The Lapland woman takes them further in her boat, and the robber girl takes them the rest of the way in the coach that had been stripped of its gold plate. They go past the princess, her consort, and the ravens who wave them on. They are now home again in their window box garden in springtime. Old Dreamy tells the viewer that Gerda and Kay will continue on to have more adventures, and so will the viewer.

Tags: fantasy

Review:
My main attraction was that I absolutely love the original Snow Queen story and always have done, for me it is one of Hans Christian Andersen's best stories.
The good news is that while it is miles away from being perfect Snow Queen is really quite decent and one of Hallmark's better efforts.It does have a number of good things.
The scenery, settings and lighting look absolutely stunning, easily one of Hallmark's best-looking movies, and the Snow Queen's costumes and make-up are an absolute knockout.
The music score is very good also, it has the sparkling motifs that you'd associate with a fantasy score, the darker moments have a haunting musical undercurrent and it does all this without ever sounding generic.Snow Queen's lead performance I did think were quite good.
The acting honours do go to Bridget Fonda who I think is wonderful as the Snow Queen.
Chelsea Hobbs is a little bland to start with, but I didn't worry too much actually as it fitted with the "character going on a journey"(literally and in character development) and later on she is easier to warm to.Oh and before I forget, I was surprised by how good the special effects were, the reindeer and the polar bear looked great.
Snow Queen began and ended well, the darker moments providing a lot of promise for the telling of such a timeless story.Unfortunately, for all the good things that Snow Queen it does also have debits.
The script once the darkness shifts dissolves into anachronism and modern vernacular, which against the production values proved to be quite a stilted mismatch.At this point as well, the pacing does get tedious and save for some inspired moments never really picks up- some of the action sequences like with the Summer Princess' minions and the Autumn robbers are quite nifty though-, which is a shame considering how promising the beginning and end proved to be.
The story showed a lot of potential and I personally did find Gerda and Kai's love for one another and together convincing, which took a nosedive in the tone shift.
For a programme of this length, I was disappointed at how forced the Autumn scenes seemed to be and by how certain events were introduced but never explained satisfactorily and consequently coming across as confused instead.So in summing up, Snow Queen was decent and watchable with the art direction being the best thing about it, but there were a number of things that stopped it from being great.
It tells the tale of a girl named Gerda (Chelsea Hobbs) who lost her mother at a very young age, so has been bought up by her father.
She falls in love with the bell boy named Kai. However, on her birthday the snow queen (Bridget Fonda) comes the the hotel which her father owns and kidnaps Kai. Gurda then goes after Kai, and follows him through the four seasons in an attempt to rescue him.I thought that this was an excellent adaption of the story with great performances from all the cast.
Every time, i get more and more impressed by how far the wish of a young heart can go, and the strenght of both Kai and Gertha to struggle for what they believe in.And the whole story is presented in such a way, you just get transfered into the plot and before you know it, you are there.
and there's the Snow Queen...it's just a wonderful mix of love, adventure, tension.it's brilliant 10 out of 10.
The production company clearly spent a lot of money on sets, costuming (Bridget Fonda, especially), and special effects (including a great Jim Henson talking polar bear & reindeer).
Too long and miscast in several roles, the main problem is the opening hour which sets up a love story between Gerda and Kai. In the original, the main thrust of Gerda's quest to rescue Kai from the Queen was friendship that was revealed to be love at the end, but casting the leads as 18 year olds defeats that revelation..
A Too Much Long and Confused Fairy Tale, Where Something is Missing to be a Good Movie.
Close to her eighteenth anniversary, Gerda meets Kai (Jeremy Guilbaut), the bellboy of the hotel, and they fall in love for each other.
On the day of the party of her birthday, the Snow Queen (Bridget Fonda) kidnaps Kai and Gerda commits suicide, jumping in the river, trying to recover Kai. This is the beginning of Gerda´s adventure through the reigns of the four seasons.
Although having good special effects, the story is very confused, cold, slow and too much long.
Although there are many strange things in the movie that the fairy tale itself doesn't have them including the autumn characters (mother and daughter) the general concept rocks..
The film I was looking for was "The Polar Bear King", a Norwegian production dealing with a very similar story about a young princess searching for her abducted prince."Snow Queen" however, is not set in the middle ages, but circa 1900 in the cold reaches of a Nordic landscape (even though everyone speaks English).
We're presented with a sprawling magical epic of young love challenged by the callous heart of a queen who herself seeks to conquer what she already had, but failed to see.There's a lot of subtext and other themes going on here.
I thought the movie started out a bit slow and disjointed for the first hour.
So, while it starts out like a cheap horror film, it evolves into a beautiful and wonderful fantasy film.Bridget Fonda stands out as the Snow Queen.
She absolutely personifies both the beauty and coldness of Winter.My daughter, age 14, found the film a bit frightening, so if you are showing it as family entertainment, please stay with your child and reassure her or him that it is just a fairy tale fantasy and not to take it too seriously.It is really one of the best fantasy films that I have seen in a long time, slightly better than "Eragon" or any of the "Lord of the Rings." It is about as good as "The Golden Compass"..
"The Snow Queen" is based on the famous and very beautiful fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, about a girl, Gerda, who goes on a dangerous journey to rescue her friend Kai from the clutches of the Snow Queen.
This adaption attempts to capture that story's sense of adventure and luminously intricate imagery through lavish sets and production design, but fails on a number of counts.Like so many Hallmark productions, the potential of the story is completely undercut by heavy-handed scripting and direction.
The two actors playing Gerda and Kai are blandly pleasant but forgettable; Bridget Fonda as the Snow Queen looks the part but is otherwise miscast for the role.
At least some of the pacing problems can be attributed to the addition of filler scenes that add very little to the original story, particularly in the opening hour that introduces the main characters.That said, "The Snow Queen" would be just about ideal for pre-teens with a liking for fantasy and a bit of patience.
It's all just so cute, all, even the way that white bear loves the Queen in secret and gets Her in the end, also the achievement the two young actors of Gerda and Kai gave.
The two of us will always be one combined with sad piano tones in some places gives a very touching result and if one watches both parts at once, he'll see the Snow Queen is not so bad.
The evening this movie was on here (first part) I only watched it, because I was bored, but I loved it a lot more after and was very angry, when they didn't show the next part because of the Pope's funeral...
This story encourages me to fight like Gerda for the ONLY ONE, for the love of my life, for Mister Right.
Even the remake of Snow White, while kind of freakish, but beautiful with Kristin Kreuk in it was a helluva lot better than this lumbering hulk of garbage.That said, please understand that I am a loyalist, and The Snow Queen and The Little Mermaid were my two favorite fairy tales of all time (you could say that Hans Christen Anderson was my first favorite author- I even liked Danny Kaye as Hans in the movie).
There's no way that just after a couple of months and one kiss Gerda would chase off after Kay. Even with his silly Help Me note.That said, I think that the bits with Kay and the Snow Queen could have been considerably edited down, and more time spent with Gerda on her travels.
I didn't really like what they did to the snow queen; all in all, it was a complete disappointment to me.
Nor is the story bound by modern Hollywood rules of composition: direct, often to the point of being grotesquely linear in lesser works, and obvious (in retrospect, at least).With this defence against the common criticisms of those who do not understand fairy tales, "Snow Queen" is a delightful movie with wonderful visual effects, skillful acting, and great sentiment.
Instead I found myself watching a very weak movie with really bad acting from all the actors.
The story line is not attractive at all as is expected of a movie based on a fairy tale so full of magic and warmth of love.
The snow queen of the movie is just like a teenager and does not convey the sense of superiority a queen from a fairy tale should have.
So this review is probably a year away from its start date but I just saw it on video and feel compelled to say something.The story was awesome, the movie definitely dragged.
Bridget Fonda did look good as the snow queen but her acting is off a bit, someone may want to remind her this is a hallmark movie she's in.Gerda and Kai were cute.
I'm not usually one for fairy tales or make believe storeys but this film captured my attention.I first saw this film on the UK channel Hallmark...which usually shows afew tacky films...but then Snow Queen came along...and I was loving it!
I really really admire Bridget Fonda in this movie...she plays the snow queen brilliantly and glamorously.I won't explain what the story is about as other people have already done so, so there is no point repeating.I would just suggest that if you want to watch a fun fairy tale journey...get this film...but if you want to purchase it and you live in the UK, you might have a hard time.
The version I saw may have been cut (a demon [?] shown in the trailer and publicity stills didn't appear), but anything that made the movie shorter can only be a blessing.POSSIBLE SPOILERS IF YOU ARE UNFAMILIAR WITH THE ORIGINAL FAIRY TALE:Anyway, the film updates the story to the early part of the 20th Century (?), and makes Gerda and Kay (here called Kai - being a Lexx fan, I kept expecting him to say, `The Dead do not solve puzzles') 18 year olds.
Hans Christian Andersen's basic story is followed: the boy gets a shard of ice in his eye, goes bad, is taken off by the Snow Queen to solve a puzzle in her palace and Gerda goes to find him, having various adventures on the way.As the two main characters are older than in the original, a lot of time is spent getting them together and `in love'.
At the start of the film the Snow Queen kills Gerda's mother, but no explanation for this is given.
A polar bear living in the Snow Queen's palace is more than he seems (though this is possibly because the producers realised that the bear's feelings towards the Snow Queen would be OK in a Fairy Tale, but not in a modern film).
The script is also full of anachronisms that really jar you out of the `fairy tale' mood.The production looks good, though there is evidence of penny-pinching: the Snow Queen's palace is the hotel where Gerda and Kai lived covered in ice.
Bridget Fonda looks great as the Snow Queen, but seems to be in a different movie to everyone else.Ultimately, the film is unsatisfying.
I know that they were going for a "true love conquers all" kind of thing, but about all this film conquered was about 3(which felt more like 9) hours of my afternoon which I will never get back.
The movie is about two young lovers named Kai and Gerta who live in a remote town in a fantasy world.
As if this obstacle wasn't enough to overcome, an evil snow queen shoots a shard of glass in Kai's eye and he becomes a mean person treats Gerta poorly.
Kai is eventually taken to the Snow Queen's fortress (Which is the same set as the hotel just covered in ice, because the good people at Hallmark like to go all out) and Gerta sets out on a mission to get Kai back.
It's probably the most evil and most effective spells cast by the Snow Queen) Anyways, I will spare you from the ending because anything you can think up in your head right now is probably better then how they ended it.
So, in conclusion, the Snow Queen is an incredibly boring movie, which takes the fan out of fantasy..
My particular favourite from this movie is Bridget Fonda, whose performance as the Snow Queen herself was quite moving, assisted enormously by a stupendous wardrobe and makeup.
Fonda aside the acting was not what we have come to expect from Hollywood, which I think is a good thing since Hollywood seems to have run out of ideas on how to train its acting talent to portray roles and so they have become stale and reliant on CGI and other special effects to take us away from the actors who all use the same tricks on us.
This movie is based on "The Snow Queen" traditional fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen.
The original story is quite depressing and I didn't like "Snow Queen" as a child, it was cold and quite dreary.
It's only the Snow Queen who doesn't want Gerda, the only season who has no interest in her.
The snow queen wants boys and has frozen a lot of them.
I fret saw this sprawling romantic fantasy epic years ago when it premiered as a television mini series and I found it to be something special and loved it right away, it felt like this big fantasy adventure, a love story and a Christmas movie all rolled into one.
It's a big movie but I personally don't find it boring, there's a lot that goes on in it once it gets going and once I start watching I'm in for the long haul and have to watch it to the very end, there's something about it that I find very engaging and it cruises through the long story with a competence that most TV-produced short fantasy series fail to achieve, and happy sad or awed, you get a lot of emotional bang for your buck with "Snow Queen".
I like it best in the second chunk of the story where Gerda embarks on her quest to find her bewitched boyfriend and the Snow Queen and encounters the three other sister witches of the seasons who each act as obstacles to her final goal and are all selfish, possessive, and various degrees of crazy!
It's not exactly what you'd call a linear story arc, a lot of it is pretty surreal and even metaphorical, there are points where you don't actually know which direction it's going to go in next, but it keeps a sense of strange reality about itself and has a good balance between the dramatic and fantastical and for me the overall presentation is a most enchanting one.
I truly thought that Bridget Fonda made an awesome Snow Queen.
I loved all of the gripping scenes with her and Kai which stay in the same frozen hopeless place while Gerda travels throughout the seasonal realms.
I also liked the touch of how the Snow Queen's domain was an icy version of the hotel, I find that quite clever in how it played into the theme if Kai's cold heart as well as Gerda's father's.
It deserves a lot more love and to be remembered better than what it has been, and I'd suggest while watching it that you try to see beyond the kinks and look at the bigger picture of its story and try to enjoy it for what it is.
Warning: I may include some spoilers in this review.I remember hearing the story of the Snow Queen as a child, and being terrified.
The first part of this movie captured that atmosphere entirely as Kai begins to change, but after he is taken and Gerda goes off on her adventures, the tension is mostly lost.Bridget Fonda completely looks the role of the Snow Queen, and is generally pretty good too, especially in what is probably her main line: 'Let the whole world be as I am.'  Kai is bland, and Gerda starts the same although as the movie progresses that changes.Some things in the movie just seem to be completely ignored or forgotten.
Why did the Snow Queen kill Gerda's mother?
Winter being carried away by the ex-polar-bear gives the feeling that, rather than the typically stupid idea of 'evil turning good at the last minute', that she instead was merely going back to the way she was, and should have been, that she had been bewitched by the mirror..
I also had the chance when the movie was filming to be an extra because there was a casting call for them at the mall.But i didn't feel like going to it at the time because i wasn't interested in acting.