Frozen (2013) - Lee, Buck et al. triumph with fabulous Disney adventure favorite

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+ Best Family Movie of the Year + Best Mega-hit Movie of the Year + Best Musical of the Year + Most Profitable Movie of the Year: 362.32 mil. $ range

An uninformative but beautiful and anticipation-building ice crystal-centered poster for Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee's Frozen

Two beautiful princess sisters in the high north are alienated, because the one of them, Elsa, has to protect the world from her curse, freezing capabilities.

Frozen is written by great debuting Rhode Islander co-writer/director Jennifer Lee (Wreck-It Ralph (2012, screenwriter)), with co-director Chris Buck (Tarzan (1999)) and Shane Morris (The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning (2007, TV movie)) supplying story elements, based on fairytale The Snow Queen (1845) by Hans Christian Andersen (The Little Mermaid (1837)).
It is a fabulously good-looking, hyper-detailed, delightfully colorful adventure with fantastical songs, - mega-hit Let It Go is only the biggest and most well-known of them. It is also funny and has enchanting romance and feeling. Frozen is near-perfect Disney-type movie magic.

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2013 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED VI] 

Jennifer Lee: Wreck-It Ralph (2012) - Original story gets lost in benign but overly flashy animation (co-writer)

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 150 mil. $
Box office: 1,280.8 mil. $
= Mega-hit (returned 8.53 times its cost)
[Frozen premiered 10 November (New York International Children's Film Festival) and runs 102 minutes. Development began in the late 1990s, with Megan Mullally first attached as Elsa. Several Norwegian landmarks are shown in the film, and Norway is the biggest inspiration for its look. The film opened #22 to a 243k $ first weekend in 1 theater in North America, where it widened the following week to #2 and 93.5 mil. $ from 3,742 theaters, behind The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, subsequently spending another 13 weeks in the top 5, 2 of which were at #1, grossing 400.7 mil. $ (31.3 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Japan with 249 mil. $ (19.4 %) and South Korea with 76.6 mil. $ (6 %). It became the highest-grossing animation and musical of all time until The Lion King (2019). Bloomberg Business calculated the film's total cost (including production, marketing and distribution expenses) at 323-350 mil. $; Deadline Hollywood calculated the film's profits at over 400 mil. $. The film won 2 Oscars: Best Animation and Best Song (Let It Go). It also won 1/2 Golden Globe nominations, 2/3 BAFTA noms, 2/3 Grammy noms and many other honors. According to Excipio, a copyrights infringement-tracking site, the film was the 2nd most illegally downloaded of 2014, behind The Wolf of Wall Street, with almost 30 mil. downloads. The home video release still broke records: becoming the fastest-selling digital release at the time in North America, where it also sold enormous 18 mil.units, including 7.5 mil. blu-rays, accruing more than 308 mil. $ domestically alone. The success was such that a global merchandise shortage ran through most of 2014: Disney sold more than 3 mil. Frozen costumes in North America alone; more than 8 mil. Frozen books were sold by August 2014. The filmmakers and cast returned for smash hit sequel Frozen II (2019). Lee and Buck returned with Frozen Fever (2015, short) before their theatrical return Frozen II (2019). Kristen Bell (Zootopia (2016)) returned in Parks and Recreation (2013-14)) and theatrically in Veronica Mars (2014); Jonathan Groff (Looking (2016, TV movie)) in 2 shorts and a TV movie before his theatrical return in American Sniper (2014); Idina Menzel (Rent (2005)) in 10 TV, short and video game credits before her theatrical return in Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018). Frozen is certified fresh at 90 % with a 7.69/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Frozen?

The Little Mermaid (1989) - The fantastic, romantic return of Disney animation

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The colorful and infectiously happy poster for Ron Clements and John Musker's The Little Mermaid

 

The Little Mermaid is a Disney classic based on the same-titled 1837 fairytale by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (The Snowman (1861)). It was the last Disney film to be done with only hand-painted cel animation and analog film work. This required more than 1 million hand-made drawings. The enormous effort paid off as a hugely successful fairy tale animation that marked the start of the 'Disney Renaissance'. Disney animation had fared poorly during the 80s, but Mermaid turned things around, and in the following decade's renaissance, Disney was revived to its former glory within animation with major film successes like Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). Tarzan (1999) is thought of as the end of the Disney Renaissance.

Ariel is an unhappy mermaid, who idolizes humans against her father King Triton's demands. She falls in love with the human Prince Eric and makes a Faustian deal with the sea witch octopus Ursula to be a human for 3 days. If she succeeds in getting a kiss of true love from Eric within that time frame, Ariel will be freed from Ursula's eternal bondage, which also entails that Ariel has lost her voice.

 
Seeing Mermaid again today is a great experience, and it is obvious that much has happened in the world of animation since 1989. Animation now almost singularly means computer animation, and big releases run like near adult comedies on kiddie speed or acid (it sometime seems), and are sold with famous comedians like Steve Carell, Jack Black or Will Ferrell as poster candy. This way more people decide to join the little ones to the multiplexes, and the studios make more dollars. (And potentially lose more, as we also see regularly as with Turbo (2013) or Rise of the Guardians (2012) recently.)
Back to the Mermaid, - which has no star voice actors at all, but doesn't fare any the worse for that reason.
It's a beautifully animated movie with strong, charming characters: Ariel's cautious friend, Flounder, the New York-accented, funny seagull and Triton's right hand crab, Haitian-accented Sebastian. There's scenes of raucous slapstick, as when Sebastian survives a ridiculous, French chef, and many really amazing songs, - an element that sadly seems largely extinct in today's animation output. Mermaid deservedly won Oscars for Best Original Song (Under the Sea by Alan Menken (Sausage Party (2016)) and Howard Ashman (Aladdin (1992))) and Best Original Score by Menken. (It was also nominated for the song, Kiss the Girl.)
Ariel's eyes sometimes grow to hysterical excess, (bigger than the shells that make up her bra), in outrageous romantic feeling, and caused by prince Eric, who actually seems like something of a dullard throughout the film. It is an intensely romantic fairy tale, - about half of the film is about her getting him to kiss her, - and, understandably, Andersen's original, tragic ending has been thrown into the sea in favor of something lighter and happier.
The film is written and directed by Ron Clements and John Musker (Hercules (1997), both), with Ashman, Gerrit Graham (Oliver & Company (1988)), Sam Graham  and Chris Hubbell (Peter Pan and the Pirates (1990-91), both) contributing dialog, based on the Andersen story.
An online list of scary movie villains from non-horror movies recently included Ursula from The Little Mermaid and that with good reason. - The sea witch of Mermaid is a damn scary creation. A devilish, tentacled, super-obese diva, somehow reeking of sins of every nature, who keeps the souls of her unlucky clients as slimy, weeping snails in her gloomy, violet-colored, underwater lair. I don't remember villains in any recent animation films coming even close to Ursula in malice and scare-factor. Her evil culminates in a nightmare-inducing sequence, where she grows to enormous kaiju monster size in the sea. (Perhaps Western animators today are less induced to go all in with evil villains in their films than was the case in 1989. If so, that's a damn shame.)
Curiously, Ursula was inspired by the drag queen/disco singer/performance artist/actor/actress phenomenon, the now many years dead and gone Divine, most famous for her parts in John Waters films like Roman Candles (1966), Mondo Trasho (1969) and Pink Flamingos (1972). These films couldn't be further replaced from Disney's target group and are definitely not for children. (In the latter film, Divine notoriously devours real dog feces.)
Here's pictures of both movie personas for your own comparison:

Sea witch Ursula from The Little Mermaid

Drag queen legend Divine from something decidedly non-Disney

Cost: 40 mil. $
Box office: 211.3 mil. $
= Big hit (returned 5.28 times its cost)

[The Little Mermaid premiered 13 November (New York) and runs 83 minutes. The Andersen story had been planned as a Disney feature ever since the 1930s but had been scrapped for unknown reasons. Production took place in California. It was Disney's biggest budget in decades and the first time they would include Broadway-type songs in the film. The film opened #3, behind fellow new release Harlem Nights and holdover hit Look Who's Talking, to a 6 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent another 5 weekends in the top 5 grossing 84.3 mil. $ (39.9 % of the total gross). A 1997 re-release garnered impressive 27.1 mil. $ additionally in North America. Disney broke with their strategy to keep releases from the home video market for years to profit from re-releases by releasing Mermaid to home video after 6 months, garnering enormous merchandise and video profits, reportedly bringing the film's total revenue past 1 bil. $. The film won 2 Oscars, for Best Score (Menken) and Song (Under the Sea by Ashman and Menken, with their Kiss the Girl also getting nominated.) It also won 2/4 Golden Globe nominations, 1/3 Grammy nominations and several other honors. Roger Ebert gave it a 4/4 star review, translating to a notch over this one. Two direct-to-video sequels were made, and a 2023 live-action remake is in post-production right now. Clements and Musker returned with Aladdin (1992). The Little Mermaid is certified fresh at 93 % with an 8.20/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

 

What do you think of The Little Mermaid?