James Tisch September 26th, 2013 - 6:06 PM
Disney’s ‘Frozen’
The first full trailer for Walt Disney’s animated feature Frozen has arrived. The film is the 53rd animated feature from Mouse House and tells the story of the fearless young Anna in a race to stop her evil sister Elsa, whose icy powers have trapped her kingdom in an eternal winter. Along the way the intrepid gal makes friends with a dreamy boy named Kristoff as well as a comic snowman. The film is based on the fairy tale The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, whose works have previously been mined by the Walt Disney Company – most famously with the animated classic The Little Mermaid, which helped spur the Disney Renaissance of the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.
Frozen utilizes the vocal talents of Kristen Bell (last seen on screen in the independent feature The Lifeguard) as the heroine Anna, Jonathan Groff (currently in the independent feature C.O.G.) as her love interest Kristoff, Josh Gad (Thanks for Sharing) as the comic relief snowman and Broadway vet Idina Menzel as the evil Snow Queen, Elsa. Alan Tudyk makes a vocal appearance in a Disney animated feature for the second consecutive year as the Duke of Weselton (he also voiced King Candy in last year’s Wreck-It Ralph). Frozen was written by Jennifer Lee (co-writer of Wreck-It Ralph) and Shane Morris, and directed by Chris Buck (Disney’s Tarzan; Surf’s Up) and Lee, who is the first woman credited to direct an animated feature for a Disney-proper animated feature – Brenda Chapman won an Oscar for co-directing the Pixar animated feature Brave, but was infamously fired before completion of the film.
It remains to be seen what potential chances Frozen may have in the 2013 Animated Feature Academy Award, yet it holds the distinction of being one of the few original films to be in contention for the calendar year. The most popular animated features of the year are the sequel Despicable Me 2 and the prequel Monsters University, while other originals The Croods, Epic and Turbo have for the most part faded away from memory. Last year, Disney held the distinction of having two finalist in the Oscar race with Frankenweenie and Wreck-It-Ralph, a creative boom for Disney which for the best part of the last twenty years has seen most of its critically acclaimed and commercially viable animated work coming from its Pixar division. Frozen opens in theaters on November 27th.
