If I Could Melt Your Heart

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I wasn't bowled over by any of the songs, but I think I might have passed the age where a Disney movie can break its way in past my hard candy shell. I mean re-watched The Little Mermaid a couple of weeks ago and I had "Part of Your World" stuck in my head for a week after (and no doubt now that I've brought the song up it'll be stuck in my head for yet another); if you feed me the first line of "A Whole New World" from Aladdin I'll just fly right off with a full on performance with mimed flying carpet riding and all. But those movies got to me at a tender age before my spirit was broken and my soul shredded to bits by sneering cynicism; until they make their mopey Radiohead musical I think I'm gonna have to settle for not being so into brand new Disney cartoon soundtracks now. 

That aside, Frozen is pretty charming. If you follow me on Twitter you could probably gauge my level of snark plummeting as I live-tweeted the movie last night - I started out picky picky picky but as the story revealed itself the script proved itself smarter than I anticipated, apparently pre-prepped for all my side-eyes and above-it-all digs, and attempting as best a Disney cartoon can to be something approaching thoroughly modern. In its sweetly old-fashioned way, of course.

There is some very nice animation to be seen too, mostly in the world-building and snow effects (and I love the big killer snowman). That was much better than I'd anticipated from the trailers at least, which made it look downright straight-to-DVD at times, like one of those Tinkerbell movies. I always have to remind myself that Disney has always gone for simplifying as much as possible when it comes to character design - it's not just lazy CG, the stock side-characters are always the same variations on caricature. You could mistake any of the villagers in Frozen for any of the villagers in any of their movies. But there were some wonderful very character specific movements going on, and with the Anna character especially - I've always adored the little quirks they gave to the way Belle moves in Beauty and the Beast and I was actually reminded of that a couple times.

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