Frozen

The wildly popular winner of the most recent Best Animated Film Oscar, Frozen, plays less like a Disney cartoon than an X-Men origin story. Somewhere underneath all the ice and snow is a film about female empowerment, but at the same time the lead female characters have the physiques of Barbie dolls.

Thus are the contradictions of this uneven film, directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee. It is a runaway hit, the highest-grossing animated film of all time, and received the accolades of most critics, who called it the best Disney animated film since the renaissance of the late '80s/early '90s.

I'm kind of meh about it. It certainly isn't a bad film, but it didn't do much for me. The CGI animation is visually stunning, but lacks the warmth (no pun intended) of the hand-drawn films of the Disney glory years.

The story is based, very loosely, on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen (Disney had wanted to make a film of Andersen tales back in the '40s). Two princesses, in a Scandinavian-like country, are happy, especially when Elsa, the eldest, uses her special powers: the ability to control ice and snow. But an accident that hurts the younger sister, Anna, forces the girls to be locked away in a castle. When Elsa comes of age and is coronated, she hopes not to reveal her powers, but Anna forces her hand, and she escapes into the wilderness, where her fear and rage have turned the whole country into a winter wonderland. Problem: it is summer.

Anna then goes on a trek to find Elsa, helped by an ice salesman and his pet reindeer. Along the way they meet a snowman who has come to life, who provides the comic relief.

Frozen is a musical, with songs by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez. The most prominent is "Let It Go," which won the Best Song Oscar and was a number one hit, especially among tween girls. The song has a great hook--those three notes have been running through my head for 24 hours now--but I can't remember the rest of the song, nor any of the others. I do see why the film is popular with girls, as the film focuses on the relationship between sisters, and has less to do with romance.

But the film also has problems. Just where did Elsa's powers come from? I'm not the only one who thought the film smacked of the X-Men--a clever YouTube parody has her visiting Professor X. Except for Olaf the Snowman (voiced by Josh Gad), the film isn't very funny, and a reveal of a character near the end seemed way out of left field.

The best thing about the film, aside from the effects, are the voice work of Idina Menzel and especially Kristen Bell as the sisters.

As with the theatrical release, the DVD includes the short Get a Horse!, a clever film that combines the animation style of the first Mickey Mouse cartoons with the modern era, as in a Sherlock Jr.-like phenomenon, Mickey and Minnie and the villainous Peg-Leg Pete pop off the screen into a contemporary theater. Mickey's voice is provided by Walt Disney himself.