Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #776
Written 12/31/13
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Buy it... if the basic musical formula of the Disney studio is
enough to sustain your interest if there are just a couple of engaging
ballads and three or four noteworthy score tracks, the highlights here
entertaining enough to suffice.
Avoid it... if you expect to hear that intangible sense of
"magic" from the Alan Menken projects at Disney, the primary issue
with Frozen being the discord between the style and melodies of
the songs and the score.
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| Beck |
Frozen: (Christophe Beck/Robert Lopez/Kristen
Anderson-Lopez) For decades, Walt Disney himself sought to bring a
number of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales to the screen, and "The
Snow Queen" was one of his target productions. It took the better half
of a century for the concept's adaptation to finally make it to
completion, the last two decades a series of setbacks for a story that
proved very difficult to translate to the target audience. The resulting
2013 animated musical Frozen not only unfortunately changed its
name from The Snow Queen for its American release, but
dramatically rearranged the tale to make it almost unrecognizable
from its origins. That circumstance didn't bother critics and audiences,
however, who compared the merits of the picture to those of the entries
at the height of Disney's renaissance of the 1990's, yielding strong
awards consideration and hundreds of millions of dollars in net profit.
In this version of the story, two sisters are princesses to the thrown
of Arendelle, a Nordic kingdom that experiences a magic-induced ice age
of sorts when the sisters have a falling out, forcing them to spend the
film reconciling with each other and finding true love, of course, in
order to save their home. Frequently with comedy befitting
six-year-olds, Frozen goes through all the motions of the typical
1990's Disney musical, attempting to throw a bit of feminism and family
mores in at the same time, true to studio form. Despite composer Alan
Menken's return to the Disney realm in the late 2000's, the studio
continues to search for his inevitable replacement as a master of song
and score, and there has been limited success in this endeavor. The
rotation between composers in the late 1990's and 2000's has yielded
occasional singular successes, but no dynasty of successive powerhouses
as Disney would hope to achieve, and Frozen fits into the
equation as yet another production struggling to find the right balance
in the classic Menken mould. The team of composers combines the
songwriters from 2011's Winnie the Pooh, husband and wife duo
Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, with Disney's current score
composer of choice for its Muppets and other secondary projects,
Christophe Beck. The Lopezes have adequate experience with songwriting
from their days on Broadway, and Beck has, outside of his ventures into
the children's realm, cranked out workmanlike comedy music for the big
screen for years. Their selection for Frozen is somewhat
conservative, but their output is average at worst, with all the proper
procedures adhered to in the process of emulating a Menken musical.
Unfortunately, there is a sense of coherence and that ever intangible
notion of "magic" that is missing from Frozen despite its
procedural competence.
The Lopezes write eight songs for the film, as is the
norm, the opening one conveying the working man's ensemble much like
The Little Mermaid and others. Two ballads are the emphasis of
the bunch, the highlighting "For the First Time in Forever" a
traditional aspirational song allowing the two sisters to perform over
each other in counterpoint. Both Kristin Bell and Idina Menzel handle
this song and its full reprise well, the latter's veteran stage voice at
lower tones really shining. The other major song is "Let It Go,"
requiring Menzel to reach to an uncomfortably high octave and infusing
unnecessary rock percussion into the mix where a soaring orchestral
backing alone would have made more sense. The full pop rendition of this
song by Demi Lovato seems redundant as a result. The rock and other pop
influences exist in the remaining songs, including the short comedy
pieces that accomplish little other than to annoy you with their muffled
vocal performances. The modern Broadway style of "Fixer Upper" is
really awful in conjunction with surrounding material. Therein exists
one of the major issues with
Frozen: the discord between songs
and score. The press materials for the film strongly emphasized how well
connected the two halves of the project are, especially in relation to
Lopez song melodies integrating into Beck's score. But those claims are
utterly false. While Beck does indeed interpolate the song melodies
throughout the score, their enunciation is very poor, causing them to be
lost in the action. Likewise, the pop style of the songs is absent from
the score, creating even further problems despite the necessity for Beck
to play his role straight. The composer did utilize Norwegian
instrumentation and vocal techniques that make the score a stronger than
average animated venture, especially as the choir kicks in at "Summit
Siege." Some of the source ensemble vocals were recorded in Norway,
though this material ("Vuelie" and its reprise) have a much wetter mix
than either the song or score. The quality of the score is solid,
meandering through routine children's methodology early on and maturing
in later cues. The authentic ethnic coloration begins with horns in
"The Trolls" and extends to the unique vocal techniques in
"Sorcery." Once again, though, Beck addresses each moment without
obvious enough references the songs' melodies, causing his contribution
to sound frightfully anonymous as a whole. Animation enthusiasts will
latch onto the final three cues, "Whiteout" ripping with standard
percussion and the vocal inflection while "The Great Thaw" merges the
"Vuelie" recording with the orchestra and "Epilogue" finally closes
out with song references and the chime-banging, choral-aided crescendo
everyone expects. Overall, the praise heaped upon these songs and score
is a bit odd considering their pedestrian execution and occasionally
poor mix. A "deluxe edition" of the album contains rejected songs
described by the Lopezes, instrumental karaoke mixes (more on the
digital version), as well as a wealth of very mundane Beck demo cues.
None of it will thaw you out.
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