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FILMTRACKS.COM
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of Frozen (Christophe Beck/Robert Lopez/Kristen Anderson-Lopez)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
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.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
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. ***
TRACK LISTINGS:
Regular Edition Album:
Total Time: 69:18
Deluxe Edition Digital Album: Total Time: 128:36
Deluxe Edition CD Set: Total Time: 117:33
NOTES & QUOTES:
The inserts for all album variants contain similar contents, including lyrics to
each song and a full list of performers.
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2013-2024, Filmtracks Publications. All rights reserved.
The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Frozen are Copyright © 2013, Walt Disney Records (All Albums) and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 12/31/13 (and not updated significantly since). |
