Frozen

We were roughly twenty minutes into Frozen, watching the brown-haired sister (voiced by Kristen Bell) sing a duet with her beau, when I realized my kids weren't showing me a movie. They were showing me a Broadway musical disguised as a movie. About ten minutes after that, while watching Idina Menzel's Ice Queen belt out a full-throated (and Oscar-winning) “Let it Go,” I realized they were showing me a particularly good Broadway musical disguised as a movie. They ate it right up, and so did I.

Here's what makes Frozen a particularly good Broadway musical disguised as a movie: the songs, the story, the sets and costuming, and the performances.

Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez wrote the songs. Between them, they boast 'The Book of Mormon,' 'Avenue Q,' 'The Wonder Pets,' 'Winnie The Pooh,' and 'In Transit.' Robert Lopez has an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. These people know what they're doing, and what they're doing in Frozen is writing show tunes. These songs have great hooks, catchy choruses, and singability written all over them – just try listening to “Fixer Upper,” sung in the movie by a chorus of Scandinavian rock trolls, and not imagining a bunch of 12-year-olds in homemade costumes. I dare you. And if you happen to be one of the few people who still haven't heard Frozen's big anthem, “Let it Go,” well, get ready for an ear worm that'll play in a constant loop for days.

The story has a story of its own.  Re-pitched in the wake of Disney's successful The Little Mermaid, an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Ice Queen had been knocking around the Mouse House since 1943. The picture got a green light in 2011, and the story went through multiple iterations involving many people before it got to the version we see today. And that version? It's a near-perfect combination of family tension, romantic interest, villainy, and magic. Best of all, it does unexpected things with those elements. The family tension is about two sisters who love each other so much that it's simultaneously pushing them apart and pulling them together. The romantic interest zigs one way, then zags another, then zigs and zags a few more times, helping the audience mirror the conflicted feelings of the protagonist. The villainy, well, it's wonderful. There's Alan Tudyk (CDNW), voicing a character that's just a perfect weasel. And there's -well, you're going to have to see it for yourself. And the magic? It delights in that it plays more like something from an X-Men movie than a fairy tale. But those are just the elements. Frozen's unique charm springs from the way it lulls the audience with its first act simplicity, setting up all the pieces and archetypes for a pleasant if predicable story, then combines and recombines those pieces in unexpected ways while taking the story in fresh directions. I am used to watching children's movies for execution over story. Frozen offers both.

The sets and costuming are the result of a combination of extensive research, artistic sensibility, and technical brilliance. Animators visited Norway to get a sense of Scandinavian architecture, wilderness, and maritime culture. It's one thing to look at pictures of a fjord; it's quite another to see one for oneself. They traveled to Wyoming to understand how people move in deep snow in a variety of different styles of dress, from ball gowns to traditional Nordic furs. They visited a Canadian ice hotel to see how ice architecture really works. Then, they took all this and combined it with Ice Queen designs from the Disney archives, their own original artwork, and technical tools like Matterhorn, a snow-animation program written specifically for this film. The result? A beautiful, organic, seamless world that enriches its story, adds depth to its characters, and maintains the illusion of reality throughout the film's running time.

Of course, the whole thing breaks down if the performances don't resonate. In addition to the aforementioned Tudyk (CDNW), Idina Menzel provides a speaking voice for the Ice Queen that's both strong and vulnerable. Perhaps more importantly, Menzel (who boasts an impressive Broadway resume) has extraordinary singing pipes. The Frozen soundtrack provides a great example of this by including renditions of “Let it Go” performed by Menzel in the film and the pop singer Demi Lovato for a radio audience. Menzel blows Lovato clean off the record, bringing a clarity and technical proficiency that somehow reminds me of Nat King Cole.  And the rest of the cast? Well, not a single voice or inflection broke the movie's spell. We're talking about top-drawer stuff.

All of this adds up to a little more than a movie, and a little more than a really good Broadway musical disguised as a movie. It adds up to an extraordinary film, both entertaining and beautiful, that I'll be happy to watch again and again. Way to hit one out of the park, Disney.

Sita Sings the Blues

SITA SINGS THE BLUES opens with the best credits sequence I’ve ever seen. It begins gently enough, but it soon explodes into a vibrant and exciting combination of music and animation. If the film could have found a way to maintain that level of energy throughout its run time, it could well have become one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

While SITA SINGS THE BLUES unspools to become, over the next hour and a half, a fine, imaginative, wonderful movie, it doesn’t stay on track to earn “best ever” status. But hey, whom are we kidding? Most of the movies we sit through are achingly average, so why pick nits over whether a refreshingly innovative, original, and beautiful film ascends to the pantheon of “best ever”? It’s enough that this film takes material with which most of us are unfamiliar, adapts it in a way both entertaining and illuminating, and even manages to reacquaint our culture with the artistry of a performer long-passed.

SITA SINGS THE BLUES retells The Ramayana, a Hindu myth in which the noble Rama and his beloved Sita deal with exile, war, jealousy, and the vicious power of rumor. It tells it in wonderful 2-D animation, with different styles reflecting different storytellers, stories, or stories-within-stories. And it does it to the music of one Annette Hanshaw, a popular jazz singer of the ‘20s and ‘30s, in an innovative twist on the time honored practice of making that which was old new again.

Unfortunately, filmmaker Nina Paley failed to clear the rights to Ms. Hanshaw’s music prior to putting four years into creating this wonder on her home computer. Consequently, you can’t find SITA SINGS THE BLUES on Netflix or at your local art house movie theater. You can, however, find it for free download or stream at http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/, a site created by Paley to distribute her film via a creative commons license. I’m no lawyer, but I’m going to assume it’s legal. So I encourage you to check this movie out. If you like it, flip Ms. Paley a couple of bucks through the link on her site. I, for one, would love to see what she comes up with next.

Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms

HELLBOY ANIMATED: SWORD OF STORMS is much better than I thought it would be. I only rented the thing out of loyalty to the characters, and I expected a cheap, direct-to-DVD knockoff. What a pleasant surprise to find an involving story, solid animation, excellent voice acting, and an all-around great experience.

If you're already a Hellboy fan, read no further and be assured that you'll enjoy a film that hews to the style of the comics. If you aren't familiar with the character, here's a bit of background. In the waning days of WWII, Hitler's occult advisor tries the last-ditch tactic of summonig a demon from Hell to aid in the fight. When American forces break through at the culmination of the ceremony, they find cutest li'l baby demon you ever did see. They name him Hellboy, raise him to be a good guy, and put him to work in the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, or BPRD (Motto: Things really do go bump in the night. We're the ones who bump back.). Hellboy's a gruff manchild, still living in the equivalent of his parents' basement, and his solution to most problems involves significant amounts of blunt force trauma. He's a great character. He's nearly indestructible, so he can face the most horrific of creatures with little more than a deadpan, "Oh, crap." He carries his massive upper torso and Fist of Clobberin' around on spindly little goat legs and delicate hooves, making him simultaneously imposing and amusing. And he hangs out with a gill man and a firestarter. What's not to like?

In HASS, the BPRD sends Hellboy to Japan to investigate the theft of a legendary sword. Before he knows it, the demon gets sucked into the Japanese equivalent of Faerie, where he must undertake a quest that gives him and us, the audience, a tour through some of the scarier tales of Japanese folklore. As Hellboy uses the amazing power of blunt force trauma to survive in this world, his pals in the BPRD must deal with the real-world repercussions of his actions and figure a way to get him back.

It's a solid setup, and one that goes right for a variety of reasons. First, HASS, as do the comics, boasts a love for folklore and an ability to introduce the audience to new legends with a light and entertaining touch. Second, the animation style resembles Hellboy creator Mike Mignola's comics, creating a continuity with the printed page and inviting us into the greater world of the character. Third, the voice acting (largely by the cast of the not-as-good live action HELLBOY movie) sells the picture. Genre stalwart Ron Perlman voices Hellboy as I always imagined the character; Selma Blair does fine, if necessarily whiny, work as Liz the firestarter; and Doug Jones gives Abe Sapien, the gill man, a different and successful spin than did live-action voice actor David Hyde Pierce.

HASS is fun. It's funny, scary, and thoroughly entertaining, and it provides a wonderful introduction to the world of Japanese folklore. What more could you want?

Mad Monster Party

MAD MONSTER PARTY (1967) is a stop-motion picture picture with a vaudevillian's philosophy: if you don't like the current joke, don't worry - there's another coming right on its heels.

Here's the setup: Dr. Frankenstein is having all the best monsters (Dracula, the Wolf Man, Phyllis Diller) over to the castle for a bash. Like any good party, this one is a hotbed of machiavellian maneuvering, cynical doublecrossing, and animated-skeleton rock bands ripping off the Beatles.

It's cute, it's inventive, & my kid loves it as much as I did when I was five. What more could you ask for?