Frozen, the recent hit movie released by Disney, enthralled millions with its tale of two sisters, betrayal, and ice magic. Overall, I think Frozen is a decent movie with a few flaws, however, the public’s reaction to it is unreasonable. To me it seems that many love the movie to a point of reverence exemplified by how Frozen remained in theaters for months, while the typical movie stays in theaters six to eight weeks.

While Frozen’s storyline was based off of “The Snow Queen”, a 1845 story written by Hans Christian Andersen, Disney altered the plot severely. I think that both stories are good, however I would have liked it if they had kept true to the plot of “The Snow Queen”. Frozen is a good story, but is geared more towards children, and I would have liked to see something a little darker. In “The Snow Queen”, a boy has his heart frozen and sees only the bad traits in people because dust from a destroyed demon mirror got in his eye. The Snow Queen takes him, and the girl next door tries to find him and bring him home. To reach him, the girl overcomes many challenges such as being captured by thieves and escaping, eventually making it to the Snow Queen’s palace and finds the boy. This story would have been good without many alterations, such as Frozen’s snow queen, Elsa, being good compared to the original. Overall, I would have just liked to see “The Snow Queen” more than Frozen, although both stories are well written.

Another critique about Frozen is that its plot is very similar to Tangled’s and the stories share many parallels. For example, both Rapunzel and Anna are isolated for most of their lives and want to get out and meet people and see the world, both are helped by men whom they made bargains with, both use a domestic mammal for transportation – in Frozen it is Sven the reindeer and in Tangled it is Maximus the horse. Even the conclusions of both movies mirror each other, ending with betrayal and the death and resurrection of a character. The plots are very similar, and whether this was intentional or not, I wish that Disney was a little more original and didn’t simply make a chilly derivative of Tangled.

With this being said, the one thing that particularly stuck out to me in Frozen was the music. Idina Menzel has a great voice, and it really showed in Frozen as she brought life to the songs and characters. The band was great as well and I really enjoyed their playing and background music.

The animation was also good, except for a few glitches such as Elsa’s hair clipping through her arm in the song “Let it Go”. Creating a program to make each snowflake be unique showed great attention to detail. Also, an entire program was created just for Elsa’s hair animation, which again was a minuscule detail but all of these small things added up to a having great animation. I especially liked how they animated Elsa’s magic; it was well done and made the movie shine from an animation standpoint.

I enjoyed Frozen, however I would like to have seen more plot variation from Tangled, and I think that it should have been closer to “The Snow Queen”. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good story, just a little overused. The animation and sound effects were excellent, and the film was well done from a technical standpoint. With this in mind I would recommend watching Frozen once or twice, but leaving it at that and not obsessing over it.