Frozen indoctrination: End of Year 1

While Christmas shopping one recent weekend and being beset by "Let It Go" and various department store employees dressed up like Elsa and Anna, I came to a rather startling realization:

Frozen has only been with us for a single year.

This movie has been so entrenched into the very fabric of kid culture that it seems hard to imagine it, but last Christmas season, Frozen wasn't even a full-fledged phenomenon yet. In fact, in Australia, it hadn't even been released yet. Disney's big animated features tend to come out on Boxing Day, as is happening with Big Hero 6 this year.

So this is actually only the first Christmas season in which Frozen merchandise has even been an option for Australian children. I'm sure a small amount of it was bought speculatively last year based on the advanced marketing and some positive buzz from the U.S., but this time last year, Australian children didn't know Frozen (the movie about ice princesses and a plucky snowman) from Frozen (the movie about skiers stranded on a lift and being devoured by wolves).

Now, though, it feels like the images and songs from this movie are as familiar to us as the images and songs from The Little Mermaid ... perhaps the last time there was such an unimaginable furor over something released by Disney.

You could argue that Beauty and the Beast was the greater critical darling and The Lion King the more far-reaching overall phenomenon, but in terms of entrancing little girls, nothing beat The Little Mermaid.

So it is with Frozen. Storywise, Frozen has nothing on Tangled or even Wreck-It Ralph. (I can make these broad statements because it's my blog, and in my world, Tangled is The Greatest Animated Achievement of the Past 20 Years.) But in terms of entrancing little girls, even Disney's first recent movie designed to do that doesn't stand a chance.

Adding to that, it's also a Lion King-sized overall phenomenon. Now you see the secret to Frozen's power.

But Mr. Crankypants -- that's me, the Tangled lover -- still can't see what all the fuss is about. The movie has a couple good songs, sure, but even its undeniably greatest scene -- "Let it Go" -- strikes a person as odd in terms of what the movie is trying to convey in that moment. So wait, which bastards have been getting her down that she has to walk away from? And why is she dressing up in her icy winter ballroom gown and walking a runway? Isn't this supposed to be feminism lite?

I never really got into the characters, and I felt there were whole avenues that ended up as red herrings. (Why is there a whole song devoted to cultivating ice when the movie never spends any time on it otherwise? What purpose do those little ogre people serve?)

The failure to see this film's flaws is what frustrates me so much about the collective Frozen brainwashing of our young people. One of the things that makes Tangled so brilliant is its script. There isn't an ounce of fat in that movie, it's so damn tight. Frozen? It often feels like nothing but fat.

But I suppose what frustrates me the most is the fact that the movie's message is being prized above all else in considering its quality. Tangled made the apparently cardinal sin of having the princess interested in a man. Because Frozen is about a bond between sisters, it is viewed as more progressive and a further step away from the long Disney history of which it is supposed to be deeply ashamed. Maleficent and Brave (Disney via Pixar) both push men to the side as well and are lauded for their "I don't need no man" modern sensibilities.

But these are weak stories, especially Brave. Yes, it's about a mother and daughter. But it's also about a daughter who places a curse on her mother that ends up turning her into a bear. Let's not get so bogged down on the forest that you can't see the trees.

So I feel like the collective narrative has been to celebrate Frozen's focus on a sister-sister relationship, instead of a boy-girl relationship, like the one in Tangled. I count my wife as one of those concerned that Rapunzel doesn't have enough of her own agency in Tangled, since Flynn Rider is ultimately the one who chooses to make a (temporarily) fatal sacrifice for her. He is, therefore, "saving" her. These people forget, though, that Rapunzel tried to issue herself a life sentence of servitude to Mother Gothel to save him, only he flipped the tables on her. He who sacrifices last wins, I guess.

Now I'm really straying from my original point. My original point being that here we are, one year into Frozen's reign as The Greatest Animated Achievement of the Past 20 Years, and the blind adoration accorded this movie leaves me a little uncomfortable. This is a lesser cinematic product being celebrated like a greater one, and that's why I fearlessly refer to the cult-like worship of it as an indoctrination.

Closing on a more positive note, though, I will say that we owe Frozen for one of the funnier moments on our recent trip to the U.S. It was night 2 of the trip and we had just landed in Boston, where we would be picking up a rental car and driving out to my mom's house in Bedford. After we signed the paperwork and headed out to choose from about a half-dozen options (and when did this weird kind of inexactitude become normal practice when renting vehicles?), my son inexplicably ran ahead of us, turned around, and screamed:

"LET IT GO! LET IT GO! DON'T BOTHER ME ANYWAY!"

It was an awesome release that really punctured the stress. We laughed and laughed and continued to mention it for the rest of the trip.

And I kind of love that he got the lyrics wrong in such a funny way.

Take that, Frozen.

That's one kid out there who isn't fully under your spell.

Three-star animation

I've seen two objectively subpar animated movies in the past ten days - Alpha and Omega and Escape from Planet Earth - and given them both three stars on Letterboxd.

My son saw the Netflix ad for a third objectively subpar animated movie - Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil - pop up after Planet Earth, so he's in there watching it now. I'm in here, typing this, to prevent myself from giving the supposedly terrible Hoodwinked sequel three stars as well.

Something seems clear: I have a harder time recognizing mediocrity in an animated movie than elsewhere.

It's three out of five, not three out of four, but the fact remains that I am giving a passing grade to movies that should probably flunk the test of being worth my time.

I'm entirely too comfortable with rewarding an animated movie for being a "good try." I know that Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks represent really daunting standards to live up to, both in quality of writing and quality of animation, so I'm acknowledging the handicaps that other movies start out with. But that doesn't mean that all other movies deserve the star rating that translates as a modest recommendation.

There are a handful of reasons I think I'm as easy as I am on these movies:

1) The animation, especially these days, is good enough to contain some "wow" moments. Plus, I know how hard they worked on every little detail. Most animated movies are a labor of somebody's love. It's much easier to mail in a live action film.

2) Animated movies tend to get top-flight vocal talent, mostly because it's an easy paycheck and does not carry any particular stigma. Studios will be glad to learn that their money is well spent, as I do tend to be impressed by the fact that William Shatner (who, let's be honest, will do anything these days) voices the villain in Planet Earth.

3) Animated movies are usually smart enough (i.e. safe enough) to stick to conventional plotting with familiar character types. With the amount of money invested in the polished final product, it does not pay to take risks on the story, nor is it possible to slide any remotely objectionable content through.

Vanilla, though, should not be worth three stars. It should max out at 2.5, even if it's pretty well-made vanilla.

However, as I've written before (though never specifically about animated films), I feel like giving something 2.5 or less means it's a thumbs down, an entirely too grumpy dismissal of a movie that's okay to pretty good.

In fact, the last animated movie I remember really slamming was one that did take an apparent risk with its plot -- an impulse I probably should have rewarded, except I thought it was just too wrong-headed of a narrative choice. That movie was Brave, which offered us some cockamamie plot about people turning into bears. I gave it 2.5 stars, but these days tend to think of it as a two-star movie.

So am I saying I like the generic underdog hero story and panoply of colorful sidekicks better in Alpha and Omega, Escape From Planet Earth and (let's throw in one more I saw earlier this year that fits the description) Planet 51? Are they better just because they don't make any egregious errors? Are they better just because the plot was deemed safe enough by every interested financial backer?

I'm a slow learner, apparently, because this is not the first time I've tried to get tougher with my star ratings. It's not even the first time this year. You may recall that back in April, I wrote this post after seeing Trance, frustrated by the instinct that made me want to award it three stars. And I still haven't figured out how to award lower when movies deserve it -- at least not consistently, and especially not with animation.

Maybe this time, I'll do as I write. "It didn't offend me" should no longer be the standard for what gets three stars.

The generosity ends ... now. Again. 

Brave new world

Pixar's Brave was going to be our first 3D movie on our "new" 3D TV.

I'm very glad it ended up being the second. But first some history.

We got our "new" 3D TV around the time we moved, which makes it seven months old and nearly ready to shed the descriptor "new." To our great shame, we went the first six-and-a-half months of its life without even tapping into the feature that gives it its name. We knew we couldn't watch a 3D BluRay until we followed up this purchase with a 3D BluRay player, but we also knew that there were some 3D features on our TV we could access directly through the TV. Still, watching programming in 3D remained for us a peripheral priority, something that seemed vaguely too hard to do.

Flash forward to Cyber Monday, when I decided to convert on my intention to buy us a 3D BluRay player for Christmas. I couldn't click the "purchase" button on Best Buy's website fast enough. The thing cost a scant $70, and with having it delivered to the store rather than to my house, there was no shipping cost either. The next Saturday, I walked my son down to the nearest Best Buy and returned home with this tiny new component, less than 2/3 the size of our current BluRay player.

I knew I couldn't wait for Christmas to present it to my wife. I also knew it couldn't be a present specifically for her, because that's cheating -- I'd obviously get as much use out if it as she would, and probably more. So I decided to repurpose some birthday money for the purchase, and decided I would present it to her on the Saturday night before Christmas (she should still unwrap it, as a good way of revealing the surprise). That left Sunday and Monday nights as two possibilities for watching our first 3D movie. Oh, it would have still been "special" if our first 3D movie didn't come until after Christmas, but the days leading up to Christmas have this special kind of magic to them. Besides, one of my two movie choices would only make good viewing prior to Christmas.

See, another thing I'd been working on in December was borrowing the copy of Disney's A Christmas Carol I bought for my friend two Christmases ago. I bought him the version that included a 3D BluRay, even though his family didn't yet have a 3D TV (and still doesn't). But the timing of the borrow was tricky. His family planned to watch it this holiday season, but hadn't yet. About two weeks ago we realized that my needs and theirs were not incongruous. They weren't going to be watching the actual 3D BluRay, because they couldn't. So his wife secretly slipped me that disc in a padded manila envelope when she was babysitting for us two Saturdays ago.

I figured my wife would choose A Christmas Carol and that's what I was rooting for, but it seemed only fair to have another option available. And we do in fact own one 3D BluRay: Tangled. However, in my mind, that was a definite Plan B. We had both already seen Tangled twice. This would be my third Christmas Carol viewing as well, but she'd only seen it once, and had also proclaimed it "probably her favorite movie version of that story." Besides, Tangled would keep until after Christmas. A Christmas Carol would not.

As it turns out, she wanted a Plan C. And that's where Brave came into the discussion.

Both of the proposed BluRays were movies we'd seen within the past two years, and my wife was eager for another option. She mentioned that Brave had been in 3D, and neither of us had seen Pixar's latest yet. My Christmas Carol bias notwithstanding, I thought it was a great idea and went to work figuring out how to procure it.

We weren't so excited to see Brave that we thought it was worth it to actually own the movie, which would currently be priced at its all-time high. So Sunday morning I swung by Blockbuster to see if they might rent 3D BluRays. I didn't even need to get further than the front counter, where the friendly clerk told me that they didn't. I gave him an opening to refer me to one of his competitors: "So the only way to see a movie in 3D at home is to buy it?" "Pretty much," he responded.

I was satisfied with the response, because I thought it clinched my desired Christmas Carol screening. It did not. My wife chose Tangled.

And I'm so glad she did. Even if it denied us a seasonal viewing, Tangled is far and away the better movie. And watching a great movie in 3D on our own TV was as wonderful a way to usher in this new era as I could have possibly imagined.

Simply put, the 3D was astounding. I would have expected something that was very clearly a lesser version of what you get in the theater. At the very least I figured you needed to position yourself at a perfectly straight angle to the screen in order for the images to have that third dimension. But no. Tangled was as breathtaking as it had first been for me in the theater, with incomparable depth as well as images occasionally popping out of the screen. My wife, who hadn't previously caught it in 3D, claimed to like it better than she ever had before. Even a part of the third act that she had previously considered a significant narrative problem did not bother her this time. Amazing how an extra dimension, when done correctly, can just wrap you up in its spell and eradicate all your complaints.

Unfortunately, Brave could not pull off the same feat.

Last night, we did watch Brave in 3D -- without needing our new BluRay player, in fact.

It turns out that our LG 3D TV (all three of our components, including both of our BluRay players, are LG) has kind of an "app store" accessible from its home screen. It can use our wifi to deliver us a variety of movies directly from the TV, and it being a 3D TV, has a section devoted to movies we can rent in 3D. The other two 3D movies were movies we'd both already seen (The Avengers and Gnomeo & Juliet), so Brave was clearly it, especially since we'd flirted with this very idea on Sunday. Eight dollars even seemed a reasonable price to pay for such a rental -- that's probably a quarter of what it would cost if we bought the BluRay combo pack to own.

And after watching it, I can tell you that we don't want to own Brave.

Keeping in mind that I have yet to see Cars 2, Brave is the first Pixar movie that I have actually given a thumbs down. A Bug's Life might have been close, but even that lame movie would get a marginal thumbs up from me. Well, not this one. Even reasonably good 3D (though not as good as Tangled) and images that are certainly beautiful were not enough to blind us to the movie's many, many narrative flaws.

Name a few? Okay. (SPOILERS)

1. It's pretty damn hard to forgive your heroine after she has gotten a witch to cast a spell on her own mother. When was the last time you trusted a witch to do exactly what you told her to do? I didn't think so. Much like the devil, a witch's main priority is to make a nearly legalistic analysis of your request in order to figure out creative ways to follow the letter of what you asked for, though not the spirit of what you asked for. See Brave for a very good example.

2. As a result, Merida spends the entire second half of the movie trying to correct her own mistake. My wife always says that she can't stand movie characters who create their own problems. There are certainly exceptions to this, but it's hard to get behind a character who has to go to considerable trouble to undo something he/she never should have done in the first place.

3. I was led to believe one of the main plot points was that Merida competes against her suitors in a variety of feats of skill, in order to "win her own hand in marriage" rather than letting someone else win it. In this way I expected the story to resemble the tale of Atalanta from Free to Be ... You and Me (though originally a Greek myth). Turns out, she has one archery scene against the three dopes trying to marry her, none of whom can do anything with a bow and arrow. (One suitor hits the bulls-eye, but it's by accident.)

4. What the story is actually about is human beings turning into bears. Really. That's what this movie is about. The problem is that if a human being is confused for a bear -- because of, you know, being turned into a bear -- another human being might try to kill that bear. Never mind the fact that Merida could just say to her father, who has built his reputation on his desire to exact revenge on the bear who took his leg, "Dad! Don't kill this bear. It's Mom. I gave her a cake that had been cursed by a witch, and she turned into this bear." Instead, they have to hide the bear and run around like idiots.

5. When Merida and her bear mother are out in the woods, trying to find a cure to the mother's bearness, they somehow learn things about each other that make them understand each other better. However, none of this is actually dramatized in any particular moment. I guess being turned into a bear by your daughter is enough of a reason to realize that she doesn't need to get married against her will. 

6. Even while it's clear that the cake Merida has given her mother is making her physically sick, she doesn't care. All she cares about is whether her coughing and choking mother has changed her mind on whether she must marry one of the three dopes. Which, you remember, is the reason she poisoned her in the first place. All of these so far should lead naturally to #7 ...

7. I didn't like the characters. Any of them, really.

But I've saved possibly the most problematic element of the movie for last ...

8. Nothing that occurs on screen here -- I mean, nothing whatsoever -- requires an ounce of bravery. No one does something really daring. No one puts him or herself in position to make a sacrifice. No one leads an army against impossible odds. The film's only established antagonist (other than the witch with ambiguous intentions) is the king's brother, who was turned into a bear (called Mordu) after becoming evil and trying to take over sole control of the kingdom. He only appears in the story a couple times, and his motivations are so vague and generic that they almost don't even exist. He is dispatched somewhat easily. You could say that the queen engages in a bit of bravery by taking on Mordu, but since she is also a bear at the time, the risk to her is considerably less than if she had been, you know, not a bear.

So yeah, I didn't like Brave.

But that doesn't mean I can't use its poster art to symbolize our exciting new home 3D adventure. And now I'm just rubbing my hands together, figuring out which movie to rent or own that will blow our dimensional minds next.

My wife hasn't seen Wreck-It-Ralph, and I didn't see it in 3D. That seems like a probable one to own come February or March, as we get ever deeper into this brave new world.

Not so Brave after all?

That sound you hear is a sigh of relief from hardcore Pixar fans upon the release of Brave.

True to its name, the film represents Pixar's return to its risk-taking ways of old. After two straight sequels -- one that was well received (Toy Story 3) and one that wasn't (Cars 2) -- the company is finally returning to something brand new, something with uncertain merchandising potential featuring characters we've never met before. The return is temporary, as the sequel to Monsters Inc. (called Monsters University) is due out in June of 2013. (I just read that it is technically a prequel.)

But I'm kind of wondering if Pixar isn't relying on our sense of familiarity for this one, too.

Oh, there are surface similarities to How to Train Your Dragon, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's actually a bit more shrewd than that.

Remember a little movie called The Hunger Games that came out in March?

Yeah, that movie also featured a tough female protagonist who's handy with a bow and arrow.

Don't think this didn't cross their minds over at Pixar.

The actual release date of the Hunger Games movie would have been largely serendipitous. But back when they announced what was then called The Bear and the Bow in April of 2008, they had to know that The Hunger Games would be made into a movie, and that by June of 2012, it would already be either a big hit, or a highly anticipated release sometime in the near future.

Hadn't they?

Ha. No. See, this is what happens when you start writing a blog post before fully researching the thing you're writing about.

Suzanne Collins' first Hunger Games book was not published until September of 2008 -- nearly six months after the movie that would become Brave was announced.

So The Hunger Games and Brave are actually just another case of that phenomenon we see so often in Hollywood -- the convergence of similar ideas that are ready to hit the multiplexes within months of each other. Often times, one of those ideas is a direct rip-off of the other, even if it makes it to theaters first. In this case, though, it seems like just a coincidence.

Of course, it's not like The Hunger Games and Brave are similar outside of the fact that a young girl wields a bow and arrow in both. It's not like these are two competing movies about the life of runner Steve Prefontaine.

So why did I make you read a whole post in which my conclusion ultimately contradicted my original thesis?

Hey, I'm lucky if I get the time (or have the ideas) to write anything these days. If I've got actual content up on the page, I'm publishing it.

Here's hoping you love Brave ... and that I start finding the time to post more often.