Disney's Frozen

[ShyViolet]

Animator draws heat for princess comment:

http://m.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movi ... irls-video

[Dacey]

Wow. Talk about taking a statement COMPLETELY out-of-context.

[ShyViolet]

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. The animator didn't mean it that way and Disney princesses heroines have always had to be pretty. Nothing new there. When at Disney JK always insisted that they be sexy too lol (Jasmine, Ariel and especially Pocahontas).

[droosan]

During my few experiences working in cartoon character development / design, I slowly grew to dread working with female characters.

Primarily because the approval process for any female character (no matter how miniscule their role) attracted roughly four times the scrutiny and comments from everyone along the production supervisory chain. This meant more meetings, many more drawings / CG model revisions, etc .. and far more stress, time and effort on my part -- only to achieve an end result which (IMO) suffered from this "too many cooks" process.

Male characters on which I'd worked -- by comparison -- generally skated by my supervisors to approval, with little to no tinkering.

I thought I'd made myself fairly safe from this on one production, on which I was responsible for designing & building props and environments (which are largely 'gender-neutral') .. and then one of my assignments on that project was a "frilly pink little girl's bedroom". Whereas the average 'concept-to-approval' for most sets on that series was 7-10 days, that one girly bedroom took over a month of meetings and revisions to get to a 'final' that the producers were happy with.

-----------------

I should add that I have nothing against female animated characters (many of my personal favorite cartoon characters are female! ) .. I only relate the above tidbits to convey that working on designing, and animating, them is not necessarily the 'dream experience' that it may seem, from outside the industry.

[ShyViolet]

New Halloween tv spot:

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=110327

[Bill1978]

Trailer #3 - Or as I like to call it, the one with the plot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVpBCyprbH0

[Dacey]

I feel like...I've seen most of the movie now. I know that people complained that the trailers for Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph focused on the jokes, but the plus side of that was that we were able to discover the stories for ourselves when we actually saw the movies in theaters. And what's with the "greatest since The Lion King" thing? Has Lassetter decided that this will be the focus of the company's Oscar campaign this year instead of the Pixar film?

[ShyViolet]

I agree with Dacey...I feel like I've already seen this movie not once but five times now. I'm still looking foreword to it, but it pretty much looks like Anastasia with Snow to me...complete with awkwardly shoehorned sidekick friend. (Pooka the dog in Ana, even though he didn't actually talk.)

[Dacey]

LOL. I actually meant that the trailer gave the entire plot away, not that it looked repetitive.

And I think I'm going to have to turn into an Olaf defender...

[EricJ]

LOL. I actually meant that the trailer gave the entire plot away, not that it looked repetitive.
And I think I'm going to have to turn into an Olaf defender...

Olaf's overenthusiasm ends up sounding like "What if BEN from Treasure Planet was actually funny?"
(Although BEN came out pre-Lasseter, and didn't have someone worth melting for.)

And yes, having cheated and looked up the kids' books before the Trailer With the Plot came out, it follows Tangled's "good" plot developments pretty much down the line. (Anna's hair is turning fashionably white because

a spell says that she'll end up, well, Frozen, unless some sacrificing "act of love" will save her at the end--Hmm, Kristoff or the sister? Tangled or Brave?)

[Dacey]

Um...even though that's 'cut,' Eric, that's still kinda spoiler heavy. Might be best to hide the whole thing.

And....yeah, gonna hafta disagree about B.E.N. being a "pre-Lasseter problem" (sad thing is, the man probably would've intervened so much that Jim couldn't be so troubled, and Scroop--being a villain--would've been left on the cutting room floor altogether).

[Ben]

Is it me? I'm still not really finding much to get excited about here. And I loved Tangled. But this is feeling way too much like a retread here, with a supposedly funny sidekick (defend away, Dacey!) who is a one-joke character. The animation doesn't really look to capitalize on Tangled or Paperman's innovations, and the portion of the song they choose to highlight here has the most trite lyrics (something along the lines, "for the first time in, like, forever") since Disney had that bad shake of the DTVs.

Sorry...I'll be going to this primarily to see the Mickey short before it...and am almost shocked at the way the logos for The Lion King and Tangled have been used to sell the movie. Tangled, yeah, since it's as much a sequel/franchise extension as could be done, but to evoke The Lion King, with which it truly has little to nothing in common with? Feels like the Studio is simply feeding desperately off its past and just throwing out random titles (or, at least, the ones that proved the biggest hits) to try and get some audience recognition going. Of course, most studios do this anyway, but saying this is the best since The Lion King is a pretty bold statement (especially when that film was presumed to fail) and one that is surely destined to not be lived up to...?

[Ben]

Pretty cool (haha) review from THR that doesn't spoil anything (though I skimped over the couple of paragraphs on the plot)...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review ... ow_ehayden

[Dacey]

I wish I had skimped over the plot in that review. A bit of information--especially on the prince--that I didn't know about before now. But I'm happy to see that the reviewer liked it.

Still, I'm probably going to stay away from most reviews in the future (if there's even a point in doing that now).

[EricJ]

Sorry...I'll be going to this primarily to see the Mickey short before it...and am almost shocked at the way the logos for The Lion King and Tangled have been used to sell the movie. Tangled, yeah, since it's as much a sequel/franchise extension as could be done, but to evoke The Lion King, with which it truly has little to nothing in common with?

Not sure how much of it is studio desperation, but the rush of fans and critics saying "It's the best since (insert 90's Disney-Renaissance icon here)!" is more a reflection of the fact that people haven't really been noticing that post-Lasseter WDFA films have been getting better.
Old grudges from '05 die hard, and it certainly took some amount of persuasion to get some folks into Tangled after bad advertising campaigns.

But they saw Tangled, remembered it, and pass that off as a lucky classic.
Their new "surprise" that Frozen was pretty good too should have come to no surprise for anyone who already sat through Wreck-It Ralph in the theaters last year. And as we know from, ahem, certain Oscar-"winning" Pixar movies....most didn't.
So now, Tangled and Frozen become selectively singled out as good Disney movies that "magically" appeared out of nowhere, which...brings us back to new re-examined theories about just how Beauty&Beast and Lion King got all that darn iconic praise in the first place.