Frozen

An animated film set in a northern kingdom. Elsa can freeze whatever she touches. As a child she injures her sister by accident, and after that day the doors are closed; nobody goes out and the sisters grow up apart. Anna remembers nothing. She grows up alone and keeps talking to her sister through the door. On the coronation day the doors open for one day. Anna wants to marry someone she met that evening and Elsa refuses. The argument grows, the power is seen, and Elsa runs. From there the film is a search. A mountain, a palace of ice, a reindeer, an ice seller and a snowman. What the narrative is interested in is not love but sisterhood: the act of true love at the end does not come from a man, and that deliberately breaks the genre's habit. Elsa was originally written as a villain. After one song was written the character changed completely and the story was rebuilt; that song became the film's signature. The prince line is a trap. The narrative puts the audience into a fairy tale expectation and then reverses it. A tale by Andersen is named as the source, but the film takes very little from it. Simulating snow and ice was the hardest technical work in the production; every grain had to behave separately. The film won Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature and Best Song and became the highest-grossing animated film worldwide at the time. Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Jonathan Groff and Josh Gad are among the voices. Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee directed. Who it is for: families who want a musical animation. Who it is not for: anyone looking for consistency; the second half is rushed and some of the rules are never explained.