Frozen – Review

November 29, 2013

Verdict: 7/10

Ever since Disney’s Pixar division debuted with Toy Story in 1995, Disney’s in-house animation studio has become increasingly overshadowed. Following the heyday of classics like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, Disney has produced a mix of forgettable and underrated animated features, but nothing that quite stacks up to the most beloved princess movies that form the core of its brand. Frozen may mark the beginning of a new golden age for Disney animation, or it might just be an anomaly, but either way it’s the best movie the studio has produced in many years, combining all the charms of the classic princess formula while tweaking them in clever, forward-thinking ways that still feel completely organic.

Like The Little Mermaid, Frozen is based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, although it’s a very loose adaptation of The Snow Queen. Here, there are not one but two princesses, sisters Elsa (voiced by Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell), who live in the Scandinavian-ish kingdom of Arendelle. Born with powers to create ice and snow, Elsa is sequestered from her boisterous sister and opens up to the outside world only when the death of their parents elevates her to the status of queen. Her inability to control her powers leads to disaster, making Elsa in some ways both the villain and the damsel in distress.

Refreshingly, however, neither Elsa nor Anna is really a damsel in distress; Elsa unleashes her powers during a terrific musical number that celebrates her independence and autonomy, accompanied by stunning animation, and Anna boldly sets off into the mountains to confront her sister. Anna has suitors in the form of both a rogue (Jonathan Groff) and a prince (Santino Fontana), but the true love at the heart of the story is sisterly, not romantic. Add in wonderful, Broadway-caliber songs from Robert Lopez (Avenue Q, The Book of Mormon) and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, and Frozenfulfills every requirement of the Disney princess movie in spectacular fashion (even the annoying talking-snowman sidekick voiced by Josh Gad is only marginally annoying). Pixar better watch its back

Jurassic World is set in real time, 22 years after the events in Jurassic Park.

November 29, 2013

Besides the fact that Universal Pictures will release Jurassic World in 3D on June 12, 2015, we don’t know much about what to expect.

Rumors have surfaced that the film may be about the park some time later as it is officially open to the public, but the studio has not confirmed that. Fans have also wondered if the movie will serve as a reboot of the franchise. Director Colin Trevorrow has now addressed those worries onTwitter.

“Reboot is a strong word,” he said. “This is a new sci-fi terror adventure set 22 years after the horrific events of Jurassic Park.”

If it is set 22 years after the first film, it could mean the theme park rumors are accurate.

Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Ty Simpkins, Jake Johnson, Nick Robinson and Irrfan Khan will star in the film. Steven Spielberg returns to produce. Trevorrow directs the epic action-adventure from a draft of the screenplay he wrote with Derek Connolly. Frank Marshall and Pat Crowley join the team as fellow producers.

A leaked plot breakdown revealed that an older Jurassic Park 4 script draft also picked up in real-time after Steven Spielberg’s original film (released in 1993). In that version, the island of Isla Nublar now housed a fully-functional “biological preserve” for dinosaurs, as John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) intended so many years before.

Trevorrow and Connelly are reported to have since made significant revisions to that version of the script, though it appears that not all of the key elements in that draft have been removed. Additionally, Trevorrow previously indicated that the fourth Jurassic Parkmovie is still going to take place on Isla Nublar (not Isla Sorna, a.k.a. Site B, featured in the other sequels), while the Jurassic World title could be an allusion to the existence of a SeaWorld-esque park for dinos in the film, a la the setting in the aforementioned JP4script draft.

To sum it all up: it’s possible that Trevorrow and Connelly have altered a number of the specific details, but the premise for their Jurassic World screenplay may not be quite so different from that in the leaked JP4 synopsis. Of course, the execution of the setup in the key and this writer/director pair demonstrated with Safety Not Guaranteed that they can get a fair amount of mileage out of a basic, yet intriguing concept.

Are you excited to see a new Jurassic Park movie? Does the rumored plot sound like a good idea, or are you keeping your fingers crossed that the project will end up going with a different approach?