Disney Night!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Frozen was excellent, y'all. I was seriously gleeful that it was a sister movie! It's great having movies that focus on different family relationships--and it's almost up there with Brave as far as telling those stories well. (Brave does not get enough love.) I was also pleased at their expanding the traditional Disney definition of True Love.

And it was PRETTY.

But the thing that really blew my mind was the short at the beginning.

OH MY GOD.

Why is nobody TALKING about this thing? I've been getting interested in animation history recently,* and then here on the screen shows up an old-timey-looking short that almost had me fooled into thinking it was an actual old short. Okay, yes, it did give itself away a couple times--I'm not sure what did, exactly, but you got the sense it was a modern attempt at the retro look, rather than actual retro--before the, uh, the DEAD giveaway. And then when they did get to that reveal, the rest of the short just had me laughing the way a cartoon should. It was faithful to the 1928 aesthetic and to modern aesthetics, and it had wonderfully clever slapstick.

Also, OSWALD.

OSWALD, y'all.

So yeah, Frozen was brilliant, but ten thousand points to Lauren MacMullan for "Get a Horse!" That just about killed me.


*Well, even more interested.

Comments

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I loved Brave! I hadn't really heard anything about Frozen, and was thinking I should look it up to see what it's about, but you've just sold me on it with that comparison.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't want to be misleading--as far as I'm concerned, Brave is certainly the better movie. But Frozen is surprisingly wonderful, too.

And really, it's worth the price of a ticket just to see that brilliant short. I may have briefly died during it, just from sheer glee.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

That still puts it well above the "worth seeing in the theatre" bar for me.

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

I saw "Get A Horse!" a couple weeks ago, at the end of a program of Mickey Mouse shorts that ran from "Steamboat Willie" to the 1940s, and laughed myself sick. The look was dead on, but it definitely felt more modern, largely (to me) because of the pacing -- the gags come a lot quicker nowadays, with less time spent on the characters' reactions.

("MY NACHOS!")

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I think you're right. One thing I noted was that far less time was spent on those looped establishing shots than it would have been in the old ones--a shot of the hay wagon just trundling along while everyone bounced in it would probably have been tossed in, and gone on for a little bit. But it was nice to see them paying homage with the eyelines and the rubber hose limbs and the close-ups and the--well, a lot of things.

I lost it (well, again) at "I used to have a little cat ..." because I recognized exactly where that came from. Mr. Mouse Takes A Trip! That was the easiest to put into context, but I admit I recognized a lot of lines. It was fun to hear Walt doing Mickey's voice again.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Frozen is the one that's a gender-reversal of The Snow Queen, isn't it? I was interested in that but I haven't seen or read the original yet.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Well, there's SNOW in it ... and there's a QUEEN in it ... and ...

... Yeah, really other than that it has nothing to do with the original story, gender reversal or not.

Which is frankly FINE WITH ME. The original Snow Queen is as loony as the rest of Hans Christian Andersen's stories, and I never much liked it. You really don't have to read it to see the movie.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

Oswald is one of nature's many examples of how rabbits are made of infinite win. :>