Frozen (Disney film)

Okay, seriously, if we're not allowed to critique terrible film adaptations until after they come out, this site is going to die a terrible death due to lack of discussion.

There's been plenty of information released about Frozen to support my statements. How about you prove me wrong instead of telling me to stop talking?

edited 4th Dec '12 12:21:31 PM by Rebochan

Rebo I agree that the changes here are already problematic (Americanization and removing female characters and replacing them with men). But if we're talking about the QUALITY of the produce and not the politics their really is no way to tell until the movie is released. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was barely related to Who Censored Roger Rabbit and the story they came up with was so good that the original author retconned the book to fit the events of the movie. The only real way to judge quality is actully seeing the movie. And no Discussion wouldn't dry up. There's always bitching about bad adaptations AFTER they come out!

Fair enough, and admittedly, we don't know how this will turn out.

On the other hand, The Snow Queen was going to be a straight adaptation until the marketing men got ahold of it and I think that's reason to be concerned for the direction it's going in. There's a lot of warning signs.

That said, Tangled turned out pretty good despite the reconfiguration and the marketing's attempt to promote Flynn as the main character, but I still can't help but think that it might have been stronger had there been no meddling. Most of the changes weren't too bad though - the leads of Rapunzel needed the extra depth the movie actually gave them, Flynn was a co-lead and not THE lead, and while there were funny animals, they were animals that didn't talk and wise crack like other Disney whacky sidekicks.

Similarly, I loved Brave and what it was doing with the idea of princesses and such, but the action elements that Disney clearly wanted probably hurt it more in the long run. I also suspect had they not tried to pretend it was a dark fantasy epic out of fear of the Girl-Show Ghetto, people would have had a far less negative reaction to learning what it was actually about.

edited 4th Dec '12 12:48:27 PM by Rebochan

I agree re: Brave.

Also, the song snippet posted last page makes it sound like Disney will try to milk the Queen as a tragic villainess like they are (retroactively) doing with Maleficent (seems to be a thing these days, since Wicked. Anyone for an Ursula movie? )

The irony is, they don't need to rewrite the queen to be Anna's misguided sister to make an isolated, lonely woman into a tragic character desperate for companionship. They could have kept the ACTUAL plot of the book for that!

Just out of curiosity, why are we citing Brave as what's wrong with Disney when Disney just recently released another very successful movie that, by all accounts, is a genuinely good story?

Is it because Wreck-It Ralph doesn't have a female lead?

Because Brave was subject to heavy Executive Meddling like this movie seems to suffer. BUT... I think Wreck it Ralph also was highly supervised, considering they mention there were a LOT of drafts to the script.

Brave did fantastic, and I think it gets a bum rap on this site.

But nonetheless, it does have issues and while it hardly got bad reviews, a lot of people criticized the movie's marketing as trying to present it differently. It's also started coming out that the movie's female director (an animation veteran) was essentially let go to be replaced by a male newcomer entirely out of fear that Brave was too "girly" and needed more action.

Interesting that Wreck-It Ralph comes up - Disney initially announced it as an attempt to be boy-friendly along with a slate of boy-led films due to blaming the weak box office of The Princess And The Frog entirely on having a female lead. And yet, despite being a film about what is generally considered more of a male-dominated hobby, it had more women in the film's cast than the actual AAA video games it was focusing on. I mean, seriously, Call Of Duty hasn't ever put a woman in the lead role and recently seems to think women don't actually exist...yet Sgt. Calhoun is the lead character of Hero's Duty. I can't think of a single all-female Kart Racing game, yet Sugar Rush (in its natural state) has nothing but female racers. Plus the one gamer the film spends most of its time showing as hanging around the arcade? A little girl. Seriously, I thought the biggest fictional element of Wreck-It Ralph was depicting a gaming industry that caters to men and women equally.

It's not that Disney can't be better at this. It's that in the case of Frozen, they seem to have freaked out and excised anything they thought would invoke the Girl-Show Ghetto.

edited 4th Dec '12 1:50:01 PM by Rebochan

I agree that it's ironic that Disney is like "OMG Girly things don't sell" when half of Wreck it Ralph took place in a world that literally Tastes Like Diabetes and made half the main cast female.

Well, the marketing problems Brave had are something I can see being worrisome, yeah.

...I still haven't seen the movie. I really should.

Was there really any Disney animated movie that had a story that wasn't drastically changed from the book/tale it was based on?

Oh, and we're not counting Wreck-It Ralph because it's not based on any old story. They're just taking the history of video games and making up a story based on that premise.

edited 4th Dec '12 1:57:45 PM by kyun

Rebo, I feel you've been acting extremely vitriolic towards these details. It's not that you can't express negative opinions or critique but we have to focus on execution as well. You've cited examples to show how comparatively far it is in terms of an adaptation, which does not guarantee the quality.

I can't necessarily see (yet) what is "wrong" with the changes. Did some films have the potential to be "better" if they took a different direction? Sure, but at the same time so much goes into a film it's difficult to gauge.

Granted I'm not super excited about Frozen(considering it was a former cel-animated film, and it's sort of a tough act to follow). But I'll reserve my judgement.

edited 4th Dec '12 2:26:00 PM by blueflame724

Well, as far as fairy tales go, they're generally required to receive a lot of reworking due to the fact they're extremely short, have deliberately flat characters, and many of them have several versions that contradict each other. However, looking over the Disney film adaptations of fairy tales and folklore, for the most part, it is recognizably an adaptation of its title story despite additions or alterations to individual story beats. Snow White still faces off against an Evil Queen obsessed with her beauty, Ariel still makes a Deal with the Devil for a chance at a human's love, Belle and the Beast still engage in a romance that ultimately redeems him from a curse, Mulan is still a girl who dresses like a boy in order to become a soldier. Tangled is still the story of a young woman with incredibly long hair who longs for the world outside her small existence and is led there by a man.

In regards to the books, while they often modify for the change in medium, the quality of the adaptations is all over the place and several of them were criticized for it. The Black Cauldron isn't even considered to be a strong film despite the cult following, let alone a good adaptation of the Prydain books. The Hunchback Of Notre Dame is an extremely polarizing film due to their need to take an extremely dark and complicated adult novel and jam it into the Disney formula. In fact, I am specifically thinking of those godawful gargoyles every time I see Olaf the Snowman. And the less said about their takes on history the better.

Some are considered classics - Bambi, for example, brightened up the darker elements of its story through some additional characters, but it still retained its overall arc of being a Slice of Life story about a deer that also didn't shy away from the cold and cruel sides of nature between Bambi's isolation from his father and the death of his mother.

My complaint with Frozen is that as of now, there is absolutely no resemblance to its source material except there is in fact a Snow Queen.

You really don't see anything wrong with a novel that consisted of a nearly all-female cast where the heroine sets out on a journey to save a boy from a curse being rewritten to a film with a largely male cast where the heroine must be saved from a curse?

We know all of five characters. Two of whom aren't even human. And the character with the most of a description so far is the female villain, who looks to be one of the only Disney villains with sympathetic motives (if anyone says Gothel I'm gonna slap them over the internet).

Again, the issue is that you're making huge assumptions based on very little info.

We know of five characters, three males who do not appear in the novel at all and on top of that, two are "wacky sidekicks". We also know that Anna is under her sister's curse because they told us that. Anna used to be a girl named "Gerda" who was saving her friend from a completely different curse from the Snow Queen.

Prove me wrong instead of telling me "you don't know anything." You can easily make the Snow Queen sympathetic without setting up a Designated Girl Fight.

edited 4th Dec '12 3:38:29 PM by Rebochan

Mother Gothel Mother Gothel Mother Gothel

edited 4th Dec '12 5:51:28 PM by maxwellelvis

Rebochan: Sugar Rush has three boys: Rancis, Gloyd and Swizz. Male characters are a minority in Sugar Rush's racer roster, but they aren't nonexistent.

• PUNCH Hey technically not a slap

As I said, execution. Rebo you seem to be arguing under the assumption that adaptation still has to retain the spirit of the original to be good? That's a bit subjective. I'm assuming this has to do with the accusation of sexism as well?

edited 4th Dec '12 7:04:14 PM by blueflame724

It's not really possible to critique movies before anyone has seen them. Unless you meant speculating on what the movie will be like, which is different from openly hating on a film which we know next to nothing about.

That's the entire point of an adaptation. Maintaining the spirit and themes of your chosen work in order to largely appeal to the source material's audience.

Why even bother announcing you're adapting a book for film and then throw the whole thing out unless you're banking on name recognition for the original to cover up your awful script? An adaptation without any attempt to actually adapt is In Name Only and there's a reason people hate those. Seriously, for every The Secret Of NIMH or The Iron Giant, there's hundreds upon hundreds of animated versions of The King And I with talking animals and evil sorcerers that piss off the creators so bad nobody will license their works anymore.

I mean, would have gone to see my proposed Lord Of The Rings adaptation, "Golden"? Would you seriously be defending it as anything close to a good idea? Especially knowing that because of that adaptation, any serious attempt to adapt the source material would at best be delayed years and at worst never happen because someone else technically already did it and it flopped?

Well, how else do you explain dropping every other female character when the original story was full of them and changing the story from a girl rescuing a boy to a manly man rescuing an innocent girl? It's obvious they're terrified of boys not being able to relate to girls (ahem, Girl-Show Ghetto) and thus crafted male heroes to replace the women because marketing suits are idiots. Since Disney has openly admitted to doing this in the last several years, I'm not going off half-cocked here.

If they intended to keep the female cast, surely by now they'd have been talking about the robber girl or the princess or the old women instead of showing off their goofy talking snowman.

...speaking of, I can't think of many snarky female animal sidekicks. I can think of one or two in a trio with dudes (the hyenas or the gargoyles), but are there any women in this well-treaded stereotype?

Dunno, inspiration perhaps? There's often a thin line between what's acknowledged to be an adaptation and what's a strong influence or initial basis. Admittedly there's a good argument for "why bother adapting if you're going to change it so much", but hence the line.

edited 4th Dec '12 7:50:11 PM by blueflame724

"That's the entire point of an adaptation. Maintaining the spirit and themes of your chosen work in order to largely appeal to the source material's audience."

We won't be able to tell how well the movie conveys the spirit and themes of the source until it actually comes out. No, a few lines of plot summary aren't enough.

"Well, how else do you explain dropping every other female character when the original story was full of them and changing the story from a girl rescuing a boy to a manly man rescuing an innocent girl?"

How did you come to this conclusion? Isn't the story about a girl rescuing her sister? I know there will be a male in this story but I am pretty sure the movie will not focus on him rescuing an innocent girl? You are just twisting facts to suit your agenda here.

"Snow White still faces off against an Evil Queen obsessed with her beauty, Ariel still makes a Deal with the Devil for a chance at a human's love, Belle and the Beast still engage in a romance that ultimately redeems him from a curse, Mulan is still a girl who dresses like a boy in order to become a soldier. Tangled is still the story of a young woman with incredibly long hair who longs for the world outside her small existence and is led there by a man."

Well, if you are going to be so general to put these up as an example of faithfulness, one could say that Frozen is similar to The Snow Queeen in that it concerns a girl going on a journey to rescue a loved one from a curse.

edited 4th Dec '12 7:40:29 PM by qindarka

...I enjoyed the animated The King and I. At the very least I like their renditions of the songs the most.

And I've already seen Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings. "Golden" doesn't come anywhere close to that. And it was still good fun!

Except that the released plot revealed that Anna is under the curse now and now she conveniently has a bunch of men helping her out. Instead of a storyline where man needs help from a woman. Maybe it is a bit of a leap, but since Disney's pushing the formula so hard now, is it really that much of a stretch?

I mean, at least in Tangled, Flynn was taking over the part of a character who did help Rapunzel and did take a nasty injury in the process (and Rapunzel even saved him the same way!) The only major difference was that he and Rapunzel actually spent real time together.

See? That's a GOOD adaptation - maintains the spirit and the core cast, but utilizes the difference in mediums to tell a fresh story.

EDIT: Okay, there's been several posts now and the post I was responding to was completely rewritten. Added what was there when I wrote this.

edited 4th Dec '12 7:45:24 PM by Rebochan