Frozen (Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee, 2013)

Frozen isn't quite up there with the magic of Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992)—we're not yet back to the days of a single Disney movie meriting multiple "Best Original Song" Academy Award nominations—but it is by far Disney's best animated musical since its Renaissance, and Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez's "Let It Go," performed by Idina Menzel, should be a deserved lock for the Oscar. The film may be loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale The Snow Queen (1845), which Disney had been trying to adapt for decades, but Frozen feels almost a project that grew out from around this one song as much as the song itself was composed specifically with Idina Menzel's vocal range and performance ability in mind. As Menzel belts out lyrics like "I don't care what they're going to say" and "Here I stand in the light of day," the soaring anthem to proud, even defiant self-affirmation is an instant classic, yet one keenly conscious of today's audiences and concerns, and it sounds destined to conquer Broadway.

http://youtu.be/moSFlvxnbgk

Frozen's other theme song, "For the First Time in Forever," is rather generic—derivative of, but inferior to, past wide-eyed classics, such as "Part of Your World" (The Little Mermaid, 1989) and "A Whole New World" (Aladdin, 1992). Nevertheless, it's instantly hummable, and Kristen Bell, most often associated with a more ironic acting style and off-screen personality, sings impressively and with surprising warmth. The reprise, actually sung in counterpoint with Menzel joining Bell, is another high point in the soundtrack and in the film. Meanwhile, the comedic number "In Summer" features in probably the best musical sequence in the movie—a hilariously absurd and dynamic cartoon daydream. "Fixer Upper" has some irritatingly infectious verses, though I felt it was oddly situated—a lighthearted group number sung by the movie's most underdeveloped characters right as the story rounds its final turn toward the more serious—and probably should have been left as an outtake. The remaining songs are more forgettable and unlikely to achieve any kind of longevity beyond the immediate context of the film.

Songs aside, Frozen confidently points toward a return to Disney's glory days with massive box office, renewed cultural relevance, and a story that is grand, enchanting, and fun. For a good decade there, following 1999's Tarzan, Disney actually seemed tentative about trying to live up to its own animated epics, and so it entered into a phase marked by lighter and/or more experimental fare that, although generally well-received, never captivated imaginations on the same scale as it had during its '90s heyday. 2009's The Princess and the Frog, Disney's first calculated effort to reclaim its animation throne with another princess musical, was a good movie, but commercially it lagged behind CG productions from Pixar, Dreamworks, Fox, and even Sony. They took another stab at it with 2010's Tangled, which performed much better while also coming across more conservative, less ambitious—a charming but slight film.

Like Tangled, Frozen is another CG princess musical, but it is better in every way. The cast of characters is much stronger, the story is more engrossing, and it possesses far more distinct a visual identity among the glut of CG-animated pictures in theaters these days. Where the animation stands relative to the hand-drawn films of the past is difficult to quantify. The different techniques inform different stylistic choices which, in turn, produce different effects on the viewer. The great images of the traditionally animated classics, such as Sleeping Beauty (1959), as well as of mixed works like Beauty and the Beast, affect and arrest one in the manner of a remarkable painting. Frozen, which commits itself to a fully three-dimensional look (as opposed to using computer animation in service of a still 2-D look, a la Beauty and the Beast), is maybe more comparable to sculpture, although, much more so than modeling the characters, most of the artistry here seems invested toward the production design—in this case, the splendid castles and majestic winter landscape—and the viewer appreciates it accordingly more for its spaces than its images. I do find it less opulent and less striking than Disney's traditionally animated films of the '90s (and also more minimalist than contemporary Pixar films), which is the main reason why I still can't regard the film as a whole as on that same magical level. The "Let It Go" sequence, for instance, I found to be disappointingly sparse and, ironically, flat, compared to any of the signature sequences from the Renaissance era, or even compared to The Princess and the Frog. That is not to say, however, that Frozen is without great images of its own. The climactic shot of the two sisters is truly gorgeous—framing, poses, costuming, use of color—it's just masterfully done.

Frozen's weakest aspect is its story, which is on the conventional side, even though at times it seems to promise more. The character of Elsa, based on the originally villainous Snow Queen from the Hans Christian Anderson tale, is potentially one of the more compelling heroines in Disney's canon. She gets the best song, obviously, and her ice powers also make her, no pun intended, much cooler than her sister, Anna (or pretty much any Disney princess ever). If you were to poll a bunch of young children—girls AND boys—you would find that Elsa is by far the most popular character in the movie—the one whose toy the kids want. So it's disappointing that, for long stretches of the story, she's consigned to play the classic damsel role, a la Snow White or Princess Aurora—maybe not always in distress, but nevertheless presumably literally waiting around off-camera and doing nothing while less interesting characters journey to meet her.

If it's not quite in that highest echelon alongside the likes of Beauty and the Beast, Frozen is nevertheless Disney's best animated feature in over a decade—a movie that, at the very least, reminds viewers of the studio's great epics, and both restores confidence and whets the appetite for Disney's next animated musical.

What's Martian Manhunter's deal?

Although the Young Justice cartoon was not part of the Bruce Timm DC animated universe that began with Batman: The Animated Series, it was interesting, watching it, to observe how the storytelling in DC's cartoons has evolved along a similar trajectory as it did in the comics.

Batman was made up of mostly standalone stories, and it was self-contained, with scarcely any hint of a larger "superhero universe." Superman: The Animated Series, simply by virtue of existing in the same universe as Batman (as well as featuring appearances by Flash, Green Lantern, and others), began to change that. It was, in my opinion, a thematically simpler work, but it offered greater action and a stronger regular supporting cast for its hero to have meaningful relationships with, both in and out of costume. It traded the occasionally thought-provoking short stories of Batman for superpowered action and light character-driven drama. Years later, the final entry in the metaseries, Justice League Unlimited, was heavy on references to events and characters from almost every work that had come before. That was really not a show you could walk into with no prior knowledge and expect to make sense of. But, from another point of view, it was extra rewarding for those hardcore fans, who had been watching since the beginning and could still keep track of it all, to think that there might actually have been a payoff to their committing so many years of fictional cartoon events to heart and to memory.

Young Justice placed a similarly heavy emphasis on attention to continuity, with almost every hero and villain working some angle that would take the better part of a season to fully emerge. Moreover, even though it didn't share continuity with any previous series and was ostensibly a self-contained new show, it also didn't bother to explain who anybody was, outside of the original core team, despite it featuring at least as many characters as Justice League Unlimited. It pretty much assumed that, if you were watching the show, you already knew what Martian Manhunter's deal was, even though I'd wager that most people, unless they read comics or have seen Justice League, would have no idea who Martian Manhunter is.

I suppose it would be a waste of everyone's time to tell and retell every minor character's origin story with each reboot. On the other hand, this approach does leave potential new viewers somewhat out in the cold, and it's exactly that kind of mentality that has led superhero comics to become so indecipherably mired in continuity that DC has to perform periodic cullings on its fictional history.

Another thing that has kind of gone away, both in the comics and now the cartoons, is the non-superhero guest character. In Young Justice, there weren't very many non-superhero (or villain) characters, period. With a very few halfhearted exceptions, the heroes only seemed to have other masked heroes for friends and lovers. It had become a story about a society of demigods, with no part for ordinary civilians (like, um, the viewers) to play, except as frail and useless children in need of saving.

In the comics, these are trends that have resulted in a readership of, over the decades, an increasingly more insular and older subculture of geeks—people who prefer fantasy to reality and would rather follow fictional characters' lives than live their own. The cartoons, though trending in that direction, thankfully aren't quite there yet (and they've also managed to avoid the distastefully graphic violence that has seeped into even mainstream comic titles), and, for that, I actually should probably be grateful to the executive suits for reminding the writers that these shows are primarily for kids and teens, not for comic book nerds who have studied decades of superhero lore.

Young Justice (TV) (2010–2013)

It's not always satisfying being a faithful viewer of American cartoons. Very rarely do shows end on their own terms. More often is it the case that some suit will pull the plug upon determining that additional episodes will not result in additional toy tie-in sales. So it was for Teen Titans (2003-2006) and Legion of Super Heroes (2006-2008), and so it is now for Young Justice.

Created by Greg Weisman (creator of the cult favorite Gargoyles) and Brandon Vietti (director of the highly competent Batman: Under the Red Hood), Young Justice cranked up the best aspects of Teen Titans—the arc-based structure and character-driven melodrama—but did away with the slapstick humor and frenetic anime-influenced look, opting instead for a more mature tone and realistic art style. In other words, it was a more straightforward adaptation of the Teen Titans comics. Although focusing on DC's teenage heroes/sidekicks, it was, in some ways, the most grown-up DC cartoon yet, with a surprisingly heavy emphasis on characters hooking up. My favorite, almost kind of racy line was delivered by the teen archer Artemis, at one point finding herself without her trusty bow: "I feel naked, and not in a fun way." (Season 1, Episode 14 "Revelation")

From the second half of season 1 on, the show also went big—appearances by just about everybody who's anybody in the DC universe, a five-year time-skip that changed everything, and some staggering attention to continuity, with tons of twists and turns that, more often than not, the show would have to spell out through explanatory dialogue, knowing that the callbacks might otherwise go over a lot of weekly viewers' heads. More than any superhero show before it, it really conveyed a sense of a "superhero universe," beyond just the core team and its mission. Major names like Batman and Superman could be presences on the show without having to appear in person all the time, but when they did get involved, they would fit right in with the regular characters and just feel like an established part of the world.

Admittedly, the rapidly ballooning roster of characters meant that less and less time could be devoted to exploring any individual character in depth, and the end of the second season (and, as it turned out, the series) was rather anticlimactic. Still, the show was really a lot of fun, and I'm sorry to see it unceremoniously cancelled. For me, it struck almost the perfect balance between the intimacy of Teen Titans and the scale of Justice League Unlimited. And, maybe I just read into it what I wanted to, but I could have sworn there was even an homage to my favorite superhero comic of all time, Brian K. Vaughan's Runaways.