Frozen

This was a great film, certainly the best animated film of the past year.
Elsa (Idina Menzel) has a gift or a curse, depending on how you look at things. She can turn things frozen, into ice with her hands. This is triggered by her having fun, or feeling any sort of emotion. But after accidentally hurting her sister, Anna (Kristen Bell), her parents force her to hide her power. She and her sister are separated.
They don't reconnect until Elsa' coronation day, three years after the deaths of their parents. But this ends badly. Earlier that day, Anna has a meet-cute with Prince Hans (Santino Fontana) from Southern Isles, where he lives with his twelve older brothers. They fall in love instantly, but Elsa does not give them her blessing for the wedding. (She's actually really smart.) Which leads to outburst of ice crystals spilling from her hands while Anna tries to plead with her. The citizens of her kingdom are horrified by the actions of their new queen.
So Elsa runs away, and creates her own ice lair high up in the mountains, alone from the rest of the world where she can't hurt anyone else. Anna is not alone on her quest. She meets up with the local iceman, Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) and his trusty steed, a reindeer named Sven. Also joining them is a snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad) who Elsa created when she was a little girl. But the meeting with Elsa goes badly, leading Anna to once again become injured by her sister, but this time, the problem is not in her head, but in her heart, which is lethal, unless she is healed by an act of true love.
Kristoff rushes her back to Hans, but it turns out that Hans is not a good guy. Shocker. He was only there because he wanted some power for himself. As Anna freezes to death, the kingdom crumbles with a huge blizzard swirling all around them, as Kristoff rushes back to Anna, realizing that he does actually care about her. Hans, in turn, is out for blood. Literally. He wants to kill Elsa so he can have the kingdom all to himself. But before he can stab her, Anna turns from running to Kristoff and protects her sister as she turns to ice, shattering the sword.
The storm stops and as Elsa hugs Anna's frozen body, she slowly melts along with the kingdom. Elsa learned how to control her gift. True love allowed her to melt and the world returns to summer, bursting forth only when she wanted. If only her parents had learned that letting her emotions out would be better than holding everything inside, the world would have never turned into a dreadful eternal winter.
And yes, Hans is punished by being exiled and Kristoff and Anna end up together but even better, the sisters can actually be sisters again. It is sweet.
I truly liked this film, with great voice acting, some comic relief, brilliant animation, with every snowflake visible including the ones showing in Elsa' hair, and an excellent song, "Let It Go". I'm currently listening to it on repeat because my dad is watching basketball.
The problems are more nitpicks than anything else. But how in the world did Elsa get her mysterious power to begin with? That sort of bothered me. And why didn't they give her a love interest? I thought that she would have ended up with Hans there briefly, but of course, that was ruined when he turned out to be evil.
But I liked how a guy didn't save the day, which is so overdone. This film showed a different sort of love, the love rarely shown in films, a love between siblings, sisters especially. I also liked this film more than Tangled, because it adapted a fairy tale that I was not familiar with proving that I like new things better than older things. I will most certainly watch this film over and over again, and will continue listening to "Let It Go" on repeat for some time to come. Grade: A-