Frozen: This is going to be GREAT!!

[Rumors Rocks]

I'm rounding up a group of kids to go!!!! Been watching the fan videos. There is a really good article floating around where the Lopez's review the 5 best fan videos. My favorite was a reprise of Do you want to build a snowman sung by Elsa when Anna was frozen.

I read that the amazing number of videos is one of the reasons they decided to do a sing-a-long.

This should be fun.

Sounds like fun.

 

[Rumors Rocks]

http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.c...s/?_php=true&_type=blogs&hpw&rref=movies&_r=0

A scene from Frozen, featuring Kristoff (voiced by Jonathan Groff) and Anna (Kristen Bell).

LOS ANGELES  Frozen, the Disney-animated and Oscar-nominated hit, is also one of the longest-running blockbusters of the season, with a 10-week streak at or near the top of the box office. The company announced that a sing-along version of the film would be shown at more than 1,000 theaters around the country on Friday even as its directors, Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, are in Japan, in advance of its March 15 opening there. (Thats more international dollars for Disney, if the popularity of a foreign language-version of the films theme song, Let It Go, is to be believed. )

And its quite a record for Ms. Lee, a screenwriter making her directorial debut (the first woman to direct a Disney film), and for Mr. Buck, a Disney veteran who started out as an animator. Neither were sure the musical story, of a dysfunctional relationship between two sisters  another Disney first, unless you count an evil stepsister  would be a hit.

We felt like we were taking a chance again with this film, Ms. Lee said at the Golden Globes, where Frozen picked up the prize for best animated feature. A lot of music, a big film, two gals kind of leading the way, we just didnt know, she said. We certainly werent expecting quite this much.

Part of the success surely has to do with the music, written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Bobby Lopez, a married couple from Brooklyn. They had worked on other Disney films, like Winnie the Pooh, and Mr. Lopez is also a Tony-winning Broadway composer, having written music for bitingly funny shows like Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon. (Mr. Lopez has also won a Grammy and an Emmy, making him, with his Oscar nomination for Let It Go, tantalizingly close to EGOT status.) Still, it wasnt quite a breeze to write.

We had trouble building the DNA of a musical, very early on, Ms. Anderson-Lopez said. The movie took several shifts as the Disney team excavated the story, very loosely based on Hans Christian Andersons Snow Queen. Once they hit on the character of Elsa, the older sister who can freeze anything with a flick of her wrist, the couple buckled down.

To come up with Let It Go, Ms. Anderson-Lopez said, we took a long walk around Prospect Park, near their home in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We stood up on a picnic table in front of the picnic house and imagined what Elsa would be thinking up on her mountain alone. And we wrote it in a day.

As a birthday gift for Disney head John Lasseter, they gave him a copy of their scratch recordings of the song, which he championed early, listening to it on his daily commute to the Disney offices, and even singing along as Idina Menzel, who voices Elsa, recorded it.

The soundtrack for Frozen wound up at the top of the Billboard charts. We just never expected, coming from musical theater, that that was even a possibility, Mr. Lopez said. I didnt even know about the Billboard charts.

Even more, it beat Beyoncés surprise December album, not that the couple think she minds. I think Beyoncé operates on a higher plane and she doesnt care about the things that us little humans do, Ms. Anderson-Lopez said.

We imagine that if she meets us, she wont be that mad at us, her husband added.

Shes the queen, Ms. Anderson-Lopez concluded, smiling.

Correction: Jan. 28, 2014

An earlier version of this post misstated the date Frozen is opening in Japan. It is March 15, not this week.