Snow Queens who have gone before us
Thursday, November 14, 2013 at 9:45PM It’s Tim, with a little bit of animation history for y’all. Not that you’d be able to tell from the details dribbled out so far (estranged sisters, talking snowmen, reindeer acting like dogs), but the impending Disney film Frozen began its development as a dramatic musical adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”, a story first published in 1845. By this point, Frozen has drifted far enough from Andersen’s fairy tale that it’s probably more of an honorary adaptation than anything else, but that’s not all that unusual for Disney animated features. In the meanwhile, anyone looking to get their fix with a more authentic, faithful version of the story can look to a lengthy tradition of Snow Queen animated films, stretching back more than half a century.
From Russia to London with Sigourney-Love after the jump...
Possibly the most successful, and certainly the most eye-opening to an American viewer, is a 60-minute 1957 adaptation from the Soviet Union (perhaps oddly and perhaps not – it’s a cold part of the world – Soviet Snow Queens are far and away the most common). Thanks to the vagaries of international copyright, it’s the easiest thing in the world to watch it: there’s an excellent print in Russian with optional subtitles on YouTube, and a slightly cleaner, but also slightly softer print with an English dub here. I emphatically prefer the former, unless you're interested in the mad spectacle of hearing early-‘90s, child-edition Kirsten Dunst doing voiceover work for a mid-century Soviet cartoon.
An hour is a lot of time to commit just on the spur of the moment, but I hope you’ll hang onto that link and watch it some time, because it’s a fantastically weird thing. There was a tradition in Soviet animation of trying to create works that could compete with the big Western films on their own merits, which effectively a lot of Soviet artists applying their very particular worldview to the task of copying Disney. By no means does The Snow Queen look like a routine Disney knock-off, not least because its design mentality appears to be lagging behind about 25 years. But it’s also plainly foreign in a way that never resolves itself: the character design, which is weirdly expressive given how plain and smooth most of the faces look, is unabashedly derived from folk art, not from the decades-long tradition of American cartooning.
The marriage between this style and the extremely-fluid animation is very unlike anything in the Disney playbook, giving The Snow Queen an extremely unique feel, but it’s not only special because of its aesthetic. Being made in a culture that never abandoned its folklore the way Americans have largely done, it pays more fealty to the narrative sensibility of a fairy tale. There are inexplicable old witches with jeweled gardens, illiterate Finnish women reading messages carved onto fish, and talking ravens just wandering in like nothing. It’s crazy and dreamlike in a terribly interesting, though frequently dizzying way. And it all hangs together with a terrific villain in the form of the Snow Queen herself, a perfect bedtime story concoction of steady, deliberate movements and imperious, wicked beauty.
A little bit closer to home, the only feature-length English language Snow Queen I’ve found is a British version produced in 1991 and distributed in 1995. Like its Soviet counterpart, it’s a child’s-eye-view story, but that’s all that connects them: this is unbearably chintzy stuff, blandly colored and stiffly animated according to the aesthetic of a low-budget kids’ show from the late 1980s; here’s a sample to see what you’re not missing, and it’s available on disc from Netflix, if you’re interested in exposing yourself to the whole thing, for God knows what reason. One might ask why I’ve even bothered bringing it up, and it’s because the thing unexpectedly has sterling actressexual appeal: the Snow Queen was voiced by none other than Helen Mirren. She certainly gets the dictatorial haughtiness and icy qualities down, though it takes more than one slumming British superstar to turn such obvious kidvid junk into something worthy of anyone’s time.
Your actressing needs are much better suited by another Russian version, this one a mere 25-minute slip of a thing from 1981, which was repackaged in 1992 for the American audience with narration by none other than Sigourney Weaver. This version, too, is available on YouTube, and it’s worth it if only for Weaver’s surprisingly warm and mothering storyteller’s voice, doing character voices and everything. If you’ve ever wanted to be her child – and who among us can say otherwise? – it’s an odd but totally rewarding experience even at the mere level of listening to the thing, if you can get beyond the hilarious dated electronic keyboard score.
Which is another way of saying, it’s perhaps more with the listen than the watch. Certainly, it’s not as punishingly generic-looking as the Mirren film, and I admire that the Soviet animation mentality was so okay with making its characters look a little grotesque. Squint hard enough, and you can just about see the folk art influence still.
Still, a little grotesque and really damn grotesque are two different points entirely, and I’m not sure where this short ends up residing between them. The oversaturated earth tones make for an interesting counterpoint to all the wintry blues, and like the 1957 film, it comes from an aesthetic perspective rare enough to an English-speaking viewer that the sheer alienness of it ends up being compelling. Still, it wears thin even at less than half an hour, and I won’t tattle if you wanted to just put this on in a background window and let Sigweavie’s storytelling excellence wash over. Oh, Sigourney, you make everything so much better.
Reader Comments (9)
This is a great write-up Tim, I actually remember when FROZEN was just an adaptation of "The Snow Queen". I haven't seen it yet (and avoided the trailers) but I'm sort of happy it's not that anymore because I always found the tale so frustrating. I liked parts but others just rubbed me the wrong way.
I think in parts its aggressive religiosity (as I remember it) may have played a part in that. The scope of it is fantastic an the actual Snow Queen sure is haunting, but then she's so secondary and he's done moralistic fairytales to such better effect elsewhere.*
But as much as I have issues with the original tale that 1991 one was awful, awful, awful.
Although, I suppose, if I really think of it moralistic soap-boxing and all I wouldn't mind a live-action adaptation. The crux of the story at the centre is, itself, so specific and intriguing.
This is fascinating! I loved The Snow Queen as a kid, though I never knew of these animated adaptations. Not surprised that Frozen has deviated wildly from its source material, but that makes me all the more interested to see it to see if any pieces of the original fairy tale remains. Bravo!
As far as aggressive religiosity goes (and it's definitely there, I just re-read the story today for the first time in... 20 years, anyway), one of the most fascinating parts of the Soviet feature that i didn't have time to mention is how very noticeable it is that the screenwriters found ways to buff all of the Christianity out of an explicitly Christian story. Weird and fun stuff.
Kiki, Mirren, Sigweavie, and now IDINA & KRISTEN? this fairy tale sure is collecting a diverse roster of actresses.
Tim -- wonderful piece. The bits on Sigweavie's maternity prompted warm lolz here.
Love Snow Queen because of the great Cristian message and because it was one of the most memorable of Andressen´s tales to me , so it was my favorite when I was a child. But I do not mind that Disney changed the story, it is not like they would have dared to make a movie with a Cristian message that is so obvious anyway or a story with no royalty. There are plenty of more fait full adaptions out there already, I have seen some of those, and what I have heard of Frozen the story does sound very interesting. And it is a musical as well, so I makes me incredibly exited.
Disney significantly alters plot of a Hans Christian Anderson story! Be still my heart! Somebody alert the media!
Okay, all kidding aside, I am really looking forward to "Frozen". I am on excellent authority that the film is fantastic despite the God-awful marketing so far (call me crazy but if I had the original Elphaba singing songs written by a "Book Of Mormon" composer in my animated Disney musical throwback to the Renaissance-Era films I grew up with, I think I'd be emphasizing, you know, THAT instead of JarJar-except-a-Snowman). I also need to revisit the 1981 adaptation of the story because I remember seeing that as a youngster and loving it. Thank you for the inadvertent warning that the version advertised frequently on Netflix is not the one I've been looking for all these years.
Any thoughts on "The Little Match Girl" short adaptation by Disney? It's one of the reasons why I hesitate to upgrade to the "Little Mermaid" Blu-Ray. It's gorgeous and -surprisingly- sticks with the bittersweet ending.
I absolutely, head-over-heels adore The Little Match Girl - I think I'm on record as saying somewhere that it's my favorite thing Walt Disney Feature Animation has released in the 21st Century.
You can do what I did, and put the disc from the old Little Mermaid DVD in the new case instead of the DVD copy. The upgrade is completely worthwhile, as far as the clarity and color accuracy of the color transfer, though I got the first pressing, where "Part of Your World" was screwed up and I needed to contact Disney's customer service to replace the disc.
It's been years since you posted this, but I stumbled on your post in my semiannual quest for a particular adaptation of "The Snow Queen" (which is so elusive and unknown that I wonder if I've dreamed the whole thing up, if not for my foggy memories of it) and thought I'd say I really liked your takes on the various versions floating around out there. I didn't love Frozen for... many reasons, so I'm glad to see there's at least a few other people out there who know of the other versions and find them as bizarre and interesting as I do. The '57 version is probably the best attempt at the story that I know of, although it's definitely an acquired taste and falls more towards the strange rather than the magical that I had hoped for before seeing it. This is likely more of a cultural thing, though. The other pre-Frozen films are definitely weaker than one would hope. Have you seen the adaptation from 2012-13 from Wizart Animation?