Disney’s 50th feature-length animated movie is their best in many years. Tangled recaptures the charm, humor, and spirit of the studio’s second renaissance, the late 80s/early 90s period that saw such hits as The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. Quite simply, I laughed and I cried, thoroughly engaged with the characters and the storytelling. And when I thought I had Tangled figured out, it gave me a couple of twists and some welcome sophistication. Touche, John Lasseter, touche.
Disney’s Frozen borrows ideas from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen and follows closely in the footsteps of Tangled before it, but it’s also a bit more. For one thing, there’s an interesting sister dynamic at play here. One royal daughter, Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell), is the care-free sort, while the older daughter Elsa (Wicked‘s Idina Menzel) is born with a curse – the power to turn things into ice. After a childhood display of her magical powers nearly kills Anna, Elsa hides herself away for fear of hurting anyone. That’s all prelude. The story proper takes off when Anna inadvertently upsets Elsa on her coronation day. When the citizens of Arendelle discover their queen is a sorceress, they freak, she freaks, and a hard snow comes to fall. Elsa flees the kingdom and builds an ice castle for herself on the side of a mountain, leaving it up to little sister to later beg her for a return to warmer times.
My favorite Pixar film features two robots who say little more than each others’ names, but somehow, as if by magic, WALL-E manages to convey more emotion than films that try twice as hard to do so. There’s a charming purity in the characters of WALL-E and EVE, who to differing degrees struggle against their ‘directives’ to form a bond. The fact that these two odd ‘bots end up protecting the last sliver of life on Earth — a tiny plant — could have been cloying, but Pixar knows how to handle the material. When WALL-E finds the fragile vine, he simply collects it in an old shoe and places it on a shelf with other artifacts of a bygone era. 
“What if a gun had a soul?” That’s how director Brad Bird pitched The Iron Giant to Warner Bros. Animation. The gun in question is The Iron Giant himself, a robot of unknown origin that crash lands on Earth in 1957, at the height of the atomic scare. He dents his head and can’t remember where he’s from or why he exists. He befriends a boy named Hogarth, a savvy little kid raised by a single mother, whose seen enough science-fiction movies to know how the public will react to his extra-terrestrial friend. With the help of a local beatnik artist, Hogarth keeps the giant hidden from a snooping government official, all while forging a poignant relationship with the impressionable robot.
A terrific script and loveable characters send Toy Story soaring. At the heart of the simple storyline are two toys with character arcs as compelling as any of their live-action counterparts. Woody (Tom Hanks) is a pull-string cowboy who’s afraid of being replaced as his owner’s favorite, and Buzz (Tim Allen) is the new, gadget-enhanced astronaut who doesn’t accept the fact that he’s a toy. The Oscar-nominated screenplay (co-written by Joss Whedon) deftly blends character, humor, and action. The climax, where Woody and Buzz chase after a moving truck to rejoin their fellow toys, is a particularly thrilling scene. The voice cast is also a triumph, including Wallace Shawn as a neurotic dinosaur, Don Rickles as a bitter Mr. Potato Head, and Jim Varney as a trusty Slinky Dog. Randy Newman’s score makes the plight of plastic playthings nothing less than epic, and his cozy songwriting fits the nature of the film to a tee. “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” is the film’s charming anthem, but it’s Newman’s performance of “I Will Go Sailing No More,” played over Buzz’s realization of his limitations, that works most powerfully.
