D Gary Grady

As narrator Patrick Stewarts explains, back in the 1980s a lonely little boy wished for his teddy bear to come to life, and to everyone’s amazement it did. The talking bear became an instant celebrity, but after a while he faded into obscurity, like pretty much every other celebrity from the eighties.

Eventually the little boy got to be 35 years old, looking a lot like Mark Wahlberg. The bear matured as well — or got older, anyway — and now the two of them sit around smoking dope and watching television when Wahlberg isn’t working at his dead-end car rental job. They both have thick Boston accents, and Ted sounds a lot like Peter Griffin on the animated show Family Guy, which happens to have been created by Seth MacFarlane, who also co-wrote and directed this movie and supplies Ted’s voice (along with those of multiple characters on Family Guy).

Wahlberg’s girlfriend (Mila Kunis) has been with him for four years and while she gets along with Ted well enough, she thinks it’s about time for Ted to move out and get a job and his own place. Eventually Wahlberg agrees, and Ted winds up applying for a job he really doesn’t want at a grocery store. When he obscenely insults the store manager during his interview, the manager says, “Nobody has ever talked to me like that. You’re hired!”

“Shit!” says Ted.

So soon Ted is running a cash register, dating a ridiculously hot human female co-worker, and throwing parties in his low-rent apartment over a Chinese restaurant, during one of which one of the guests brings actor Sam Jones along. That name may not mean much to you, but he’s a huge deal to Ted and Wahlberg, since Jones was the star of a film they watched over and over again growing up, 1980’s Flash Gordon. When Ted phones to tell him the news, Wahlberg sneaks out of another party he’s attending with Mila Kunis to come to Ted’s and meet his childhood hero. Things get out of hand, leading to a fight between Sam Jones and an enraged Chinese neighbor unfortunately named Ming (“Death to Ming!”) while Ted squares off against Ming’s duck, named James Franco.

Meanwhile Mila Kunis has noticed that she’s been abandoned and correctly suspects where Wahlberg is. Convinced he will always put his teddy bear ahead of her, Kunis dumps Wahlberg and even agrees to go out on a date with her obnoxious but handsome and wealthy boss. Meanwhile a very odd man (Giovanni Ribisi) is increasingly determined to get Ted for his spoiled brat of a son.

Pretty much everything about this is ridiculous and extremely vulgar, but it still turns out to be pretty funny, and even sometimes touching, though it always manages to recover.

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This hugely popular computer-animated feature from Disney is said to have been inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” (and in many countries was released under a version of that title), but the plot and characters are in fact completely original. In keeping with Disney tradition, it’s a musical fairy tale about a princess, but the story plays nicely against audience expectations, and as with Tangled the heroine’s love interest is a fully developed character rather than a handsome nonentity.

The music is quite good, and “Let It Go,” is probably the first hit song in history to mention fractals. There are a few minor but irritating flaws — unnecessary plot holes and a pat solution to a major story problem — but overall I quite liked it, and most people who’ve seen it appear to agree, including countless millions of little girls.

(For a variant opinion from the Bizarro world, see my earlier post today [link] about a Fox & Friends segment weirdly attacking the movie as anti-male.)

A woman in Japan reportedly became so obsessed with Frozen that she saw it repeatedly, and when she insisted her husband watch it with her and he found it merely OK, she divorced him.

Elsa (Idina Menzel) is the crown princess of a small Nordic kingdom who must keep secret her magic powers over ice and snow. Consequently she and her younger sister Anna (Kristen Bell) grow up in a closed palace, separated from one another, both suffering from loneliness and isolation until Elsa’s eventual coronation leads to a crisis. I won’t say more because the story is full of surprises.

Incidentally, their kingdom is named Arendelle, pronounced essentially the same as Arundel, a town in southern England I’ve visited. I’ve no idea whether there’s a connection.

Jennifer Lee, who previously co-wrote Wreck-It Ralph (2013), was both screenwriter and co-director. Originally the director was to be Chris Buck, best known for having directed Disney’s Oscar-winning Tarzan (1999), but given Frozen’s tight production schedule and the fact that Buck and Lee got along very well, it was decided to put Buck, a long-time artist and animator, in charge of visuals and give Lee responsibility for the story side, with both of them sharing director credit (a first for a woman in Disney animation history). This appears to have proved very successful.

Lee’s artist sister Brittney also worked on the film, designing some of the architecture and what I understand were the most elaborate costumes in Disney animation history. The Lee sisters’ relationship growing up is also said to have influenced the script.

Lee’s daughter Agatha provides the singing voice for the teenaged Anna, while five-year-old Anna was voiced by Katie Lopez, daughter of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who wrote the movie’s songs.

Watching interviews with Jennifer Lee on the film’s Blu-ray extras, I became convinced I’d seen her as an actress in some film or other, but IMDb says I’m wrong. She’s certainly attractive and appealing enough to pull it off. (See her Wikipedia article.)

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