Saturday Night Showcase: The Snow Queen

The Snow Queen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Do you recall in my Christmas review last year about the First Christmas Snow that I talked about how winter isn’t necessarily Christmas, but we’ve just accepted it? That’s why I’m not calling it a Christmas posting. That said, I do know when to ride a bandwagon (at least I admit it) for the sake of readership. Disney’s Frozen (which I would like to go see, but weather and scheduling are prohibitive) is said to be loosely adapted from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen…unless there’s another book with that title somewhere. Frozen, from what I can tell, is the tale of a girl trying to convince her sister to stop overdoing it with wintertime.

Anderson’s story, however, is a tale of love between two children, Kai and Gerta. When one of the kids is taken away by the titular villain the other must go to rescue…him. Yes, this is a story where the female character braves all to save HER true love. If you find that rare now, remember that this was first published in 1845. It was even rare then to have the girl being the hero. And it’s true the girl doesn’t save the hero like the guy would…but that’s a bit cliché anyway, and Gerta’s method, love, not only empowers her, but affects people she meets along the way.

The animated adaptation we’ll be seeing tonight comes from the Internet Archive and is a Russian-produced film from 1957, dubbed in the US by Universal in 1959. For some reason the English version starts with Art Linkletter, known for hanging out with kids before that was immediately assumed to be creepy, handing out Christmas presents. And yet the actual narrator makes even less sense. Otherwise, it’s a beautiful little tale.

Okay, the little wizard sprite thing using umbrellas to give Andersen ideas…I don’t understand. I’m not even sure it was necessary and at least in the dub his scenes could have been replaced by Linkletter telling the kids the story and missed nothing…plus their appearance there would have made more sense since we never see them again. That’s really my only complaint since the skips can be based on the condition of the film the Archive ended up with.

I here this got a later re-dubbing and while I’m kind of curious to see it, I though everyone except the crows (I understand what they were going for, mind you) were rather good. I think Angel and Gerta’s voices were the best.

Not having read the original story I don’t know how many liberties were taken, but as its own work I really liked this story. Now to see if I can find time to catch Frozen.

Related articles

• Disney’s Frozen vs. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (mvlteenvoice.com)