Disney’s ‘Frozen’ will melt your heart (Kyle Smith)

Watch Frozen (2013) Online! Watch Frozen Online (2013) Movie

The rhythmic chanting at the start of the animated feature “Frozen” raises an ambitious, perhaps foolhardy comparison. Does Disney dare herald a subzero “Lion King”? It does, and “Frozen” seldom disappoints: It does for sisters what Mufasa and Simba did for fathers and sons.

Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” “Frozen” is a great big snowy pleasure with an emotionally gripping core, brilliant Broadway-style songs and a crafty plot. Its first and third acts are better than the jokey middle, but this is the rare example of a Walt Disney Animation Studios effort that reaches as deep as a Pixar film.

Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell) is the younger daughter of the king and queen of a wintry land who, in a heartbreaking prologue, is forced as a child into estrangement from her beloved older sister, Elsa (Idina Menzel). Elsa has a bewildering and scary power: She can conjure up snow and ice with a touch of her hand. It’s a dangerous gift, so the royals regretfully separate the two girls and keep Elsa a virtual prisoner in her room. Anna’s query at her sister’s door, ceaselessly repeated over the years, yields a classic Disney song, “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?”

The girls grow up and Elsa is forced to exile herself to a mountain ice palace, where she revels in being a no-compromises, all-powerful snow queen who makes Anna Wintour look as cozy as a Snuggie. Her liberation anthem is another wonderful song from Robert Lopez, who won Tonys for “The Book of Mormon,” and his wife, Kristin Anderson-Lopez. Disney films can lean toward banal tweener pop, but the Lopezes are pure Broadway, coming up with songs that climb off the screen and wrap their arms around you.

In the middle of the film, Anna is tiresomely insipid until she becomes inexplicably skilled at mountaineering. She and the sledder Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), whom she hires to find her sister and save the kingdom, trade empty hipsterisms like “That happened” and verbal tics like”Wait–what?” Disney should consign the of-the-moment chatter to the Disney Channel: The films are meant to last forever.

Action scenes (seemingly thrown in to attract boys) are uninvolving, and the comedy sidekick, a talking snowman named Olaf (voiced by Josh Gad), can be annoying. But Olaf has some funny moments, and the Lopezes give him a superb comic number, “In Summer,” that’s a denialist fantasy on par with “By the Sea” in “Sweeney Todd.” In his Nordic delusion, Olaf imagines it would be nice to spend a day at the beach once in a while, in much the same way Alec Baldwin imagines slugging only every third paparazzo.

The conclusion of “Frozen,” though, brings back the emotional force of the opening in clever and surprising ways. And its central figure is intriguingly nuanced. Elsa mostly has good intentions, but she also struggles to tame powers befitting a villain. The closest parallel to her may be the Beast in “Beauty and the Beast.” She’s not just icy, she’s cool.

For all of Disney’s efforts to rethink its heroines, it too often panics at feminist pressure and orders up formulaically “strong, capable, smart” girls. I picture the protagonists of “Brave” or “The Princess and the Frog” at job interviews answering the question about their biggest flaws: “Well, I have to admit that sometimes I’m just so darned confident, determined and adroit that it gets me into trouble!” Let’s move on from all of that, Disney writers: “Interesting” beats all.