4/4 stars

There is an unspoken rule in the film industry that all children’s animated movies must be comedies. Disney follows this rule to the letter. Even when they are brave enough to trust children to accept a serious treatment of serious subjects, comedy is never too far away to provide a kind of cushioning pathos that I do not believe children truly need. At least certainly not to the degree that all children’s movies must be comedies. Lev Atamanov, the director of the highly evocative The Snow Queen, understands this perfectly. Children or not, he respects his audience.

The Snow Queen is in many ways a highly derivative work, owing much of its presentation and style to Disney’s Snow White, Pinocchio. and even Bambi. There is also nothing particularly transformative about its adaptation of the original Hans Christian Andersen story.
But, what elevates it to a masterpiece is its mood and its haunting imagery. Fairy story is at its best and its most pure when it is distant. Western animation (especially the modern variety) is generally garish and tends to over-explain. It often lacks that distance which is key to a love and appreciation of Fairy-Land. Without distance there is no magic and The Snow Queen glows with magic and takes it seriously.

The story begins with two young lovers named Gerda and Kai. When they first hear tales of the Snow Queen from Gerda’s grandmother Kai causes offence by suggesting that he would stuff her in the oven and melt her should she ever stop by. In response the Snow Queen sends a blast of ice to freeze his heart and he transforms from tender-hearted child to a cruel loveless miscreant. The Queen herself is made entirely of ice and dwells in a frozen castle that instantly calls to mind the White Witch and her keep in the Narnian stories. She, too, like the White Witch, drives a sleigh and whisks the boy Kai away in it. He goes willingly since his spirit has now gone cold. There, at her castle, Kai slowly forgets Gerda and all that he once valued which the Queen denies ever having existed. She tells him that poetry, artists, and feelings are not real; and even life itself appears to be denied when she claims flowers are inferior to ice crystals because they are not cold and stagnant like herself.

Gerda, who remains pure and innocent, journeys to find and rescue Kai and along the way meets talking ravens, lonesome witches, princes and princesses, and even roving bands of woodland robbers. In none of these adventures does Gerda meet much resistance and she moves on from each with a minimum of fuss. At 65 minutes in length the film cannot take more than a passing glance at its episodes, but manages to keep a gentle non-breakneck pace throughout. When she finally makes her way to Kai and the Snow Queen’s castle the resolution is swift, but natural and fitting.

More gratifying than the film’s story is its animation. While it is clearly influenced by Disney, it’s less gaudy and kinetic; maintaining a quiet holiday postcard quality and an atmosphere of distance between the audience and the ethereal fairyland that is its subject. The Snow Queen’s icy castle is isolated and apart from all other realities; appearing to Gerda magically rather than truly being got to. The Queen is of towering size and dwarfs Kai when sitting upon her throne. She is animated through the same old rotoscoping techniques seen in Disney’s Snow White, but much more effectively here. She is often shown completely still and statuesque, like a marble goddess of classical antiquity. She is more spooky than frightening, more awe-inspiring than beautiful.
The movie presents us with a fairy-land not rich and complicated, but dreamlike and perilous. The paths to the Snow Queen’s castle are cold, windswept, and hidden by winter’s night. And therein things can only fade, but never die for they are eternal.

The quality of distance that I had mentioned earlier is important to the fairy story because fairy tales are not meant to show us things that are new. They are not meant to awaken our consciousness to deep philosophical thoughts. Fairy stories don’t take us someplace else. They take us home. Our souls yearn and long for things that cannot be described prosaically, and fairy-land is where a taste of those longings is found. The Snow Queen succeeds as a fairy tale where many Disney films do not because it is evocative and not flashy; haunting without being brazen; and good-humored without being crass.

The Snow Queen is a Soviet film that we in the States could just have easily have missed for no other reason than petty politics which is often where art finds its death. In the late 1950’s cultural exchanges between America and Russia were largely unheard of thanks to the Cold War. This film was one of the first to cross the divide and we are richer for it. There are profound beauties in this world that we let barriers of language and identity keep us from discovering. The Snow Queen is proof of it.