6. ‘Against the Wall’: Frozen’s Expressive Planarity, Attempts to Connect and Ambivalent Utopias

During its theatrical exhibition, Disney’s computer-generated animated adaptation of The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, retitled Frozen, was preceded by a computer-generated (CG) short film entitled Get a Horse! (Lauren MacMullan, Disney, USA, 2013).¹ This film begins in a small academy ratio image, placed in the middle of the wide 2.35:1 frame. It is placed in slight positive parallax, but features no discernible variations of stereoscopic depth within its frame. It is also in black and white, recalling the aesthetics of earlier Disney shorts such as Steamboat Willie (Walt Disney & Ub Iwerks, Disney, USA, 1928). It features a hand-drawn Mickey and Minnie Mouse being menaced by an obnoxious, burly dog called Peg-Leg Pete, who has designs on Minnie. Pete knocks Mickey out of the black-and-white, academy-ratio film he inhabits and into a full-colour, CG and stereographically represented cinema auditorium. The remainder of the short is an extended long take facing this cinema screen that projects this black-and-white film and is placed on the near locus. A now CG, stereographically rounded and full-colour Mickey, who is either level with the screen plane or inhabits the platea in front of it, attempts to broach the projected image. Meanwhile, a still hand-drawn Minnie is pursued by a similarly sketched Pete in the black-and-white world; a distant and flat diegesis from which stereo Mickey is cut off. At one point, Pete’s car crashes through some ice into a frozen lake, and the represented film’s camera follows it underwater. When this happens, the projected image starts to expand as if about to burst, the screen swelling slightly out onto the platea due to the water that builds up behind it. Mickey pricks the screen and fountains of water begin to burst out into the screened auditorium and onto the platea. Minnie and a host of other animated animals, who are now computer generated, are swept through into negative parallax on a digital tidal wave. The remainder of Get a Horse! is a slapstick encounter charting the to and fro between, behind and in front of the projected screen, all of which takes place within the same shot that faces it. When the screen is torn at points during the film (Fig. 6.1), it is revealed that the projected black-and-white element of this film is in fact an impediment to a colourful and 3D world that spreads far back into the locus. The projected image has in fact functioned as a kind of barrier between two separate diegeses.