Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)
"The Snow Queen" is another decent fairytale movie that came out for the holidays last year. It was produced by ARD and ZDF just like all these uncountable other fairytale films in recent years. The production country is mostly German, but there is also some Finnish impact here (for example the evil queen is played by a Finnish actress). It runs for almost 90 minutes, so a bit longer than most of the others. A bit sad to see the film's IMDb page so incomplete, no listing of Hans Christian Andersen who wrote the original tale that was adapted here. Also no mention of Annette Frier (sidenote: fitting name for this film) and a couple other actors. The film is directed by Karola Hattop, who is a very experienced filmmaker and worked on many television movies and series and this is also not her first fairytale. The writer duo are Brinx and Kömmerling. They adapted the Andersen tale and these two are probably the most experienced fairytale writers in Germany right now looking at everything they have done in the last years. Also they always work together as a duo no matter what they are making.The story is as follows: A girl and boy are best friends and he gets abducted (well sort-of goes voluntarily) by the evil cold-hearted Snow Queen to her ice castle. His best friend wants to find him and save him despite everybody saying that he is long dead. On the way there, she meets all kinds of interesting characters: flower fairy Flora (funnily the child actress' real name is Flora), two young Royals (not William and Kate, sorry), a bunch of robbers and finally an Eskimo. The girl makes friends on all these occasions and could have stayed with all of them if she wanted, yet she never forgets her mission to save Kay. I am not too familiar with the original story, but I quite enjoyed the action in this movie, so the experience of the writer duo helped no matter how much they changed compared to the original. This film would actually also have been good enough for the big screen. The cast is pretty good, aside from Frier there are Steffi Kühnert and Annekathrin Bürger in there, who are both fairly known at least to German audiences, plus Sebastian Urzendowsky's sister. It is also visually very nice in terms of cinematography, art direction and set decoration. I recommend watching it, especially to lovers of fantasy and fairytale films.
