Frosty the Snowman is a Christmas special that came out on January 1, 1969. The song that goes along with the movie came out in 1950, written by Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson.
The plot of Frosty the Snowman is this. It is the day before Christmas, and it is snowing. The children want to play in the snow, but they have school. Their teacher brings in a magician named Hinkle who attempts to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but he fails which causes him to throw his hat. The rabbit (named hocus-pocus) appears, and then runs of with the hat.
When school ends, the children play in the snow. They build a snowman, and the magic hat is blown onto the snowman, named Frosty starts to have human like traits. Hinkle takes the hat, which makes frosty inanimate. Hocus runs out of the hat and gives it back to the kids.
Then, the weather starts to heat up so frosty must get to the north pole before he melts. Frosty, Hocus and a girl named Karen sneak onto a refrigerated boxcar, but professor Hinkle sneaks onto the train as well to attempt to get the hat. When they get there, Karen is close to freezing to death. Karen and frosty go into a greenhouse, but professor Hinkle locks it up. frosty melts, and Karen is heartbroken. Santa then comes and opens the door, and frosty comes back to life.
The plot of Frosty the snowman is pretty simple, but for a Christmas special that is meant for kids, that isn’t a bad thing. As a animated movie, they aren’t restricted by the rules of reality, and they take advantage of that. It isn’t meant to be realistic. There isn’t a moment in the movie where I’m flat out confused or they lose me. Overall, it is a wonderful movie to watch with your family during the holidays.
The main character, Frosty the snowman, is a likeable character. He puts others needs before his own. They do a admirable job with the villian of the story, Professor Hinkle. They make him dislikable enough so you clearly understand that he is the villian, but he has a clear cut motive, which is to get his hat back. One of my least favorite things in movies generally is when they make the bad guy a bad guy just because the movie needs a villian, or just because “he’s bad” with no motive. The main support character, Karen is also a solid character. She cares a lot about her new friend Frosty. Furthermore, she wants the best for him, even if she nearly freezes herself to death. All the characters, even the villian are three dimensional and have a clear cut personality, which helps to movie.
The guy who plays Frosty, Jackie Vernon, does a really excellent job with the role. He sounds very likable and genuine. One of my few complaints about the movie is they have people play multiple roles. An example is they have Paul Frees play a crossing guard and Santa Claus but, he doesn’t do that great of a job making the two characters sound different. This is more of a nitpick pet peeve than something that would ruin your viewing experience.
Since the movie came out in 1969, there are going to be parts of the movie that seem “dated.” If you compare the animation to what is possible today, it isn’t really good, so that isn’t really fair to the movie. If you compare it to things that were coming out at the time, it actually did a really exceptional job. They did a solid job with the dialog, none of the dialog is dated to the point where you want to cringe. Overall, they did a really great job with making it timeless and not a product of it’s time.
A new issue people have with the movie is that the children are playing in snow in outfits that would be more appropriate for summer time. Some feel that this can be misleading to children of young ages.
Frosty the Snowman is a excellent movie to watch during the holidays. There are little things you can nitpick about, but there a lot more good than bad. If you want to watch it, you can buy it on DVD from Amazon for $6.99.
