Recently I came across a youtube vid with excerpts in various languages from Disney's animated film "Frozen" for the song "Let It Go." I've never been much for those kind of children's movies unless when held captive by young children, but of course I couldn't resist watching with the foreign language angle. Some of these vids on youtube are official Disney ones, and others the usual repackaging (and re-repacking) of youtube vids. The first vid below is a non-official vid that purports to have full versions of all official language versions Disney made the film in, plus an unofficial cover in Hindu (over 2 hours long - I listened to parts of it while doing Anki). Many of the vids on youtube contain unofficial covers because I guess some folks don't like the singers in the official ones. After that is my favorite vid, one containing just 25 languages that is a "behind the mic" version where you get to see video excerpts of each of the singers where the whole song is made up of short extracts from each of the languages. It's quite addicting actually (and probably also because you get to look at attractive women of a wide range of nationalities/ethnicities ). Below that is a vid that contains a reviewer's criticism/commentary on the various singers /voice actresses based on the whole movie (counting down from worst to best in the reviewer's opinion), and which seems fairly well-balanced, though I know nothing of music theory. One can also search for the film title plus a specific language and find versions of "Let it Go" with transcriptions added. These vids are nice "samplers" of a variety of languages, though in a teen-pop kind of format. They have doubled-up on some languages/dialects for close/similar ones, like both Latin American and Castillian Spanish and Catalan (OK a triple-up), Canadian and metropolitan French, Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin (plus Cantonese), Croatian and Serbian, Czech and Slovak, and Continental and Brazilian Portuguese, not to mention all 3 Skandi languages (not implying all those language combos are 100% mutually intelligible before anyone starts in). Also some singers doubled up too, as for Castillian Spanish and Catalan, both kinds of French, and German and Dutch. Some of the criticisms of some them are apparently that some are too old, as in not representative of how a teen or early 20s woman would sing. But others criticize some, mostly younger ones, for lacking the range and power of other singers, who are mostly older (as in 30-40). I love the behind-the-mic version because you can see the emotion and physical gestures the singers put into their performances despite being in a sound booth. Apparently the singers were supposed to key off the English version, whether it turned out like that or not. Also they were supposed to keep lip sync, which must have been difficult due to translation issues in how long various lines were in comparison to each other. If you look at the Mainland Mandarin one, you can see it is horribly out of lip-sync in stretches. One other note is that there are some noticeable differences in translation, as in the last line in English which is "The cold never bothered me anyway", which is rendered in German and Spanish as "The cold is now part of me." My personal favorites, especially for full-length versions, are the Bulgarian, German, Bahasa Malaysia, Japanese, Polish and Serbian. Also I was surprised at how much of the Dutch version I could make out with my current level of German.
Thanks for posting these! I didn't watch the first one, but I watched the other two. Twice. Ha! And now I think I'm going to go sing and twirl for a little while.
Thanks for posting this it's really fun to listen all the different langauges!!! I found that mostly, the ladies have screeched their song and anyway, I hate musicals. But sometimes a singer didnt scream or force the voice. I agree that Denmark was good.
Here's an unofficial cover in Tagalog - it looks like the movie was never translated into Tagalog, but someone took it upon herself to record her own version:
She's gone on to do some much funnier ones. The main line in her version of "Wrecking Ball" is absolutely hilarious.
Reminds me of progressive rock lyrics from the early 1970s. "I'll be the roundabout The words will make you out an' out You spend the day your way Call it morning driving Through the south In an' out the valley..."
