slashfilm: If given the choice between going to a funeral or attending a one-man show, I’d pick crying in a stuffy room filled with strangers and ugly floral displays every single time. Attending a one-man show is the friend-of-actors equivalent of being asked to help them move. At least if you help someone move, you might get free pizza or gas money out of the deal. Outside of stand-up comedians, there are few people who can pull off a successful one-person show, but Josh Gad as Olaf the Snowman has done the unimaginable. In the Disney+ collection of shorts, “Olaf Presents,” Josh Gad plays most of (if not all) of the major characters in a condensed retelling of some of Disney’s most famous animated feature films, proving why he’s one of the best character performers working today.
Inspired by Olaf’s recap of “Frozen” in “Frozen 2,” Olaf and his buddies on Arendelle retell the stories of “The Lion King,” “Aladdin,” “Moana,” “Tangled,” and “The Little Mermaid,” all in under two minutes each or less. If you’re familiar with speech team, it’s as if Olaf is turning each Disney movie into a humorous interpretation performance, complete with character pops, voice changes, and the addition of props and secondary performers in the form of the Snowgies and Sven the reindeer. Totaling just under 10 minutes, “Olaf Presents” is one of Disney+’s most impressive shorts series, and easily the strongest “Frozen” spin-off yet.
The Remarkable Range of Josh Gad as Olaf
“Olaf Presents” lives and dies by Gad’s performance, who really pulls out all the stops with his characterizations. Not only is Gad trying to emulate some of the most memorable animated characters in history, but is doing so through the lens of Olaf the Snowman’s personality and perspective. Gad absolutely nails what makes characters like Ariel, Ursula, Jafar, Scar, Pumba, Rapunzel, Maui, Moana, and Princess Jasmine so beloved, and lovingly pokes fun at some of the more ridiculous melodrama hidden in films like “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin.” As much as “Olaf Presents” is a love letter to the movies that helped turn Disney into an empire, it’s also an acknowledgement that sometimes the stories could have used a little more fine tuning.
Gad’s voiceover work is masterful, successfully differentiating each character from one another while maintaining the trademark Olaf inflections. Doing impressions is hard enough, but doing an impression of someone doing an impression is damn near impossible. It never feels like Gad is imitating someone, it constantly feels like Olaf is behind the imitations. “Olaf Presents” proves that both Gad and Olaf the character are more than capable of carrying an entire film on their own. “Olaf” solo feature when, Disney?
