My Review of Disney’s Frozen … Long After Anyone Would Care

Sue me, I’m a late adopter of cinema … which has its benefits. If you can train yourself to not care about movies until after everyone else stops caring, you’ll never have to pay a premium price for tickets. In fact, you’ll never have to pay for tickets at all, because by then you’re bound to have a friend who owns the film on Bluray and is happy to share (I’ve tried to adopt this model of waiting till afterwards for discounted prices with Christmas, but my wife has yet to buy into it.) Plus, the 1st Law of Steve declares, “If everyone else is into something, give it no attention whatsoever.” Knowing it would only be a matter of time before my five-year-old daughter would twist my arm into watching this film, I followed this law to a tee.

Though there’s another reason I was hesitant to watch this film, and no, it had nothing to do with a cryptic gay agenda. It was because I doubted my ability to sit through another musical about a close-minded society suppressing Idina Menzel’s magical powers.

With that in mind, I found it hard not roll my eyes when young Elsa was told that because of her destructive magical powers she must lock herself in her room (we might as well just say closet … more on the gay thing later), shut out all of society, and cease to be herself … forever. It was just another iteration of Disney’s so-formulaic-it-hurts setup for character development, the convention of “I want to be normal just like everyone else, and I’m trying my best, but for reasons completely beyond my power, society is telling me I’m not normal, and they must be right about me.” Now where have we heard that before? Oh yeah, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Alladin, Pocahontas, Hercules, Mulan … I’m just going to stop there. So … utterly … boring.

That being said, I was pleasantly surprised at how non-judgmental Elsa’s parents were. They never once told her that she was a disgrace to the family or that she would never amount to anything. They almost seemed a little too perfect, so perfect that they couldn’t possibly hold major roles in the story, as if they were about to be killed off.

Yep.

I only have good things to say about Anna’s character. She was delightful, and I was glad that she was the true protagonist, because Elsa, all things considered, wasn’t actually a character at all. She was an archetype: the tortured victim of society. Her character couldn’t develop without detracting from the didactic edge the film required in order to takes its place among Disney’s other volumes of the “be true to yourself” theme (you know, that theme they’ve been preaching for the past twenty years).

So … utterly … boring.

Not that the whole film was boring. Honestly, I enjoyed most of it. I loved how there didn’t seem to be a villain, how the conflict revolved around extraordinary characters (with a notable exception) rather than the usual stilted struggle between moderately good and insanely evil. (More on this later.)

Though I have to put my foot down on the unrestrained magic system. There were no checks and balances, no consequences, no thermodynamics. Where did Elsa get the energy to create all of these icicles? How many calories would she have had to consume in order to accidentally freeze an entire lake and cast a perpetual storm over her kingdom? How on earth could she not only output enough hydrogen-di-oxide to build a gargantuan palace but simultaneously craft each molecule into something not only structurally sound but so aesthetically masterful that it would taken a team of architects years to have even drafted? What did she eat while reigning in her barren palace? I’m all for fantasy, but there has to be some semblance of plausibility (or at least consistency).

I mean, if you were Elsa’s parents, and you realized your daughter had magical ice powers … unlimited magical ice powers, why on earth would you shut her up and tell her to think normal thoughts when there’s so much potential for capitalization? You could open your own ski resort in the summer. You could absolutely level the snow cone market. You could take on the armies of the earth with blizzards and ice missiles. Especially when we learn that Elsa not only has the power to bring snow to life but to create giant abominable snowmen in the twinkling of an eye. Why not create an army of these monsters and conquer the world? Because this is a kid’s movie, and Elsa’s not evil? Well, haven’t you heard that with great power comes great responsibility? As long as there’s suffering and injustice in the world, I hold that anyone who’s not actively using their unlimited ice powers for benevolent military campaigns is unethical.

And what’s with the idea of magical powers being something you’re either born with or not? What does that do for the human spirit? How could Elsa possibly develop any real talents or character virtues when she had such incredible instant gratification at her fingertips?

Moving on. Most of the music was charming. “Let it Go” was amazing. Though as soon as the trolls started singing, my wife and I looked at each other, both of us having the same thought: “this just shouldn’t exist.” The trolls were just … lopsided. As clever as a postmodern twist of friendly trolls who are interested in your dating life is, they just didn’t fit in with the rest of the film. Though the movie, as a whole, wasn’t very cohesive to begin with, which was my biggest issue with it. It seems the modern approach to these “family” films is to throw in something for everyone: action sequences, slapstick comedy, witty dialog, romance, drama, passionate musical numbers, silly musical numbers, heroism, villainy, etc., and to assume that the “story” is what happens somewhere in-between. Only this never works. The result is always a hodgepodge of brilliant moments and worthless moments, both engaging and disengaging, occasionally touching, but overall doing little for the soul. I compare it to a disjointed essay in which the author is so tangential that he fails to present a real argument. Who does that?

My case in point: when Prince Hans turns out to be a traitor. So much for a character-driven conflict. “How does this happen? It’s as if someone just completely rewrote your characteristics for the sake of creating pointless drama, regardless of everything you ever said or did before this point” (“How Dead Man’s Chest Should Have Ended“). So … utterly … boring. From this point on, the movie was all downhill. As is typical with most every Disney or Pixar film, as we enter the third act, and character development ceases while action takes over, as the bad guys become unreasonably bad, and there’s no real moral decision for the good guys to make, I find myself ready to sleep. It doesn’t matter how hard the blizzard beats down, or how far separated the boy and girl are, the mere existence of this stilted action is, for me, equivalent to answering exactly how and when the dramatic question will be answered. It ironically kills any suspense I might have been feeling. I’m not saying action has no place, especially as we near a climax, but for heaven’s sake, lower the artificially jacked-up stakes and get back to humanity, not whether or not Sven the reindeer will survive a sudden catastrophic plunge into an icy lake.

Oh, and Sven, I hate to break it to you, but you’re such a late addition to the roster of Disney’s super-intelligent animal confidants, with nothing whatsoever to add in the way of character, that no one cares about you.

As for you, Olaf, another addition to Disney’s roster of short, non-sequitur-spouting comic reliefs … you pass.

I thought it was funny how the movie copied, almost to a tee, the “kiss of true love without actually knowing who your true love is” dilemma as in Disney’s Enchanted. And speaking of stilted, wasn’t it amazing how Anna’s slowly-infecting ice virus decided to leap from taking virtually no effect to transforming her entire body into a solid mass of ice within a split second … just at the right time? And the way she transformed back from a solid mass of ice into human flesh within a few seconds … sadly, this doesn’t appear to be possible. From what I’ve read about cryonics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics), the damage the ice crystals would cause to cell tissues during thawing is irreversibly fatal (at least according to modern science, which can hold its own against eighteenth century magic any day).

Lastly, the cryptic gay agenda. Does it exist? Let me pose another question: how could it not exist? With this issue being perhaps the most heated of our time, and considering that it seems Disney writers are only allowed to write about “being true to yourself,” it seems they would have had to have written a very different story to avoid drawing parallels to modern gay rights issues. But do I think the writers intended to incorporate this theme? Absolutely. In my opinion, it’s obviously in there. Do I care? No. As I’ve mentioned, the film can take its place among a plethora of other Disney films with nearly identical morals. Some themes are universal and can be interpreted in many ways, and whether or not this film gives a certain edge to a modern social climate or whether we care to let it take effect is a matter of personal interpretation. The theme I gathered was a good theme. That said, it’s still …

So … utterly … boring.

As a more practical moral, my wife summed up the movie with this: “And thus we learn: don’t deal with your children’s problems in stupid ways.”