Whyboy Spotlights… Frozen

It’s been a pretty solid year in the “Year of Standards,” mostly unimpressive visuals, very copy and paste stories, and all around a year that hasn’t leaned towards horrible but just meh. I’ve been told though that Frozen was going to change all that. It’s the movie that would subvert the cliché formulas, the run-of-the-mill humour, and rise above the ocean of bland animated movies as a film truly amazing. Did Frozen accomplish this? Let’s look at the story first to find out.

Firstly Disney is going back to one of their strongest practices for Frozen. Book adaptations. Specifically Frozen adapts the Hans Christian Anderson story The Ice Queen, but does so fairly loosely. The story starts with our two young princess sisters; Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell) while they are playing in the ballroom, courtesy of Elsa’s magical powers of snow and ice. Tragedy strikes though as Elsa accidentally blasts Anna in the head with her powers, nearly killing her. Thankfully some trolls save her but the troll chief tells Elsa that to protect herself and everyone around her she must learn to control her emotions. Elsa and her parents however take this advice and thusly teach Elsa to bottle up her emotions and keep her powers a secret. This leads her to completely shut down emotionally, and hold herself up in her room, trying her hardest to ignore the pleas of Anna who just wants to play with her sister again. Thankfully though Elsa has the loving support of her parents to help… oooohh.

After the parents croak, Elsa is set in line to become Queen of Arendelle and on her coronation day she allows the castle doors to finally open for the first time in years. Anna is ecstatic because of this and quickly finds true love in Prince Hans (Santino Fontana). They spend a glorious 5 hours together and decide they wish to get married asking Elsa for her blessing. Like any sane rational protective sister Elsa says “no” and Anna, in her frustration, accidentally outs Elsa as an ice making “monster,” as the obvious weaselly villain points out, making Elsa run off also accidentally causing a permanent winter in Arendelle. Oops. Anna feeling responsible sets off alone to talk with her sister to apologize and somehow stop the permanent winter, teaming up along the way with Kristoff the mountain man (Jonathan Groff), his reindeer Sven, and a comedic sidekick snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad).

The real selling point of Frozen for a lot of people was that Frozen had subverted so many of those Disney Princess trends that we have taken as the norm from them for so many years. My thoughts on the movie’s subversion? The film did make them rather refreshing. Starting on my favorite subversion the sister-sister conflict; Elsa and Anna are a great double act of conflict and character development. Both starting off as two hyper and energetic kids but after the accident they drift apart, one starting her energetic self and the other forcing herself to become an introvert. Ever since Lilo & Stitch’s Nani and Lilo I’ve longed for a film to show that sister family tie that was done so naturally in that movie and here I feel it was just as natural. Scenes like with Elsa and Anna chatting in the ballroom demonstrated a warm bond between the two, one filled with a natural mixture of frustration, respect and love. It is kind of odd though how after the halfway point the movie seems to push this conflict to the side until the last second. This isn’t to say the plot line wasn’t explored thoroughly, it’s just I found the thematic switch a little odd.

But I guess the best way to explain what I mean by an odd thematic shift is to explain the other subverted aspect in this movie, the happily ever after motif. Like I stated in my summary, Anna and Hans spend what I would wager only 5 hours with each other and Anna already believes she’s found true love but the movie makes it plainly clear with its characters that is CRAZY!! From Elsa’s confused “What?” when Anna asks for her blessing to Kristoff endlessly hounding Anna on the topic as they escape some wolves, the movie makes it plainly clear Anna has no idea what true love is. This was the most refreshing aspect of the film.

I’ve reviewed plenty of animated films with this Romeo and Juliet, we met once and now we’re in love, love story and I’ve had a give and take relationship with this motif. On one hand with this format in say Thumbelina, where the lovers are constantly apart, we never see their chemistry together in other than one song sequence which makes their romance look utterly fake and phoned in. On the other less negative hand, the motif also brings this feeling of hope that audiences do love because for most people a love at first sight was a nice dream, and Disney for many years took it this route. Cinderella, Pocahontas, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty and many of the other princesses, all of them fell in love with their prince either through first sight or through a short chemistry building time lapse and they just lived happily ever after.

While Disney didn’t subvert the formula entirely (How much time did Anna and Kristoff spend with other another til they got together?), the subversion is more displayed as a slightly different moral. A moral of the transformative nature of true love. This sort of moral can be analyzed in many ways but my personal analysis pulled how it’s okay to not find your true love the first time. Simplistic? Sure, but simplicity can help capture an audiences imagination, and lead to more in-depth discussion and analysis. I’m trying to look at this movie from a more average movie-goer standpoint, and from that point of view I think audiences of all types will enjoy these subversions and connect with the theming on a personal level.

Moving onto animation quickly I want to say how beautiful Frozen made its ice effects. Crisp and clean as well as giving that atmosphere of a cold landscape. The greatest example of the ice in Frozen is in the movie’s most famous musical number, sung by the Ice Queen Elsa “Let it Go.” The camera work and animation in the sequence was pitch perfect. It’s thanks to me watching that on YouTube that I wanted to see the movie so bad. The song is just a culmination of all of Elsa’s frustration and bottle up emotions into an explosion of emotion that is not only beautiful to watch but to listen to as well.

The other songs are pretty good too but none of them really have the “wow” factor Let it Go, unless I count that Troll song from the third act. But only if I can change it to the “wow this is awful” factor. Yep I hated something in Frozen. It’s just… wow. That troll song was so needless and created the most forced juxtaposition. It starts off with the trolls trying to hook up Anna and Kristoff (even though the two tell the trolls Anna’s engaged) and the sing ends with Anna collapsing from her Frozen heart that Elsa gave her. It was such a by-the-books scene that for a movie that is known for subverting the Disney formula it was sickening to watch. I even liked Olaf’s little diddy about his love for summer but these trolls’ song is like a big sign saying “Please find us funny!” The trolls served a purpose as expositors but as comedic juxtaposition they were garbage.

But that’s my only real complaint everything else was great and Frozen actually surprised me which for me being the jaded reviewer that I am is usually hard to do. Firstly, Olaf and Sven turned out to be actual likable characters. Ever since Frozen’s first trailer I was really dreading the two because Sven seemed like the traditional random animal acts like a dog, and Olaf’s design looked unappealing to me, but when they’re on screen it just worked. Sven is that traditional animal acts like Dog character but his mime routine with Kristoff as he speaks through his grunts and body movement actually allowed for a more definable character. Olaf on the other hand was that goofy comic relief but he did serve a thematic story purpose, as he represented the last bit of warmth and happiness in Elsa’s heart and he wasn’t annoying. Hooray! Thankfully instead of every other comic relief where they get louder when telling a joke Olaf is more quiet and reserved which doesn’t lead to any laugh out loud moments but makes Olaf a more supportive secondary character to Anna’s dilemma. It’s better then the alternative where they could just have had him running around just reciting pop-culture references.

The final surprise for me was Hans. There really isn’t any sort of big evil villain in Frozen. There are antagonists namely Elsa because she is Anna’s biggest obstacle to overcome. However there are more tiny villains running around like the obviously evil lord Weasel face and surprising to me Hans. Now I’ve been wracking my brain whether this was a good surprise or a bad surprise and I’m still unsure. Hans up to his villain reveal has been the valiant hero, handing warm blankets out to the villagers, fighting giant monsters, and stopping Elsa in a more peaceful fashion. However this all gets flipped around as Hans revealed to be a complete nefarious villain who just wants power and that left me befuddled. Is this the same guy who I’ve been watching through the movie, or did the writers make him a villain because it made the plot more convenient?

I think the movie just tricked me. In a good way. Looking at the movie again there are several lines of Hans’s dialogue that speak a lot more subtext about him and his motives when you bring in the knowledge that he’s a villain. But will everybody get that? Probably not. This is one of those instances where Frozen may have been too subtle for its own good and people might call this heel turn out of nowhere but in my opinion this just shows how smart Frozen’s writing truly is.

Final paragraph time and I think my first question has been soundly answered. Did Frozen accomplish to subvert the cliché formulas, the run-of-the-mill humour, and rise above the ocean of bland animated movies? Yes it did. Thanks to Frozen’s intelligent thematic and plot driven writing, likable and relatable characters and beautiful and atmospheric visuals Frozen is definitely one of the best animated movies of the year. A definite must watch for any fan of animation, Disney, or anyone who just wants a fantastic movie to watch.

Written By Taylor “Whyboy” Wyatt