Many people loved Disney’s Frozen. I certainly went to the theatre hoping to love it. A Disney movie about sisters and one having dark special powers voiced by Idina Menzel who I knew could sing Happy Birthday and make your skin tingle—how could you miss? Tangled had just been released three years prior and my sister and I loved it, but in all the ways Tangled got it right, Frozen got it wrong. Let’s dive into why.

Elsa (Greatness Underused) I loved Elsa. She was a Disney princess (Queen though, really) the likes we’d never seen before:

·         She has incredible powers she can’t fully control and ends up being isolated and fearful after hurting her sister one time.

·         Both she and her parents overreact and she inherits the mantra, “Conceal don’t feel, don’t let it show.” Naturally, this won’t last forever and this is a counterproductive solution. But this is Great Stuff to start your story with.

·          Elsa losing control and running away is a great move and “Let it Go,” one of the best Disney songs ever, mostly due to Menzel’s voice (The song was written for her to sing.)

Where did they fall short with her?   

·         “Let it go” was originally meant to be a villain song. Anyone who’s paid close attention to the lyrics knows the line “No right, no wrong, no rules for me.”

·          Elsa should have been the villain, not Hans. She basically is. (She could’ve been an extremely sympathetic villain who gets brought back in the end by her sister but still a villain.) She causes the eternal winter, she freezes Anna’s heart, and in the end she’s the one causing a storm that nearly destroys the kingdom and impales her sister in the castle. Hans is just the guy trying to benefit in the midst of the chaos.

·         After “Let it go,” we get all hyped for what Elsa will do following such a good song—that perfect girl is gone—and she spends the rest of the movie locked in a frozen castle playing checkers… until the finale. Elsa is not used to the character’s fullest potential. It’s like creating Batman and he walks around in his cowl brooding after one great donning the costume moment.

·         Let’s talk about Anna (Not a Disney Princess): I have my problems with Anna in movie one. By movie two I full on hated her. Focusing on the first film, for all exterior purposes she seems to be your typical passionate Disney princess who wants true love and something more. She Wants Adventure in the Great Wild Somewhere! Not really…I don’t know about anyone else, but I knew Hans was going to be a bad guy from the so-called love song he and Anna sing. The sequence was far too silly to be The Love song of the film, and yet it really is because she and Kristoff get nothing. Anna, apparently, thinks she wants to marry Hans and we make a whole thing with Elsa mentioning how “You can’t marry a man you just met.” Since when Disney? Anna goes on the quest to retrieve her sister and we poke fun at the idea of True love. We are setting up the feel for this movie:

·         Romance is silly and people don’t just meet and fall in love.

·         Even if Anna ends up falling in love with Kristoff, I missed it. We don’t get an “At last I see the light moment.”

·         It doesn’t matter anyway because Anna saves herself in the end and Kristoff doesn’t have to marry her—they just date.

We started off like a Disney movie and ended up with secular relationship. Anna also doesn’t actually accomplish anything on the journey to find her sister.

·         She has no plan to fix things other than talking to Elsa and being ridiculously naïve in her approach to Elsa’s powers. Elsa basically tells her she’s terrified of hurting her and can’t control it and Anna says, “Don’t worry about it, just do it.”

·          Anna gets hurt, like Elsa feared, and then switches gears to needing to kiss prince Hans. When Hans won’t kiss her (good man), she only thinks of Kristoff as a last result when Olaf mentions him.

·          She’s funny and silly but where’s her heart? Being spunky isn’t a character and everything out of her mouth is a joke. Her naivety isn’t poked at like Rapunzel’s and she doesn’t grow. The sum of her character is literally to disprove Disney stereotypes: true love, dreams of adventure, finding your prince, etc. and that isn’t a whole character. It’s simply a silly attempt to not be prior Disney characters.

Kristoff (The Emasculated Man): Kristoff…who is he? We don’t know who he is or where he came from. The men in the opening scene breaking ice take no notice of a small child running around with a baby reindeer. Is he an orphan, did he run away? All of those questions would have contributed to his character if they’d been answered or dwelt upon. (He’s also irrelevant in the opening scene since he contributes nothing and no one knows him. He sees Elsa and Anna as children but this is irrelevant since it is never mentioned and it plays no part in the plot.) All we know about him is: 

·         He’s raised by badly singing trolls (who have a whole song ready just to make fun of him, the song basically being translated to “He sucks but you can have him.”) and he’s kind of turned on by reindeers.

·         Kristoff has no past, no troubles that we know of, unlike Flynn Ryder who became a thief with a made up reputation since he was a poor kid with nothing.

·          Kristoff is presented to us like another roguish character who’s help the main female needs to reach her goal (like Tangled), but he’s no deeper than being mildly crude and funny.

·         In his opening scene he’s tossed out on his rear and in the end he doesn’t save Anna or fight Hans. He gets the girl somehow by being generally likeable, harmless, and aside from being transportation— useless.

·         We also don’t need him for transportation since Elsa made the journey on foot in twenty minutes despite Anna chasing immediately after her on a horse and needing a whole day for the journey and a guide. And there’s a staircase to the top which has to be pointed out to Kristoff and Anna by Olaf (because they’re incompetent) even though Hans finds it.

I will give Kristoff credit for saving Anna twice, but the drama and excitement of him rushing to save her when she realizes she “loves” him and needs him to break the curse is broken by him not actually breaking it. But hey, he doesn’t threaten her womanhood. In Tangled, Flynn Rider is shown to be clever, resourceful; and, in the end, with his dying breath, he saves Rapunzel and kills Gothel, freeing them both. I don’t hate Kristoff, in movie 2, I feel sorry for him, but he isn’t allowed to be a man.

Hans (The Villain who doesn’t receive Justice): Hans is a good villain and unique to the Disney villain roster, but like Elsa, he isn’t handled right. If you’d wanted to do the whole not every Prince is a good guy story, fine, but then present another guy to disprove the appearance that all men suck. In this film you only have two options: The Prince who’s really an evil villain or Kristoff who’s not capable of anything aside from being inoffensive and amusing.

This is intentional, the writers weren’t stupid. We are clearly trying to say something about men in this movie—the handsome prince isn’t real but it is okay to date a man who doesn’t protect you, isn’t passionate about you, and has no story arc of his own. If you’d wanted this movie to be one of sisterly love where Anna doesn’t get with anyone, fine, (both Brave and Moana don’t have romance), but they didn’t want to do that. Hans, though a villain, is a real character with goals and motives:

·         I love how Hans, unlike Kristoff, has a backstory and a goal.

·         He’s twelfth in line for the throne and wants to be King.

·         He’s clever, and assesses both Elsa and Anna and determines Anna will be the easier target.

·         He’s ruthless. To some people it wasn’t obvious when he doesn’t kiss Anna and walks over to the window, delivering his villain monologue. He leaves Anna to die and then lies about exchanging marriage vows, all while pretending to be heartbroken (Good Stuff).

Me personally, I would’ve wanted a redemption story for him (like Disney was planning on doing before they realized it would’ve been too serious). Also, does anyone but me want a romance between Hans and Elsa? No, just me...okay.

A Failed attempt at a climax: Hans leaves Anna to freeze to death, almost beheads Elsa and yet Anna punches him in the end…he doesn’t die. The writer of these films and any story is showing me how seriously I’m supposed to take them by virtue of how grave the circumstances are to the characters. In all other Disney classics an evil villain is regarded as a serious threat deserving of serious punishment:

·          Mother Gothel gets pushed out a window after withering away to an old hag.

·         Ursula is impaled by Prince Eric with the pointy end of a ship.

·          Jafar is trapped within a lamp because Aladdin can’t kill him (not for lack of effort on his part, though).

·         Scar is eaten alive by Hyenas.

Hans is treated like the jerk ex-boyfriend who gets his and everybody laughs. This is an insult to villains and sets the tone of comedy for the film so that even the climax is weak. How would it have looked if Scar, after digging his claws into his own brother’s paws, after being asked for help by Mufasa and responding with throwing him off a cliff to die, gets given a noogie?

You working for the Plot and Not the Other way around: As a writer, your plot should work for you. Stuff shouldn’t just happen because you need it to. You should have it all planned out beforehand in the best possible way.

·         There’s no urgency to the plot—Anna is dying and we have the trolls sing a silly song. Everything happens because it needs to happen:

  -Elsa freezes everything.

  -Anna needs to go on a journey to find her.

 -They find her and she freezes Anna’s heart to provide another convenient problem.

 -Hans takes Elsa.

 -Hans is evil.

 -Elsa conveniently stops the storm when she thinks Anna’s dead.

- Anna turns to ice and conveniently takes out Hans.

-Anna unfreezes herself and Elsa can suddenly control her powers.

It is clear the script underwent a lot of changes before production so it makes the sense the story feels mish mashed.

Core elements in Disney: We’ve strayed so far from Disney in every element:

·         No Justice, silly romance, weak plot, and lots of silly songs (my brother can’t get Fixer Upper out of his nightmares).

·         Usually Disney allows itself one silly song per film so as not to lose the balance of serious and silly:

     -Hakuna Matata (Lion King)

     -A guy like you (Hunchback of Notre Dame)

     -I’ve got a dream (Tangled)

The strange thing is, both Jonathan Groff and Santino Fontana can sing, but Kristoff only gets a 51 second silly song about reindeers. Fontana gets part of a silly song with Anna where we make sure he doesn’t shine more than her vocally. Josh Gad, another Broadway singer, also gets a silly song. (Olaf knows what a tan is but he has no clue heat melts ice? Shakes head…) Frozen was Disney’s tipping point into a world of inoffensive Political correctness to see if we’d notice a change. From here on out there’s no stopping them…

-Hannah