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Let's Talk About Ice
I have a lot of extremely conflicted feelings about Frozen 2. So let's get into that. Spoilers below the cut, obviously. And not baby spoilers. We're going to be talking about the ways the narrative failed both structurally and in terms of its themes: that means the whole ass plot.
So, first off, I want to talk at least a little bit about the good things. Because there were a lot of good things. I'm going to be talking mostly about how this film failed both in a general, technical sense, and in a personal sense. But that doesn't mean it was bad. Honestly, every single strength the original Frozen had is still here, and is if anything much stronger.
Additionally, some serious criticisms raised about the original frozen, such as the poor integration of the musical numbers--most of which were superfluous at best--have been addressed. As I think a lot of people know--even if they would be hard pressed to express it directly--a musical number should achieve two major things. First, it should express emotional intensity that simply could not be expressed in a dramatic dialogue. Second, it should be so integral to the plot that if you cut that song sequence out, the film, storyline, or act to which it belongs would stop makings sense. These two major traits are what allows a song to feel like a natural, necessary part of a film, instead of feeling like the entire movie is stopping for a few minutes to have a big musical number. In the original film Let It Go and, to some extent, Do You Want to Build a Snowman, both achieved these ends. In contrast, songs like In The Summer, Reindeer are Better than People, For the First Time in Forever, etc all fail on either one, the other, or both. As such, a lot of the original Frozen felt like a film that had big broadway songs stitched in, rather than a film built of big Broadway songs.
In contrast, the soundtrack of Frozen 2 is much much better integrated into the film. There are maybe 2 tracks that you could eliminate without losing either the plot or the emotional weight they provide, which are Some Things Never Change and When I Am Older. However, and I'm willing to admit I'm just hugely biased against When I Am Older because whatever the fuck they were trying to do with Olaf this time, my GOD they failed. Honestly, though, while you could drop both of these songs without losing emotional or narrative weight, you kind of need those comedic break that When I'm Older provides, because a lot of this plot goes really hard.... and really poorly. The purposeful comedy helps cover for the aboslute fuckshow of the narrative. That need for comic relief is also why I specifically think you couldn't actually get away with cutting Kirstoff's song--or at least, not without cutting the entirety of the Kristoff's Proposal subplot. Which, actually, maybe they should have cut that, given the chaotic and cluttered narrative of the film, which I will get more into later.
Additionally, when listening to just the instrumental backing of the Big Song, Into the Unknown, it's really apparent how much effort was made into ensuring that various leitmotifs from Let it Go and Do You Want to Build a Snowman are included, without ever being allowed to dominate the track or make it sound too samey. That is hard to do. It's extremely difficult to integrate musical callbacks like that, which are strong enough to act as a reminder to the audience of what's going on and why they should feel the strong feelings about it, without coming off hamhanded and heavy fisted. The music in Frozen 2 is extremely well crafted as music, which it was in Frozen 1 as well, but additionally, the music in Frozen 2 is well crafted as a film soundtrack.
Honestly, I think my favourite thing in this movie is the way Elsa's "finally where I belong" track, Show Yourself, contains fragments of the melody from Anna's "finally where I belong" track in the first film, For The First Time In Forever.
One thing I expect we're going to hear a lot of is, there's still not a villain song. But, honestly? That was the wrong choice in Frozen 1, but it's the right call in Frozen 2. The villain is not a character, it's colonialism. Colonialism can't sing a song, it's not a character. It's a theme. And attempting to, for example, assign a villain song to Elsa and Anna's grandfather would muddy the ultimate message of the narrative. I suppose you could argue that there should have been a, well, theme song, but you don't put theme songs in musicals. You put them in serialized media to help create a cohesive tone across long periods of interconnected but separate narratives.
Actually, I'm starting to think maybe there should have been a theme song. You know, like, for a miniseries. So that the cacophony of this movie could have been split into multiple parts.
Because, I can't avoid it any more. Frozen 2's writing and editting were aboslutely fucking horrible. You know how sometimes you can watch a film and see how it was written, filmed, and then re-written, with editting coming in to re-form the entire story as best it could with a limited set of footage?
Frozen 2 is a mess of really nice scenes that are unconnected to each other. The foreshadowing and theme groundwork laid out in earlier drafts is very obvious--it's a kids movie after all--and also goes absolutely nowhere, because of the massive changes that were clearly made. Some of these changes were also clearly necessary. It's very, very, painfully obvious that the original narrative of this film was, "Elsa's magic means she is the chosen queen of the colonized indigenous people that she's never heard of or met." Whoever first realized what a massive fuckup that woudl be, and agitated to get a lot of the editorial and writing staff some fucking indigenous advisors: good job. I'm proud of you.
But it sucks that it was so late in the production process that it couldn't be replaced, just stopped.
Because the film also comes achingly close to saying something really powerful about the way mixed race people and especially native/indigenous people are denied access to their culture, and how that creates a pervasive and intense feeling of alienation. An intractable sense that we are Different and that we are Failing and that we shouldn't Be Here.
They came so beautifully close, they even touch on it at the end with the line about a bridge with two sides and a mother with two daughters. They honestly could have done something revolutionary with that, by showing the way two mixed race children can have two very different but equally powerful reactions to reclaiming their heritage. They could have given Elsa a home that finally knows and understands who she is and what she needs, while also giving Anna a sense of just how big the world really is, and how important it is to be a real part of it, rather than just staying cloistered in a slightly-larger imprisonment than the one she started in with the first film. Let Elsa go home, and let Anna realize that her own home as neighbors, and that she is a part of so much larger a world than she thought.
But instead, presumably because of the release date rush due to the pretty obvious re-writes, we got this thing where Elsa's final culmination as a character is..... doing the exact same thing she did at the beginning of the first movie. Running away to live in a magical hermitage in an ice castle. The difference being that this time, it's good that she's going to do that, so her sister lets her go without following.
The whole idea of Elsa being able to re-integrate into the culture she was denied--and that she spent her life being tortured as a result of that denial--is just sort of. Disappeared. She lives in a different geographic location, but she's still living in a kingdom of isolation.
The narrative of Frozen 2, due to the way it was re-written and editted, is basically just: what if Frozen 1 had stopped at the end of Let It Go and we all called that a happy ending? Can we just do that, instead of writing a real sequel?
And it's so frustrating, because all of the groundwork is right there. I mean, unironically, this film has some of the best integration and presentation of indigenous rights and the overthrow of colonial violence I have ever seen. For gods sakes, Anna recognizes that her kingdom is built on colonial violence, and that repairing the harm done by it will cost everything that colonialism built, up to and including her home, and she just. She commits. She sucks it up, and she does what she has to do to fix it anyway, knowing full well that as long as her people survive, they can rebuild, and this time, they can rebuild in a way that isn't on the backs of the Northuldra.
It's so fucking good, and it just emphasizes how weak the rest of the narrative is.
And then there's the editing.
First of all, this film is just chock a block with mood whiplash and sudden cuts from one plot point to the next without any actually connectivity between them. This, too, is an obvious victim of late production re-writes and edits. The dialogue and interstitial scenes necessary to move smoothly from one plot point to the next hadn't been animated, so they had to do what they could with what they had. It's hardly the first time that a rush to cut problematic plot elements and introduce new ones late in production has caused this kind of plot-by-strobe-light effect. It won't be the last time. But it was extremely obvious.
Like, you know in Bambi, when they kill his mom and then we just jump cut directly to a lovely spring day where everyone is happily frolicking, because we need to get to that point and there wasn't really a transition figured out?
The entire first 2 acts of this film are basically just that, over and over. And it's brutal.
Additionally, I want to talk about the queerbaiting.
Oh yes, queerbaiting. The real deal, old school shit. Not subtext, not chemistry between characters (I give it a week before someone says Kristoff/Ryder is queerbait).
I want to talk about the specific use of queer messages and themes in a piece of media, to suggest to a queer audience that they're finally going to be Seen and Heard, and then refuse to do so, as a blatant ploy to acquire money or fuel controversy.
I want to talk about Show Yourself. Elsa's big, "I'm here, I've made it" musical number, and critically, I want to talk about it in context not just of Let It Go, the equivalent track from the first film, but in the context of the critical reaction to Let It Go.
It's perfectly reasonable that in filming Frozen 1, and in creating the Let it Go sequence, the people involved didn't recognize the immensity of the queer subtext they were packing into the song, or that some part of the crew knew it and others didn't. There is a plausible deniability to the queerness of Let It Go, and combined with the fact that it was released into a fresh context, that made it almost charming. It certainly engaged the queer audience in a very direct and real way.
There is no such plausible deniability for Show Yourself.
The implicit queerness of Let It Go is ratcheted up to 11, to 12, to 98 in Show Yourself. And the production crew and marketing team and everyone involved knew that full well. This was a purposeful set of decisions. And, here's the real kicker: if they have gone for the whole 'mixed race people reclaiming their cultural heritage' deal, the gay shit wouldn't even necessarily be there. But, by refusing to acknowledge the racial reclamation angle in the rest of the narrative, the only interpretation we're left with on Show Yourself is that where Let It Go was a song about realizing you're queer, Show Yourself is a song about deciding it's time for everyone else to realize you're queer.
And they knew what they were doing. This was not an accident. It was a purposeful attempt to re-create the financial impact and word of mouth exposure that Let it Go created for Frozen 1, by doubling down on the accidental messages of Let it Go on purpose, without ever actually being up front enough to give us genuine queerness of any sort, and it's as obvious as it is insulting. I'm not saying they needed to give Elsa a girlfriend--with as fucked as the rest of this narrative is, they wouldn't have had time--but they needed to do something to warrant all the "look at us, look how queer we're being" fuckery.
Anything.
God, it's so fucking frustrating. This film presents so many excellent fucking concepts and this pisses them away, and it's honestly kind of insulting.
It's just missed potential after missed potential.
That said, the third act seems to have been mostly spared the late-stage re-writes, and once it gets rolling, it's really, really good. Which is part of why the cavalcade of errors in the rest of it is so grating. The contrast exists inside the film itself, and it leaves you well aware by the end that you sat through 2 hours of movie for maybe 30 minutes of it.
In a very real way, the song sequences are so necessary because trimmed and cut down past what it could possibly sustain, and you cannot pare it down any further. This is not to suggest, however, that I think the film should have been longer. Because it's also just as obvious that a lot of what they decided to keep, they kept because the production costs on those sequences were already quite high, and it would have felt like "a waste" to keep them. So they extended the film out far past what it should have been, and cut huge chunks of necessary content to make sure it wasn't a bloated mess, and what we're left with is a not even a skeleton: it's some femurs, ribs and a skull, with no pelvis or kneecaps to be seen.
And all of these issues really feed into each other. The exacerbate each other, not just be eating up the patience of the audience, but by actively making each other worse. Like I said, the queerbaiting issue wouldn't have been noticeable, had the moral of the story been, "mixed race characters reclaim the heritage denied to them." The regressiveness of the ultimate endings for these characters would not have been so obvious, had the editing been smoother. The editing would have been smoother had the re-writes been earlier. The re-writes would have been earlier had there been enough indigenous creators involved int he early production process to stop the whole, "Elsa, queen of the Sami," thing from even getting as far as story-boarding rather than getting all the way to post-rendering edits.
Like I said, though, the last act is strong. The denouement is as weak as the rest of the film, but the actual low-point and climax are great. I cannot recommend them enough.
Additionally, one place that the production crew really learned their lessons is in the set design. There are still tons of the same problems with Frozen 2 as the first film, lots of empty spaces and flat black backgrounds. But, when there are environments and backgrounds worth looking at, they are spectacular. As someone with a lot of video game design experience, it's really hard to use fog/mist effects to help reduce rendering complexity, without it being really obvious and stupid looking, but they absolutely nailed it. The fog effects only serve to emphasize the care and attention to detail in the rest of the forest effects. The flat, soft, non-directional lighting would normally be a weakness in a major blockbuster film like this, especially with the directional lighting audiences saw in Spider Verse really raising the bar on that, but it is emphasized just enough to add to the dreamlike, trapped in a magical haze vibes.
I guess, in the end, my feelings on Frozen 2 are that it's both stronger and weaker than Frozen 1. The highs are higher, but the lows, my god, the lows are lower.
So, first off, I want to talk at least a little bit about the good things. Because there were a lot of good things. I'm going to be talking mostly about how this film failed both in a general, technical sense, and in a personal sense. But that doesn't mean it was bad. Honestly, every single strength the original Frozen had is still here, and is if anything much stronger.
Additionally, some serious criticisms raised about the original frozen, such as the poor integration of the musical numbers--most of which were superfluous at best--have been addressed. As I think a lot of people know--even if they would be hard pressed to express it directly--a musical number should achieve two major things. First, it should express emotional intensity that simply could not be expressed in a dramatic dialogue. Second, it should be so integral to the plot that if you cut that song sequence out, the film, storyline, or act to which it belongs would stop makings sense. These two major traits are what allows a song to feel like a natural, necessary part of a film, instead of feeling like the entire movie is stopping for a few minutes to have a big musical number. In the original film Let It Go and, to some extent, Do You Want to Build a Snowman, both achieved these ends. In contrast, songs like In The Summer, Reindeer are Better than People, For the First Time in Forever, etc all fail on either one, the other, or both. As such, a lot of the original Frozen felt like a film that had big broadway songs stitched in, rather than a film built of big Broadway songs.
In contrast, the soundtrack of Frozen 2 is much much better integrated into the film. There are maybe 2 tracks that you could eliminate without losing either the plot or the emotional weight they provide, which are Some Things Never Change and When I Am Older. However, and I'm willing to admit I'm just hugely biased against When I Am Older because whatever the fuck they were trying to do with Olaf this time, my GOD they failed. Honestly, though, while you could drop both of these songs without losing emotional or narrative weight, you kind of need those comedic break that When I'm Older provides, because a lot of this plot goes really hard.... and really poorly. The purposeful comedy helps cover for the aboslute fuckshow of the narrative. That need for comic relief is also why I specifically think you couldn't actually get away with cutting Kirstoff's song--or at least, not without cutting the entirety of the Kristoff's Proposal subplot. Which, actually, maybe they should have cut that, given the chaotic and cluttered narrative of the film, which I will get more into later.
Additionally, when listening to just the instrumental backing of the Big Song, Into the Unknown, it's really apparent how much effort was made into ensuring that various leitmotifs from Let it Go and Do You Want to Build a Snowman are included, without ever being allowed to dominate the track or make it sound too samey. That is hard to do. It's extremely difficult to integrate musical callbacks like that, which are strong enough to act as a reminder to the audience of what's going on and why they should feel the strong feelings about it, without coming off hamhanded and heavy fisted. The music in Frozen 2 is extremely well crafted as music, which it was in Frozen 1 as well, but additionally, the music in Frozen 2 is well crafted as a film soundtrack.
Honestly, I think my favourite thing in this movie is the way Elsa's "finally where I belong" track, Show Yourself, contains fragments of the melody from Anna's "finally where I belong" track in the first film, For The First Time In Forever.
One thing I expect we're going to hear a lot of is, there's still not a villain song. But, honestly? That was the wrong choice in Frozen 1, but it's the right call in Frozen 2. The villain is not a character, it's colonialism. Colonialism can't sing a song, it's not a character. It's a theme. And attempting to, for example, assign a villain song to Elsa and Anna's grandfather would muddy the ultimate message of the narrative. I suppose you could argue that there should have been a, well, theme song, but you don't put theme songs in musicals. You put them in serialized media to help create a cohesive tone across long periods of interconnected but separate narratives.
Actually, I'm starting to think maybe there should have been a theme song. You know, like, for a miniseries. So that the cacophony of this movie could have been split into multiple parts.
Because, I can't avoid it any more. Frozen 2's writing and editting were aboslutely fucking horrible. You know how sometimes you can watch a film and see how it was written, filmed, and then re-written, with editting coming in to re-form the entire story as best it could with a limited set of footage?
Frozen 2 is a mess of really nice scenes that are unconnected to each other. The foreshadowing and theme groundwork laid out in earlier drafts is very obvious--it's a kids movie after all--and also goes absolutely nowhere, because of the massive changes that were clearly made. Some of these changes were also clearly necessary. It's very, very, painfully obvious that the original narrative of this film was, "Elsa's magic means she is the chosen queen of the colonized indigenous people that she's never heard of or met." Whoever first realized what a massive fuckup that woudl be, and agitated to get a lot of the editorial and writing staff some fucking indigenous advisors: good job. I'm proud of you.
But it sucks that it was so late in the production process that it couldn't be replaced, just stopped.
Because the film also comes achingly close to saying something really powerful about the way mixed race people and especially native/indigenous people are denied access to their culture, and how that creates a pervasive and intense feeling of alienation. An intractable sense that we are Different and that we are Failing and that we shouldn't Be Here.
They came so beautifully close, they even touch on it at the end with the line about a bridge with two sides and a mother with two daughters. They honestly could have done something revolutionary with that, by showing the way two mixed race children can have two very different but equally powerful reactions to reclaiming their heritage. They could have given Elsa a home that finally knows and understands who she is and what she needs, while also giving Anna a sense of just how big the world really is, and how important it is to be a real part of it, rather than just staying cloistered in a slightly-larger imprisonment than the one she started in with the first film. Let Elsa go home, and let Anna realize that her own home as neighbors, and that she is a part of so much larger a world than she thought.
But instead, presumably because of the release date rush due to the pretty obvious re-writes, we got this thing where Elsa's final culmination as a character is..... doing the exact same thing she did at the beginning of the first movie. Running away to live in a magical hermitage in an ice castle. The difference being that this time, it's good that she's going to do that, so her sister lets her go without following.
The whole idea of Elsa being able to re-integrate into the culture she was denied--and that she spent her life being tortured as a result of that denial--is just sort of. Disappeared. She lives in a different geographic location, but she's still living in a kingdom of isolation.
The narrative of Frozen 2, due to the way it was re-written and editted, is basically just: what if Frozen 1 had stopped at the end of Let It Go and we all called that a happy ending? Can we just do that, instead of writing a real sequel?
And it's so frustrating, because all of the groundwork is right there. I mean, unironically, this film has some of the best integration and presentation of indigenous rights and the overthrow of colonial violence I have ever seen. For gods sakes, Anna recognizes that her kingdom is built on colonial violence, and that repairing the harm done by it will cost everything that colonialism built, up to and including her home, and she just. She commits. She sucks it up, and she does what she has to do to fix it anyway, knowing full well that as long as her people survive, they can rebuild, and this time, they can rebuild in a way that isn't on the backs of the Northuldra.
It's so fucking good, and it just emphasizes how weak the rest of the narrative is.
And then there's the editing.
First of all, this film is just chock a block with mood whiplash and sudden cuts from one plot point to the next without any actually connectivity between them. This, too, is an obvious victim of late production re-writes and edits. The dialogue and interstitial scenes necessary to move smoothly from one plot point to the next hadn't been animated, so they had to do what they could with what they had. It's hardly the first time that a rush to cut problematic plot elements and introduce new ones late in production has caused this kind of plot-by-strobe-light effect. It won't be the last time. But it was extremely obvious.
Like, you know in Bambi, when they kill his mom and then we just jump cut directly to a lovely spring day where everyone is happily frolicking, because we need to get to that point and there wasn't really a transition figured out?
The entire first 2 acts of this film are basically just that, over and over. And it's brutal.
Additionally, I want to talk about the queerbaiting.
Oh yes, queerbaiting. The real deal, old school shit. Not subtext, not chemistry between characters (I give it a week before someone says Kristoff/Ryder is queerbait).
I want to talk about the specific use of queer messages and themes in a piece of media, to suggest to a queer audience that they're finally going to be Seen and Heard, and then refuse to do so, as a blatant ploy to acquire money or fuel controversy.
I want to talk about Show Yourself. Elsa's big, "I'm here, I've made it" musical number, and critically, I want to talk about it in context not just of Let It Go, the equivalent track from the first film, but in the context of the critical reaction to Let It Go.
It's perfectly reasonable that in filming Frozen 1, and in creating the Let it Go sequence, the people involved didn't recognize the immensity of the queer subtext they were packing into the song, or that some part of the crew knew it and others didn't. There is a plausible deniability to the queerness of Let It Go, and combined with the fact that it was released into a fresh context, that made it almost charming. It certainly engaged the queer audience in a very direct and real way.
There is no such plausible deniability for Show Yourself.
The implicit queerness of Let It Go is ratcheted up to 11, to 12, to 98 in Show Yourself. And the production crew and marketing team and everyone involved knew that full well. This was a purposeful set of decisions. And, here's the real kicker: if they have gone for the whole 'mixed race people reclaiming their cultural heritage' deal, the gay shit wouldn't even necessarily be there. But, by refusing to acknowledge the racial reclamation angle in the rest of the narrative, the only interpretation we're left with on Show Yourself is that where Let It Go was a song about realizing you're queer, Show Yourself is a song about deciding it's time for everyone else to realize you're queer.
And they knew what they were doing. This was not an accident. It was a purposeful attempt to re-create the financial impact and word of mouth exposure that Let it Go created for Frozen 1, by doubling down on the accidental messages of Let it Go on purpose, without ever actually being up front enough to give us genuine queerness of any sort, and it's as obvious as it is insulting. I'm not saying they needed to give Elsa a girlfriend--with as fucked as the rest of this narrative is, they wouldn't have had time--but they needed to do something to warrant all the "look at us, look how queer we're being" fuckery.
Anything.
God, it's so fucking frustrating. This film presents so many excellent fucking concepts and this pisses them away, and it's honestly kind of insulting.
It's just missed potential after missed potential.
That said, the third act seems to have been mostly spared the late-stage re-writes, and once it gets rolling, it's really, really good. Which is part of why the cavalcade of errors in the rest of it is so grating. The contrast exists inside the film itself, and it leaves you well aware by the end that you sat through 2 hours of movie for maybe 30 minutes of it.
In a very real way, the song sequences are so necessary because trimmed and cut down past what it could possibly sustain, and you cannot pare it down any further. This is not to suggest, however, that I think the film should have been longer. Because it's also just as obvious that a lot of what they decided to keep, they kept because the production costs on those sequences were already quite high, and it would have felt like "a waste" to keep them. So they extended the film out far past what it should have been, and cut huge chunks of necessary content to make sure it wasn't a bloated mess, and what we're left with is a not even a skeleton: it's some femurs, ribs and a skull, with no pelvis or kneecaps to be seen.
And all of these issues really feed into each other. The exacerbate each other, not just be eating up the patience of the audience, but by actively making each other worse. Like I said, the queerbaiting issue wouldn't have been noticeable, had the moral of the story been, "mixed race characters reclaim the heritage denied to them." The regressiveness of the ultimate endings for these characters would not have been so obvious, had the editing been smoother. The editing would have been smoother had the re-writes been earlier. The re-writes would have been earlier had there been enough indigenous creators involved int he early production process to stop the whole, "Elsa, queen of the Sami," thing from even getting as far as story-boarding rather than getting all the way to post-rendering edits.
Like I said, though, the last act is strong. The denouement is as weak as the rest of the film, but the actual low-point and climax are great. I cannot recommend them enough.
Additionally, one place that the production crew really learned their lessons is in the set design. There are still tons of the same problems with Frozen 2 as the first film, lots of empty spaces and flat black backgrounds. But, when there are environments and backgrounds worth looking at, they are spectacular. As someone with a lot of video game design experience, it's really hard to use fog/mist effects to help reduce rendering complexity, without it being really obvious and stupid looking, but they absolutely nailed it. The fog effects only serve to emphasize the care and attention to detail in the rest of the forest effects. The flat, soft, non-directional lighting would normally be a weakness in a major blockbuster film like this, especially with the directional lighting audiences saw in Spider Verse really raising the bar on that, but it is emphasized just enough to add to the dreamlike, trapped in a magical haze vibes.
I guess, in the end, my feelings on Frozen 2 are that it's both stronger and weaker than Frozen 1. The highs are higher, but the lows, my god, the lows are lower.