Frozen 2013

[6.2/10] Frozen sidelines its best material. The frustrating part about this as someone who’s colder on the movie than most audience members (no pun intended), is that I can see what people see in it. There is an endearing story of sisterly love at play in the movie, and there is a moving notion of accepting who you are wrapped in an appropriately magical allegory. If Disney’s 2013 release spent more time on these things, I might be as entranced, or at least half as pleased, as most folks seem to be with this movie.

The catch is that Frozen puts most of its focus elsewhere. One of the sharpest conceits of the film is that it’s a low-key subversion of Disney’s own Sleeping Beauty narrative. The presence of a curse that affects the whole kingdom, a princess hidden away, an instant romance between a feisty young woman and a dashing prince with barely any time for them to get to know one another, and the importance of an act of true love are all elements right out of the Disney Princess playbook.

Except that Frozen finds a way to flip these tropes on their ear. The curse is not a product of evil but rather of repression. The hiding of the princess didn’t save her, but rather estranged her from the sister she loved and gave her an unhealthy complex. The dashing prince is the true villain of the piece and the other princess only fell for him because she too has been locked up and made unfamiliar with what real human connection feels like. And the act of true love is not one of romance but of the bond between sisters.

That’s all great! It’s not the first Disney Princess deconstruction by any means, but it’s a neat idea given that much more force by coming from the House of Mouse itself. The meat of that story -- of the damage efforts at repression can cause and the healing that comes from a familial bond -- is engrossing and meaningful. Unfortunately, for all those heady ideas, Frozen spends much more time on Anna’s hijinks with her real love interest, dull narrative cul de sacs, and unavailing action sequences than on the things that mark the film as unique and worthy.

It doesn’t help that Frozen is one of the least subtle movies in the Disney canon, which is saying something. There is no emotion, point, or theme in the movie that a character doesn’t announce to the audience, deliver in exposition, or belt out over a swelling score. Everything here literally and figuratively happens at a high volume, and it detracts from the film’s commendable themes and central idea when both are hammered home to the audience with all the subtlety of snowball to the face.

Alas, even those belted out tunes, so apparently necessary for driving the point home in no uncertain terms, are only so-so. There’s a generic, poppy broadway feel to almost all of them. Musicals always contain a certain level of artifice, but the songs have such a standard issue modern showtune feel across the board which feels really inorganic to the rest of the movie and quickly makes the songs feel samey. Even the famed “Let It Go” is too cheesy and belt-y to genuinely earn its acclaim. Only when the tunes veer toward comedy -- in the delightfully demented snowman in summer number -- does Frozen achieve something musically beyond the occasional earworm.

Its visuals also suffer in comparison to Disney films before and after. Most of the major characters look like barbie dolls, in design and in a certain plastic quality to all the ones meant to seem human and relatable. That not only makes it hard to warm to them (again, pardon the expression), but gives their expressive movements an uncanny valley quality much of the time. You can sense the movie trying to walk the line between realism and exaggeration in the character designs and gestures, but the balance isn’t right, and it renders the major players either generic or a little creepy.

The same goes for the big action set pieces. There’s plenty of possibilities in a snow-drenched setting, but Frozen sticks with the expected ice monsters and blizzards and more of the usual trappings in winter-set tales. The directors do come up with some good shots now and then, but visually, the film is nothing special.

Without great songs, quality visuals, or any effort at understatement, Frozen is left to rely on its story and character, and in the end, neither is executed terribly well. Anna and Kristoph are, for all the story’s efforts at subversion, pretty generic love interests whose only distinctive characteristics are clumsiness and a caribou fixation respectively. Hans gets to play the seemingly typical brave prince-turned-baddie, but he barely gets to be villainous long enough to be interesting. The other side characters are forgettable, with only Olaf’s amusing enough comic relief making an impression.

Worst of all, Elsa has the most rich and fascinating story in the film, but it’s not really her movie; it’s Anna’s. That consigns Elsa’s “conceal don’t feel” to self-acceptance journey to something rushed and overly signposted. For however great the idea of her arc here is, it still scans as a missed opportunity, one that would benefit from more time spent on her internal experience and complicated relationship with her sister than Anna and Kristoph’s yawn-inducing wander through the frozen countryside.

It’s a shame, because the parts that do focus on those things make you want to buy what this movie’s selling. Frozen is never better than in its opening fifteen minutes or so, when we see the close friendship between Anna and Elsa turned cold and distant over fears of harming the ones we love. There’s something potent there, a sibling relationship forged and damaged by well-intentioned parenting that leaves lasting harms both daughters must overcome in their own way.

The execution, and more importantly what the movie chooses to spend time on in its bloated runtime, is just too far off for any of those great concepts to fully land. It’s not enough to infuse your film with clever ideas or the hint of a moving relationship -- you have to put them front and center and actually explore them. For a film whose legacy is Elsa’s self-actualization, it seems to stumble into the same pitfalls she does -- the lost opportunities and missed connections that come from not fully understanding, harnessing, or appreciating your own power and potential.