I'm curious as to how people think The Reveal was poorly pulled off. It was really just the, "Oh, but I already have" line that struck me as cliched. And there's so much foreshadowing that if you didn't think something was up with the True Love stuff you just weren't paying attention.
ok boomer
The things for me is
1)So few of his actions make any sort of sense.
- He actually risked his life going out of the way trying to save someone he intended to have an 'unfortunate accident' as soon as possible.
- Every interaction he had with the Weasleton fellow was antagonistic, including Weasleton seeing him send trade resources to the poor and conflicting over Elsa. Then as soon as the evil switch is flipped they're suddenly friends. Weasleton could have just been pretending to be annoyed, but he didn't strike anyone as a good actor
2) It's really not shocking for the rich posh nice looking guy to turn evil in the third act. Because I'd been told the film was going to have some twists, I was expecting him to actually be much more genuine
3) It turns Kristof's moral lesson from something sensible to something completely insane. Watch out for falling in love at first sight because they might turn out to be a murdering psychopath. It's like being told not to walk through the bad area of town and then they turn out to be right because someone walks through it and civil war breaks out
You need to be careful with love at first sight because you don't know if your feelings are genuine or if you two are compatible, and yes even if he's not a nice person. But the clever way to show that is through them not being suitable in a fairly normal way, not in a cackling evil way.
What I had been expecting was that he'd try to kiss her, nothing would happen and then he would shamefacedly admit that he probably wanted to be in line to the throne more than he wanted her. But he was still the person who cared about his subjects and was handing out clothes to the needy, just not the right person for Anna
1) He explicitly said he was going to kill Elsa because it would make him the "Savior of Arendelle." His original plan was to stage an accident for Elsa. And I don't see where the Duke factored into his plan at all, and I didn't see them being very "friendly" towards each other even after the reveal, just that Duke was as shocked as anybody that Elsa had "killed" Anna.
2) This I will concede. One of my friends who didn't know about the twist going in said later he was expecting Hans to be dead at the hands of the Duke, which would have been an interesting turn.
3) Everything about fiction is exaggerated. Be nice to other people, or a magical witch lady will come to your house and turn you into a manbearpig!
ok boomer
For 1)
His plan from the beginning was that Elsa would die leaving Anna to be first in line to the crown. So when Anna meant missing he went out looking for her, all good so far.
But when he finds Elsa he tries to talk her down, but moreover when someone is about to shoot Elsa he leaps forward and stops them at some personal risk. Why on earth did he do that when he knew that he needed Elsa to die at some point? It was a much more convenient time to let her die and he could easily tell Anna that he tried his best but it was 'too late'. If he thought Anna was dead it was still much more useful for him to let Elsa die.
And I would argue the Weselton was friendly with Hans after the reveal. It was totally out of character for him to demand that the person who had been at loggerheads with him must take command of the throne, even if that was what protocol demands. Weselton doesn't care about protocol, he doesn't care about Anna, he only wants Elsa dead. He's exactly the person who would call Hans a liar, whether or not it had really happened, because he would want to make sure he can manipulate the succession to his best ability.
Now it's more likely that Hans would pretend to like Weselton once Anna was dead (although that raises the question of why he was pissing Weselton off when Anna wasn't within earshot), but he had no reason to believe that Weselton would be reliable without more work and should have been manipulating him to a much greater extent or talking to someone else.
3) You make a good point, but in my head those are very different narrative threads.
The difference is, in Beauty and the Beast the lesson wasn't be nice to strangers or they'll turn you into a beast. Being turned into a Beast wasn't the reason why he shouldn't be nice, it was the punishment that was going to make him learn to be nice. The actually reason and process of learning to be nice was about adapting to the presence of this curious unsubmissive girl who he may have feelings for. Which is a much more normal and down to earth lesson. It was learning how to control your temper and interact with other people in a way which makes them like you, and his punishment for being a dick was that Belle got angry with him and temporarily didn't like him.
So Beauty and the Beast makes a persuasive argument using normal logic for why you should be nice to people, completely aside from magic. In fact the lesson is only truly learned when the Beast stops thinking about the magic and just genuinely cares for Belle.
Whereas in Frozen there isn't the slightly resemblance to a normal argument outside the absurd situation. In fact there's something of a counter lesson because she falls in love with Kristoff within two days and that turns out okay (Although my headcanon is that they're both just testing out a relationship and don't necessarily believe that it's going to last forever)
You gave a good example, but I think there is enough there to separate them out as different scenarios, with the one being pretty stupid and the other really good
I think I'm not communicating this well, but if you think about it, the Beast didn't become nice because someone turned him into a monster. He was still behaving horribly after that, it was the events in the film which changed his heart. Whereas there were no events to change Anna's mind except that the dude turned out to be a psychopath
1) It was all a Xanatos Gambit. He has an opportunity to be the Hero of Arendelle by stopping the winter, either by talking Elsa down, or by killing her, and he's not wrong in his thinking that it would be preferable for him to reconcile with the Queen, because then nobody could accuse him of being a usurper.
3) I'm just not getting your point. There is a connection to real life scenarios and "normal arguments": people do have Hidden Depths, good and bad, and if you rush into a relationship with somebody you might fight out some stuff about them you don't like. Of course, it's probably not going to be that they're calculating sociopaths bent on getting power, but the principle is the same nonetheless, just, as in all fairy tales, exaggerated.
And as for your point about Kristoff, "headcanon" nothing. That's pretty blatantly what they were going for. The implication was that it was going to last a while, but even 50-year marriages started out with the people only knowing each other for a couple of days. And given what Kristoff and Anna went through together, I'd think that's fair justification for speeding things along a bit.
ok boomer
But it's not good enough for him to be Hero of Arendelle, that's not his aim. If he'd returned with a medal and a reward he would be furious. And he had no reason to think he would get rewarded for it either, everyone else was afraid of the Queen and wanted the winter to go away. He wants to be King and to be King, Elsa needs to be dead, that's why he intended to kill her at a later point. Keeping her alive (especially since she refused to bless the marriage between him and Anna) was just a threat. Saving her definitely wouldn't achieve his preferred goal.
In fact if Anna had died by that point and he did manage to talk her down then he's ruined his chance at the kingdom because he already acknowledged he wasn't likely to get Elsa to marry him. If they were both dead then he could try his 'Anna just married me' story and see if that worked. But again, that only works if Elsa isn't alive.
3) I'm still feeling pretty firm on 3, although I'm still testing to try and find the exact reason. I don't think Frozen fits straight fairytale well, or rather in it's specifics it doesn't. Elsa and Anna aren't archetypes and the story isn't very purely symbolic like a straight telling of Little Red Riding Hood, they're pretty complicated and 'realish' feeling characters. I'm not a huge fan of how overt it is, but the film itself is invoking fairytale ideas and then subverting them, which by itself is a bit meta for straight fairytale.
And it doesn't feel like the whole love-at-first-sight is part of the scope of the fairytale. If it was a story about a young girl who falls for a handsome prince who turns out to be evil and takes control of the throne, I think that would make it feel okay to me. But since it was the story of Princess who lost control of her powers and was driven away and the sister who set out to rescue her, the exaggeration doesn't feel justified
As a 4)Hans is pretty much an aside by the climax and it's pretty telling that the film didn't even feel the need to give him a proper villains end. Being pushed into the water was about the limit of his relevance.
The Hero of Arendelle scheme was just a way to get the populace to accept him as king, it wasn't his ultimate goal. And it's entirely possible that he was thinking Elsa would be willing to bless their marriage after being saved, leaving her open for assassination at a later date. He was clearly in it for the long haul, willing to wait years for his plan to come to fruition. And like I said, saving Elsa and simply arranging for her "accidental" death later would have saved face and protected him from any accusations of trying to usurp the throne.
4) He wasn't "forgotten" in the climax, he's the entire reason Anna's curse was lifted. I do agree, however, that his fate was too anticlimactic and "Ha ha stupid villain"-esque; that was one of the criticisms I had in my review.
ok boomer
I think we're only going to disagree because I've only disliked what they did with him as a character more the more I've been thinking about it. It still seems needlessly risky to go out of your way to save someones life who will only possibly help you and will definitely help you to the point that you need to assassinate them at some later date (and you're never going to find a better opportunity to see someone dead than 'if you move a second later she dies'). His plan would only have come to fruition quicker and in a more secure manner if she died, I can't see how it would destabilise his chances if she did (especially since no-one could possibly have deemed him responsible, and even in point of fact he wasn't)
He isn't really that important for the removal of Anna's curse. Anna was going to go cold and Elsa was going to get locked up and run away with or without him. He was really only distracting from the Anna/Elsa stuff (admittedly you could have chosen to jetison Kristoff instead of Hans. I'm not really fussed about which one you remove from the climax). You need one short sharp threat against Elsa but since that isn't really the big deal of the scene I don't think they would have lost much from it being a random mob member. (and Hans didn't need to be there to instigate a mob, that would have happened without him too)
...no, Hans was absolutely crucial to removing Anna's curse because Anna was sacrificing her life to protect Elsa from being killed by Hans. That was what thawed her frozen heart, not Elsa crying.
ok boomer
Yeah but what I mean is a random member of the mob could have taken a shot at Anna. Hans wasn't needed to capture Elsa, or drive her away or chase after her, not really, because Elsa's perspective was much more important than the people chasing her. If they'd wanted to do something interesting about the nature of the people persecuting her (like making it an otherwise nice person, or someone Elsa/Anna knew well) than that could have been cool, but if anything Hans was just adding a layer of fakeness to the already present mob
Sorry, I'm terrible at thinking all this at the time and I keep on adding afterthoughts, but I really don't think that Anna sacrificing her life was what thawed Elsa's heart. It made it worse, but I don't think we saw anything to suggest that seeing her sister die in front of her wouldn't have made Elsa cry with love. Her problem was never that she didn't love Anna, she didn't need Anna to do something for her. Elsa's problem was that she kept trying to lock away her feelings to protect Anna. Seeing her frozen overwhelmed her
Original Poster here- I think most of Hans' actions can be explained by thinking about it some. The way he had it set up, he'd looked like a hero for saving Elsa and trying to stop the winter the "good way" (also since he was pretending to be in love with Anna, he couldn't very well have her sister killed easily), looked like a pitiful figure for losing his "beloved" Anna to Elsa's evil magic, and looked like a savior for executing Elsa for treason. I have no problems with his Evil Plan or any of that- if he'd pulled it off, he would have been SET.
My ISSUE with the Reveal was that he basically just went "BWAH-HA-HAH I was Evil ALL ALONG!" and then explained his Evil Plan with a big monologue, going into basically Plot Exposition mode. I GET why it was done (someone needed to basically explain why he was evil, and they probably didn't want to add an Evil Sidekick to have Expository Dialogue explained to him), but it came across weird, and a bit clichéd for the "I will explain my master-stroke while you still have time to save the day" thing. I just thought it was a tad clumsy.
The impression I got was that he was trying to throw Anna deeper into despair, thus speeding up the spread of the curse. Hans has proven to be Dangerously Genre Savvy before; it's completely in character for him.
ok boomer
The thing you forget with #1 is that he does not have any claim to the throne. If Elsa dies on an expedition led by him, it could easily break Anna's superficial attraction and send him back to Square 1. If he saves her, he figures his chances of getting her blessing increase considerably (he doesn't know she can't stop the winter) and his approval ratings would skyrocket. He'd be the last person anyone suspects when he kills Elsa. For me, this was a nifty bit of Fridge Brilliance, as I didn't realize this until later and it cleared him of Big Bad potential. He could have merely been a romantic false lead before Anna figured out it wasn't true love. You forget that Weaseltown had no clear interest in conquering Arendelle, only exploiting it. He's only friendly towards Hans because his WIFE just died. Acting any other way would be a tremendous breach of etiquette. And c'mon, are you really complaining that it has exaggerated consequences as part of its moral? That's part of basically every Aesop out there. It's nothing like what you say, since It Makes Sensein Context- rich heiress targeted by handsome gold-digging guy with no prospects? Plausible. Attempted regicide in order to move up the line of succession? Also plausible.
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OH MY GOD IT IS MAGNIFICENT
I absolutely loved the film. Anna is a little too "Rapunzel II" at times, but she's quirky and funny to watch, and Kristoff is lovably grumpy most of the time, but this is really Elsa's film. Elsa is the most amazing character Disney ahs created in years, and is so fascinating to watch. Idina Menzel plays her with a perfect combination of vulnerability, grace and power, and it's combined with the great character design and animation.
Elsa is sort of the film's antagonist, but you can see why she did everything that she did, and feel sorry for her at the same time. Those scenes where she's grieving for her parents but unable to go to her sister for their mutual comfort is heart-breaking, and "Let It Go" is the most bittersweet, yet amazing song Disney has created in years. The only flaw I could find is perhaps her lack of screen-time (or how easily her control over her powers came to her in the end), but in the end, a hermit outsider can't really get too much focus. But that song is easily the film's highlight, and a triumphant moment. It's really an anthem to lonely people and outsiders everywhere, and will connect with so many people.
Aside from "Let It Go", many of the songs are forgettable (and a bit front-loaded into the early part of the film), but some are still a bit amusing. The neat thing about many of the characters is that you can see multiple sides of most of them, and understand them better as people. They're a very well-rounded cast, and even the Love Story is decently well-done (though much of the Villain Reveal is full of some pretty sad dialogue and villain stupidity). The recurring metaphor about "doors" is quite well-done too, since they don't make too much of a point of it. And shockingly, the wacky "Kid Focus" Snowman isn't that annoying — many fans were fearing another Jar-Jar Binks, but instead he's really quite funny, breaks the drama of some situations, and never interrupts things or gets too much screen-time.
I think the movie fits easily in with some of the Disney Renaissance, though isn't on the level of Beauty and the Beast or anything. Elsa is really a dominant, fascinating character, but aside from her, much of the film is pretty pedestrian Disney-esque stuff.