Western Animation / Frozen (2013)

"The cold never bothered me anyway."

"In Arendelle's fair kingdom, a ruler did appear,
Born with a secret power so great, alone she stayed in fear.
Although the force was hidden, one day she let it go,
And all the land was covered in eternal ice and snow..."

— The second North American trailer

Frozen is Disney's 53rd entry in its animated canon line-up, an original story that's inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's longest Fairy Tale, The Snow Queen, using 3D computer-generated imagery. It is directed by Chris Buck (Tarzan, Surf's Up) and Jennifer Lee, features songs penned by Robert Lopez and Kristen Andersen-Lopez and an orchestral score by Christophe Beck.

Queen Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Princess Anna (Kristen Bell) are the royal sisters of the pseudo-Scandinavian kingdom of Arendelle. On the day of Elsa's coronation as queen, her Dark Secret is revealed to the world: she uncontrollably conjures up snow and ice from thin air. As Elsa flees to the North Mountain to start a new life alone, she unknowingly unleashes a potentially Endless Winter on the kingdom. Now Princess Anna teams up with rugged mountain man Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), his pet reindeer Sven (who acts like a dog), and singing snowman Olaf (Josh Gad), to track down Elsa, hoping she will return the summer to Arendelle.

It is only the second time they tapped Hans Christian Andersen for a full-length feature (in addition to shorts used for Fantasia), following up The Little Mermaid.

A new Mickey Mouse short entitled Get a Horse played in front of the main feature.

The film was followed by a short feature, "Frozen Fever" in March 2015 (paired theatrically with Cinderella) and a feature-length sequel with Frozen II in November 2019, both made by the original creative team. It also spawned a a whole franchise of Extended Universe material, including a second short, the Christmas Special known as Olaf's Frozen Adventure in November 2017 (paired with Coco), as well as various books, comics, and video games. A third short, Once Upon a Snowman, serves as an Interquel for this film.

See the franchise's character pages for character tropes.

Definitely not to be confused with the drama/thriller hybrid, Frozen (2010).

---

"Let it trope, let it trope, can't hold them back any more":

Tropes # to E

• 1-Dimensional Thinking: Kristoff and Sven would have had a much easier time escaping the ship capsizing upon them on the frozen fjord just by swerving a bit to the right; it would have barely slowed them down from reaching Anna. Instead, they ride at full speed in a straight line, right along the ship's length, barely avoiding being crushed.
• 13 Is Unlucky:
  • Elsa and Anna are shut in for thirteen years — Anna was 5 while Elsa was 8 when shut up, ending when they were 18 and 21 respectively, and adding their younger ages adds up to 13 as well.
  • Hans' family consists of thirteen brothers (himself included), and he is the youngest 13th and unlucky one.
• Accidental Misnaming:
  • Olaf calls Kristoff "Sven" for a good part of the film due to a misunderstanding when first meeting (he learns Kristoff's real name when they meet the trolls):
    Anna: I'm Anna.
    Olaf: [gestures in the direction of Kristoff and Sven] And who's the funky-looking donkey over there?
    Anna: That's Sven.
    Olaf: And who's the reindeer?
    [Beat]
    Anna: ...Sven?
    Olaf: Oh they're bo—oh! Ok. Makes things easier for me.
  • Anna also calls him Christopher/Kristoffer at one point when the wolves knock him off the sled.
  • Played for Laughs when Kai announces the Duke of Weselton as "the Duke of Weaseltown". Then invoked at the end when he deliberately refers to Weselton as "Weaseltown" as he announces the placement of a trade embargo.
• Accidental Murder: Elsa accidentally strikes Anna's heart with a blast of her magic which leads to Anna freezing from inside out and eventually turning into solid ice. She gets better though.
• Action Insurance Gag: When Kristoff's sled is destroyed as it goes off the cliff and bursts into flames, his first reaction is, "No! But I just paid it off!"
• Act of True Love: The Trope Namer. The only thing that can save a frozen heart is an act of true love. It doesn't come from whom you'd expect, nor in the way you'd imagine. When a bolt of ice strikes Anna's heart, a wise troll informs the victim that "Only an Act of True Love can thaw a frozen heart." Everyone listening assumes that it's True Love's Kiss and rushes her to her fiance for one. Unfortunately, the prince to whom Anna is engaged, Hans, turns out to be a heartless sociopath who was just using her for a shot at Arendelle's throne, and leaves her to die. Anna, on the verge of turning to ice from the inside out, then gives up her chance to kiss Kristoff and save her own life, in order to block Hans' sword and save Elsa. It's through her love for Elsa that Anna's curse is broken, and she comes back to life.
• Actor Allusion: The Duke warns Hans that Anna might be "conspiring with the wicked sorceress," the "wicked sorceress" being Elsa. Idina Menzel previously played Elphaba in Wicked.
• Adaptation Title Change: Frozen is a very loose adaptation of The Snow Queen, but the story ended up being changed so much that the title was changed along with it. Some translations still call it The Snow Queen.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • In The Snow Queen, the Snow Queen is rather morally ambiguous. It's implied that she casts a magic spell on Kai to get him to stay with her, in turn leading to an implication that she is kidnapping him for unknown reasons. Elsa is most definitely not evil; rather, she is a victim of her own powers as she didn't learn to properly control them.
  • The trolls are good now too. In the original story, they were Always Chaotic Evil.
• Adaptational Protagonist: The film is loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. Unlike the tale, it has two female protagonists, the sisters Queen Elsa and Princess Anna. Anna is this movie's version of Gerda, The Heroine of the original story, while Elsa is a Composite Character of Gerda's male friend, Kai, and the Snow Queen —who is not so much of a true villain, just the one who takes Kai with her during a snowy night, prompting Gerda's quest for him.
• Adaptational Sympathy: Elsa in this film is this, compared to how the Snow Queen was depicted in various versions of the tales, including an earlier draft of this very film. Most versions told before this film usually depicted the Snow Queen as a morally villainous character, who sought nothing but power, or, in the case of the original tale, made her a morally ambiguous party with questionable intent. In this film, Elsa does do harmful things, but she usually does them entirely on accident, having no idea on how to control her powers, and is shown to be a good person who's afraid of hurting those she cares about, due to a childhood accident that harmed her sister.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: "Frozen Heart":
  This icy force both foul and fair
  Has a frozen heart worth mining.
• An Aesop:
  • What is true love and what does it mean to love someone?
  • Appearances can be deceiving, and nice is different than good.
  • Love is stronger than fear.
  • It's implied Elsa holding on to bitterness and resentment over being outcast is what causes the endless winter. Hence, "let it go".
  • Don't marry someone you've just met, as Elsa puts.
  • If you become so desperate for love, you may end up falling for the wrong person.
• Afraid of Their Own Strength: Elsa freaking out about her ice powers and obsessively trying to suppress them is what causes her running away (which is what jump starts the main conflict).
• Age-Progression Song: Each verse of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" takes place in a later year than the previous, showing Anna and Elsa growing up from the start of their separation to their parents' deaths.
• Airplane Arms: Anna does this pose at the end of "For the First Time in Forever", and Elsa does it in the middle of "Let It Go".
• Alertness Blink: Several times the trolls blink with tones associated.
• All Animals Are Dogs:
  • Sven acts like a dog, and is described as a Labrador in a reindeer's body at the website.
  • The wolves that chase Anna and Kristoff in the forest are heard barking. While this is something that real adult wolves are capable of (being a member of the canine species), they really don't do it all too much.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The Junior Novelization adds more details and information to the story. Additionally, the book A Sister More Like Me gives a few details about Elsa and Anna growing up, which was only briefly glimpsed at during "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?"
  • You'd only know that Kristoff's last name is Bjorgman if you read the supplementary material. Unless you have a working knowledge of Scandinavian and Saami culture, you might have to read the supplementary material to find that Kristoff is also a Saami.
  • The king and queen's names are Agnarr and Iduna.
  • Hans' horse is called Sitron.
• All There in the Script: The chief servants are never explicitly called Kai and Gerda onscreen.
• All Trolls Are Different: They have rock-shaped bodies, are very kind, and even use magic to help humans in need.
• Almost Kiss: An incredibly cruel example. Dying from a curse, Anna believes True Love's Kiss will save her, and tries to initiate one with Hans, who acts very concerned... only for him to pause and say "Oh Anna... if only there was someone out there who loved you."
• Altar the Speed:
  • Played with and averted. Hans lies to the Queen's cabinet that he and Anna spoke their vows just before she died of a frozen heart, in order to create a false claim to the throne and arrange to have Elsa executed for treason.
  • More humorously, in "Fixer Upper", the trolls think Anna is Kristoff's girlfriend, and hence try to wed them during their musical number. They get halfway through the vows before the accidental participants catch on to what they're doing and cut them off.
• Always Save the Girl: Played with. Multiple characters, most notably the Duke of Weselton, are willing to kill Elsa to stop the winter and save the kingdom, but Anna believes that saving both is possible and insists on trying.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Kristoff's whole family, the trolls. Over half of "Fixer Upper" is them asking Anna which of his flaws is turning her off from dating him, with each flaw lovingly detailed (even tinkling in the woods).
• Ambiguously Christian: Elsa's coronation is set in a chapel, complete with a choir, a priest in priestly uniform and "dragonstil"-style church. However, all signs of the cross are noticeably absent, all parts where one would be are instead replaced with a crocus (a flower in mid-bloom) adorning Elsa's scepter and orb, the priest and choir's clothes, decorating the church and can even be found of Arendelle's national flag. The film is confirmed to be set in the early nineteenth century, with Arendelle as a vaguely Norwegian kingdom, so Arendelle's chief religion is likely a Fantasy Counterpart Equivalent of the Church of Norway, an evangelical Lutheran denomination of Protestant Christianity.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: Rare inversion. The American trailer gives more emphasis on the comedy and slapstick side of the film. Non-American ones, such as the Japanese and French trailers, meanwhile, give more emphasis on the action and drama.
• Amusing Injuries:
  • Early in her journey, Anna falls down a hill and lands in a river which covers her entire lower body in near-freezing water. She comically stumbles as her summer dress freezes solid but she herself does not find it at all comical. There's a brief look of sheer panic on her face before she gets to Wandering Oaken's Trading Post and Sauna.
  • Olaf is constantly getting impaled on ice, falling apart, losing bits of himself, etc., with only a lighthearted joke to show any discomfort on the matter. Then again, he's not human and the regular rules of injury don't apply to him. Makes for a really Wham when he lights the fire at the end and starts to melt.
• Anachronism Stew: Generally speaking, aside from the fact that the overall aesthetic is Scandinavian, there's really very little true Norwegian stuff. Architecture, music, characters, practices and even folklore from Norway to Finland from the early middle ages to the early 20th century combine very tightly. Everyone speaks English with American accents (except for Oaken), and in the end, the film is not representative of any given place or time period, only that it's definitely before the automobile was invented and well before the construction of the first railroads.
• An Ice Person: Elsa is by now probably the most well known fictional character with this power set.
• Animal Motifs: The Duke of Weselton is constantly annoyed when people refer to his home as "Weaseltown". In folklore, weasels are usually seen as sneaky, evil animals; fitting, considering that the Duke is somewhat of a shady businessman. This is a Red Herring, to help obscure the true villain of the film.
• Animated Musical: Why do you think they cast Idina Menzel as Elsa? There are seven and a half songs^note "Reindeer(s) Are Better Than People" is short enough that the songwriters have said they only consider it "half" a song and even decided to continue it with a Part 2 in the sequel. — the ice harvesters' work song "Frozen Heart", Anna's "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", Anna's "For the First Time in Forever", Anna and Hans' "Love Is an Open Door", Elsa's "Let It Go", Kristoff's "Reindeers Are Better Than People," Olaf's "In Summer," Anna and Elsa's reprise of "For the First Time in Forever," and the trolls' "Fixer-Upper."
• Annoying Arrows: Played straight and averted when Hans shows up at Elsa's ice palace. His mens' crossbow bolts barely tickle Marshmallow and are like being injected with needles, but this is averted with Elsa, as she has to block and deflect the shots at her.
• Apologetic Attacker: Played for Laughs. After Oaken throws Kristoff out of the store for calling him a crook, he cheerfully apologizes "I'm sorry about this violence!"... to Anna, since she witnessed an act of violence in his store.
• Arc Symbol:
  • The crocus is a symbol of spring and rebirth and is part of the official crest of Arendelle and is seen adorning various props and official regalia.
    • It is found on the scepter and orb Elsa takes as part of her coronation ceremony, her gloves, and her coronation dress and cape, as Sigil Spam, but also contains thematic significance. Elsa throws away her gloves and cape and replaces her dress with an ice dress when she flees Arendelle, signaling her leaving behind both the responsibilities that tied her down and her home and much of her hope, but the symbol still appears embedded within the walls of the ice palace she constructs, indicating they are still a part of her.
    • It is also heavily associated with Anna, who wears it on most of her clothing, including her formal princess dress, her blue winter dress she finds at Oaken's, and her casual summer dress. They are also found on much of her bedroom furniture. This fits her Hope Bringer role, fitting for a character who brings back the sun. Crocuses are also an official symbol of Arendelle and denote her devotion to the kingdom.
  • Doors, both open and closed, represent the state of relationships:
    • After the accident when the princesses were children, the castle doors were ordered closed, and a closed door constantly divided Anna and Elsa. Anna is overjoyed that the doors to the castle will be open for Elsa's coronation, while Elsa wishes she could keep them closed to protect her secret. After all is well at the end, Elsa decrees that the doors will never be closed again, denoting that she no longer feels she must conceal her nature and can open up to people.
    • Elsa's "I Am Becoming" Song "Let It Go" has the lyric "Turn away and slam the door" and concludes with her doing just that. The theme of slamming doors shut is brought up again in reprise of "For the First Time in Forever", in which Anna begs Elsa to not shut her out from her life again.
    • The duet between Anna and Hans is called "Love Is an Open Door". They use the door motif in conversation, discussing their trouble connecting with their siblings. Anna laments that "Elsa and I were really close when we were little, but one day she shut me out, and never told me why," to which Hans responds that he'd "never shut you out." When they begin their duet, Anna sings her life has "been a series of doors in my face" until Hans, and shuts the door on the party (including her sister) she had been longing so desperately for, now believing love lies with Hans instead. Hans locks Anna in the drawing room once his duplicity is revealed.
  • Falling, and catching people:
    • In the beginning of the film, the sisters lovingly play together in the snow, and Elsa creates snowbanks that catch Anna as she jumps around, but then slips and falls, resulting in her missing and in Anna also falling without anyone catching her. This accident leads to the separation of the two girls, Elsa growing up repressed and Anna, who is Locked Out of the Loop, growing up feeling unloved.
    • Anna turns to inanimate objects to catch her in "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" and "For the First Time in Forever," including an empty suit of armor, because no one else is around.
    • Anna's first encounter with Hans knocks her into a boat, and he uses his horse to stabilize it before she falls into the water. She falls twice more due to the movement of the boat during the meeting, literally into his arms, signifying that someone who will offer her support has arrived and foreshadowing that although he appears helpful and caring, Hans is really more trouble, actually exacerbating Anna's problems.
    • When her conversation with Elsa at the coronation ball ends with Elsa turning away again, Anna walks away dejected and is nearly bumped to the floor by a dancer, and Hans swoops in and catches her.
    • When Elsa flees, Anna slips on some of the ice created and falls to the ground.
    • Kristoff catches Anna when she comes down from the cliff she was climbing, signifying that they're growing closer. Anna even compares it to a trust exercise.
    • When Elsa is captured, she stumbles and falls.
    • After "Fixer Upper", Anna collapses as her frozen heart worsens, and Kristoff catches her.
    • Anna literally falls into Hans's arms when she goes to him for a curse-breaking True Love's Kiss, but he lets her fall off the couch when he reveals he was Evil All Along and decides to just let her die, signaling he will no longer offer her support because he no longer has anything to gain from her.
    • Elsa falls to the ground when Hans tells her Anna, her only supporter, is dead. She then collapses again onto Anna's frozen body after Anna makes her Heroic Sacrifice to save Elsa.
    • Anna slips on ice again toward the climax, but Elsa helps hold her up and Olaf, the physical embodiment of the love between the two sisters, catches and supports her.
  • Gloves are associated with hiding one's true self. The king gives Elsa a pair as she begins to conceal her powers, and she temporarily removes them for her coronation ceremony, for which she also opens up the gates and lets herself be somewhat vulnerable for the day. When she and Anna fight, one comes off and her powers come out, and she throws the other one away in "Let It Go", when she's decided to embrace her magic. Hans also wears gloves throughout the film, only removing them for The Reveal scene, which is the only time he shows his true self. He puts them back on when he declares he will be "the hero" of the story and puts his mask back on to meet with the dignitaries.
  • Hands in general. Hans offers his gloved hands to Anna repeatedly, pretending to open up to her while really concealing himself, and Elsa attempts to both cover hers and keep them away from people, not touching anyone or, in contrast to Hans, even giving the appearance of connecting with people. She looks at them in horror when she's terrified by her power, and in amazement when she realizes she can create life, and often uses them to make gestures as she casts magic, although her Power Incontinence establishes that they're unnecessary for it to work.
  • Elsa's signature snowflake symbolizes the beauty and danger of Elsa's power. They Sigil Spam her dress and her ice castle. They also appear as pock-like marks on Anna's skin after she is cursed with a frozen heart.
  • Boats are associated with hope. The girls lose their parents when their ship is overtaken by a storm, Anna looks longingly at the ships coming into the harbor during the excitement of "For the First Time in Forever" and is knocked into an unsteady boat when she meets Hans, their Falling-in-Love Montage includes a shot of their shadows on the sail of a boat as the two dance in a lighthouse, a ship nearly falls onto Kristoff and Sven as they race to rescue Anna, and when Elsa thaws the Endless Winter and the fjord melts, they are all find themselves standing on the deck of one.
  • Light is also associated with hope. The girls' joyful play in the beginning of the movie is spurred by the presence of Northern Lights, but after the accident the lights are no longer visible in the sky. The lighting grows progressively darker during "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" and completely fades at the end, after the parents' ship sinks at night. The light returns after a Time Skip for Coronation Day, when Anna sings "there'll be light" again "for the first time in forever." Anna and Hans dance on a lighthouse during their Falling-in-Love Montage, Elsa concludes "Let It Go" and rediscovering the beauty in her powers at the break of dawn, wolves attack Anna and Kristoff at night and challenge their resolve, and they meet Olaf ^note  described by scriptwriter/co-director Jennifer Lee as "the moment for Anna of hope again" in the daytime. Elsa reveals she doesn't know how to thaw the Endless Winter and accidentally freezes Anna's heart at sundown; the trolls give hope for a cure at dawn. Hans extinguishes all light sources at The Reveal of his Evil Plan to kill the sisters and take over the kingdom, and sentences Elsa to death at night with one of the lights in the chandelier out. Elsa then breaks out of her cell and Kristoff makes the choice to return in day. When Olaf finds Anna, he relights the fire as he brings back hope of her surviving the curse, and the film's last shot is of light glinting off a snowflake at the top of the Arendellian castle.
• Arc Words:
  • "Conceal, don't feel", and its variations. While this is Elsa's mantra for suppressing her powers, it also reflects her need to both emotionally and physically distance herself from others in general.
  • "Only an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart."
  • "Open up/Close the gates."
  • "Do you want to build a snowman?"
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • Anna firing off a string of these during the coronation party is what gets Elsa to snap:
    Anna: What did I ever do to you?!
    Elsa: [walking away] Enough, Anna!
    Anna: No! Why, why do you shut me out?! W-why do you shut the world out?! What are you so afraid of?!!
    Elsa: I said, ENOUGH!!! [creates imposing ice spikes around her at that word — cue huge Oh, Crap!/My God, What Have I Done? reaction and fleeing the scene]
  • When Elsa is is fighting the guards, we get the Armor-Piercing Statement variant:
    Hans: Queen Elsa! Don't be the monster they fear you are!
• Armor-Piercing Response: Elsa's refusal to bless her engagement to Hans leads to this exchange:
  Elsa: Anna, what do you know about true love?
  Anna: More than you! All you know is how to shut people out!
  [Elsa is visibly shocked]
• Art Imitates Art: During "For the First Time in Forever", the paintings hung on the wall of the castle are pastiches of Grand Masters works. One can recognize the style of Bruegel, Watteau, Goya and a bowdlerised version of the rather risqué artwork Les Hasards heureux de l'escarpolette by Fragonard.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Hans's horse Sitron is a Norwegian fjord horse, as is every other horse seen. However, real-life fjord horses◊ are actually smaller and chubbier than they all appear to be, meaning the visual designers likely "dignified" the breed a little to make them more befitting of royalty.
  • A male reindeer that is Sven's adult age should have antlers nearly twice the size seen. Here, they probably made them smaller so he doesn't come off as intimidating.
  • The wolves in the movie have blue eyes (wolves never have blue eyes) and attack humans (wolves generally avoid humans).
• Artistic License – History: The main setting of the film is inspired by Norway in the 1840s.
  • Although sailing vessels were in wide use until at least the mid-nineteenth century, the type of sailing vessels shown look more at home a century or so earlier.
  • Anna rides a pedal-driven tandem bike, which wasn't invented until 1870.
  • The extensive use of purple in 1840s Arendelle would imply that the kingdom is far wealthier considering the price of Tyrian purple at the time; such was the astronomical price of purple during those days that it never saw use in national flags and even members of royalty would sometimes balk at using something that's far more valuable than gold. Fast forward over a decade later and we got Mauveine, the first synthetic purple dye which pretty much made the hue more accessible than sacrificing a thousand or so snails to get a gram's worth of purple.
• Artistic License – Law: Two particularly prominent ones regarding royalty that would have derailed the film's plot.
  • A royal's spouse doesn't automatically inherit the throne. The next person who is set to inherit the throne would acquire it, regardless of marriage. Any cousins of Elsa or Anna that happen to exist would likely inherit the throne from Elsa, definitely not Hans. For a real-life reference, Elizabeth II of England's husband was never the heir to her throne.
  • When Arendelle supposedly looks to Hans for guidance in the climax of the film, he charges Elsa with treason. Except that high queens and kings in 1840s weren't servants of the state like the modern US, they were the state, and thus can't be charged with treason (with a few exceptions such as Charles I). She could, however, have been charged with witchcraft.
• Artistic License – Music: Kristoff's lute has four strings, but only three tuning pegs.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • In the beginning of "Frozen Heart", we see ice harvesters plunge their saws into the water as they cut blocks of ice from an icy lake high in the mountains. The ice harvesters are clearly standing on the ice they are cutting. Ice that is thick enough to support the weight of a person, let alone the thickness of the blocks they cut, would require a hole to be drilled to mark a spot for the saw to actually start cutting. Trying to harvest ice this thick by simply plunging a saw straight into it like shown in the movie should actually cause the saw to bend.
  • A blink-and-you'll-miss-it point in "Let It Go" when Elsa's braid has to go through her arm on the far side of her body to end up where it does. The animators couldn't do it realistically and still keep the flow of Elsa's movements, so they used Acceptable Breaks from Reality.
  • Both of Kristoff's sleds (his original and the one Anna gets him at the end on Elsa's behalf) are too large and heavy for a single reindeer to realistically pull.
  • During "For the First Time In Forever (Reprise)", when Anna is following Elsa through the ice castle, there's a point where she passes between two pillars. The pillars reflect her face from the front, when they should be reflecting the sides of her face.
  • When Hans comes upon Elsa in the ice palace, realistically there's no way he could bolt across the room in time to deflect the beardless Weselton guard's shot when the guard raises his crossbow to aim at Elsa.
  • Doesn't matter how much powder there was at the base of the cliff. In real life, if you were to jump off a 200+ foot cliff like Anna and Kristoff do to escape Marshmallow, the landing wouldn't be "like landing on a pillow". You'd probably be killed by the impact. It's not 100% out of the realm of possibility that someone could survive that (after all, a few people have survived falling out of an airplane), but it's pretty close. And two people both surviving completely uninjured is even more implausible than that.
• Audible Sharpness: It becomes important in the climax, as Anna hears the shing sound of a sword being drawn from its sheath, and that alerts her that Hans is trying to kill Elsa.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: Elsa receiving hers is a major part of the first act. The Awesome Moment part is dampened however, when it's clear she's absolutely terrified of accidentally revealing her powers to the crowd. Also notable is that Elsa becomes only the second Disney Princess to ascend the throne and become a Queen during her film as opposed to having it implied to happen like in most prior cases, the first being Kida.
• Badass Boast: Some of Elsa's lines in the third verse of her "I Am Becoming" Song "Let It Go":
  Elsa: I am one with the wind and sky
  [...]
  Elsa: I'll rise like the break of dawn^note This line is actually the title of the Italian version of the song: "All'alba sorgero", "I'll rise at dawn".
• Bait-and-Switch: The whole film runs on this trope. The trailers making it out to be more of a comedy like Tangled (which itself wasn't quite as comedic as its trailers implied) helps this along. Just in case you're wondering: The love interests, the villain and the act of true love all lead you to believe one thing and then switch it around. You at first think that Hans is the Love Interest but it's actually Kristoff. You at first think that the Duke of Weselton is the villain but it's actually Hans. You at first think that Kristoff is the one who will use true love to save Anna but she saves herself by pulling a Heroic Sacrifice for Elsa (the real act of true love - familial rather than romantic, and from the princess herself actively showing how much she cares about someone, instead of someone kissing her).
• Bait-and-Switch Comparison: Olaf does an accidental version with Kristoff and his reindeer, Sven.
  Anna: I'm Anna.
  Olaf: [gestures in the direction of Kristoff and Sven] And who's the funky-looking donkey over there?
  Anna: That's Sven.
  Olaf: And who's the reindeer?
  [Beat]
  Anna: ...Sven?
  Olaf: Oh they're bo—oh! Ok. Makes things easier for me.
• Banister Slide: Anna gets a nice long one on a spiral staircase toward the beginning of "For the First Time in Forever".
• Barehanded Blade Block: Just before she turns to ice, Anna holds up her bare hand to stop Hans' attack on Elsa, and her icy hand breaks his steel sword! Although if you look closely, the sword has become cold enough to form a visible layer of frost; steel that changes temperature that quickly is extremely brittle.
• Beast and Beauty: Both are women, as well as sisters instead of lovers, but other than that, Elsa and Anna suit the dichotomy well. Elsa is the reclusive "witch" with potentially destructive power which she has trouble controlling, and Anna is the only one who can help her come out of her shell and gain control of her powers simply through loving her. The art book indicates that they thought about doing this visually — a few rough sketches from early in development suggested that the original plan was for Elsa to become more unkempt and angry-looking as she grew older, as if she'd given up on personal appearances.
• Beat: During the "Fixer Upper" song...
  Kristoff: Enough! She is engaged to someone else, okay!
  [beat]
  Troll: So she's a bit of a fixer-upper...
• Berserk Button:
  • Do not ask Elsa Armor-Piercing Questions about fear when fear is her worst enemy.
  • Do not call Oaken a crook. Kristoff learns this the hard way, finds out how massively bulky Oaken is, and seconds later, Oaken is throwing him out into the cold. What's funny is that he does it without losing his cheery persona that he puts on for other customers.
  • Do not taunt or throw snowballs or arrows at Marshmallow. He'll kill you.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Kristoff's and Sven's relationship is lampshaded by the trolls as being "outside of nature's laws."
• Betrayal by Inaction: Exaggerated Trope. Hans attempts this, depriving Anna of a supposedly life-saving True Love's Kiss. Instead, he leaves her to freeze to death after a Break Them by Talking speech in which he taunts her for trusting him and trying to help the seemingly-evil Elsa, as well as gloats about his plan to murder her beloved sister. He also locks her in the room and extinguishes all sources of heat in order to prevent any chance of her being cured.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: The greedy and prejudicial Duke of Weselton is one of the least physically attractive characters. The trope is subverted when the Duke turns out to be a Red Herring (though still an unpleasant antagonist), and the true villain is actually the attractive Prince Hans.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Oaken. He looks quite small and nonthreatening when sitting behind his counter with his overly-cheery voice. Turns out he towers over Kristoff, and has no problem chucking him outside when Kristoff insults him. He does it without even losing his cheerful demeanor when he returns to his desk and apologizes to Anna, offering to add a jar of pickled lutefisk to her purchases for free as compensation for the act of violence she had to witness in his store.
  • Hans. His niceness is either a façade (to Anna) or Pragmatic Villainy (to the commoners of Arendelle).
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Anna, at the climax, for Elsa. Coupled with Heroic Sacrifice and Disney Death to boot.
  • Olaf finds his way to Anna after Hans's betrayal, and he then tells her exactly what she needs to hear, despite melting himself in the process. It's not as dramatic as this trope usually plays out, but the context of the moment makes it clear.
  • Kristoff and Sven mount a daring charge into the maelstrom surrounding Arendelle to rescue Anna. After nearly being crushed by ships collapsing into the frozen fjord and almost losing Sven in the icy waters, Kristoff reaches Anna... just in time to watch her die. Thankfully, she gets better. In the Junior Novelization, Kristoff punches out Hans after his sword breaks on the frozen Anna.
• The Big Damn Kiss: Par for the course for a princess-centric Disney animated film. Except when it's both subverted and defied, twice. First, Anna goes to Hans for a life-saving True Love's Kiss, and he leans in... only to sneer "If only there was someone out there who loved you." Afterwards, Olaf suggests Kristoff is actually her True Love, and she and Kristoff dramatically make their way towards each other in the whiteout blizzard of the climax, only for Anna to notice that Hans has successfully pushed Elsa over the Despair Event Horizon. She turns away from Kristoff and instead uses the last of her strength to throw herself in front of her sister and take the blow from Hans's sword. When a kiss finally does happen, it's downplayed and not the focus of the scene, which instead places more emphasis on the reunited sisters enjoying time together, with Elsa feeling free to use her powers, to the acceptance and even delight of everyone around her.
• Big "NO!": Anna shouts this when she rushes to protect Elsa from Hans.
• Big "SHUT UP!": After Elsa refuses to bless Hans and Anna's engagement, Anna and Elsa get into an argument that ends with Elsa telling Anna to leave if she is unhappy. Anna begins to ask Elsa Armor Piercing Questions that lead to Elsa snapping:
  Elsa: I said ENOUGH!!
• Big Sister Instinct:
  • Elsa's main reason for shutting out Anna is because she wants to protect her.
  • Little sister instinct when Anna refuses to see Elsa as a monster and goes out to find her. Then later she steps in front of Hans's sword when he is about to kill Elsa.
• Bilingual Bonus: During Elsa's coronation as Elsa holds the orb and scepter, the Bishop says, in Old Norse: "Sem hón heldr inum helgum eignum ok krýnd í þessum helga stað ek té fram fyrir yðr...". In English, this means: "As she holds the holy properties, and is crowned in this holy place, I present to you...Queen Elsa of Arendelle."
• Big Word Shout: Elsa screams out, "I can't!!!" at the very end of the Dark Reprise of "For the First Time in Forever", which simultaneously releases a huge blast of snow which strikes Anna, freezing her heart.
• Black Comedy: Because Olaf is a snowman, the script can get away with doing some pretty "adult" things to him, such as playing grab-ass, impalement, telling people to literally watch out for his butt, and keep it PG. On top of this, the entirety of "In Summer": not only is it a song about a snowman in the middle of summer, but every single thing Olaf sings about wanting to do in summer is something that would make him melt even faster.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands: With her powers, Elsa is able to blast a mook's crossbow out of his hands when he tries to shoot her at her castle.
• Blessed with Suck: This is how Elsa views her ice and snow powers; while there's nothing evil about the powers themselves (but harmful if used in certain ways), her inability to control them means she grew up alone, neglected her beloved little sister, and lives in fear of losing control entirely, which depending on who she is with and how exactly she loses control, could result in her seriously harming innocent people or being attacked herself.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: The three female speaking human characters consist of the blonde Elsa, the brunette Queen Iduna, and the redheaded Anna.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Upon learning that Anna's frozen heart will kill her, Hans removes all sources of heat from the room and locks her in, but he doesn't trouble himself to wait around to make sure of her death.
• Bookends:
  • The first time we see Elsa and Anna, they are playing in an indoor winter landscape created by Elsa, where they build a snowman named Olaf, and the three of them skate together on the ice. In the last scene, Elsa converts the courtyard outside the castle into a skating rink, and she, Anna and Olaf skate together again.
  • The song "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" begins and ends with that line.
  • Elsa accidentally outs her powers to the general public by freezing the ornamental fountains and most of the surrounding courtyard solid. Much later on when she returns, she celebrates her powers by turning the courtyard into a public ice-rink, this time using the frozen fountains as decorations.
  • In the beginning, the trolls show Elsa a vision of her creating a beautiful snowflake with her powers. When she creates the winter wonderland and skating rink at the end, she repeats those motions, causing it to snow upon the rink.
  • Young Elsa freezes the ground in the ballroom with a giant snowflake forming at her feet. It's the same way she starts forming her ice castle in "Let It Go" and the skating rink at the end.
  • Anna's first encounter with Hans results in her causing him to fall into the fjord, entirely by accident. Their last encounter ends with her very deliberately punching him into the fjord.
  • The story begins and ends with characters standing on a form of ice. The ice workers on the frozen lake at the start and the 5 main characters on a ice rink at the end.
• Boom, Headshot!: A downplayed, PG-rated example, where Elsa accidentally shoots ice in Anna's head in an attempt to keep Anna from falling, incapacitating her. Grandpabbie does tell their parents that Anna was lucky it wasn't in the heart, which would prove fatal later in the film.
• Born of Magic: Olaf and Marshmallow spontaneously come alive after being formed by Elsa's magic.
• Braving the Blizzard: After Elsa traps Arendelle in a severe winter and flees, her sister Anna chases after her, braving the storm and recruiting an ice trader named Kristoff to help her get there.
• Break His Heart to Save Him: Elsa distances herself from Anna to keep her sister safe from her powers, but until after the coronation ball, Anna doesn't understand why her beloved sister had turned away from her.
• Breaking the Bonds: Near the end, Hans shackles Elsa in the dungeon. Too bad for him, extremely low temperatures make iron brittle. In a matter of minutes, Elsa breaks the shackles and runs off again.
• Break the Cutie: Happens to Elsa and Anna a lot, starting with the accident as children, moving through the death of their parents, and then the Endless Winter, Anna getting cursed to freeze from the inside out, as well as Hans's evil taunts to Anna that he never loved her (and claims that there is no one who does) and is planning to let her die, followed by then guilting Elsa about Anna's assumed death.
• Brick Joke:
  • During "Let It Go", Elsa removes her crown and throws it out of sight somewhere in the ice castle. We never see her pick it up again. Immediately after the credits, Marshmallow finds it and puts it on, seeming quite happy about it.
  • The ice staircase Elsa creates during the same number. When Anna and Kristoff struggle to hike up the mountain to Elsa's palace, Olaf suggests they just take the staircase he noticed.
  • Kristoff claims that all men pick their noses to Anna. It gets mentioned in the credits:
  The views and opinions expressed by Kristoff in the film that all men eat their own boogers are solely his own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of The Walt Disney Company or the filmmakers. Neither The Walt Disney Company nor the filmmakers make any representation of the accuracy of any such views and opinions.
• Bridal Carry:
  • Kristoff carries Anna in his arms as he brings her back to the castle. This can also be called the "princess carry", which is fitting.
  • Hans also briefly carries Anna like this after she is brought to him by two servants.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: When Kristoff reunites with the Trolls, three approach them with their good news. One grew a mushroom, another discovered a crystal, and the third reveals he passed a kidney stone.

• Bright Castle:
  • Arendelle's royal palace has a fortified wall around it, but is otherwise in the style of a fairy tale castle.
  • Elsa's ice palace is even more in this style.
• Bullying a Dragon: Let's try to kill the woman who you've seen shoot ice from her hands with a thought, and then buried Arendelle in a near apocalyptic mid-summer snowstorm, both without even meaning to. It's no wonder that when Elsa finally tries to kill the Duke's men, they are only saved at the last second because Hans reminds her she isn't a cold monster. They don't even know that the Endless Winter was an accident — they just have Anna's word that it was, and the Duke makes it clear he doesn't really believe it, meaning they attacked her given the possibility that she was The Unfettered.
• Burn the Witch!: Heavily played with. When their parents see the girls in an ice-covered room, they're upset — because Anna's seriously injured, not because magic was involved. When they take the girls to trolls for healing, though, the trolls warn of the possibility of mobs attacking Elsa and warn she must learn control. Elsa and her parents then do all they can to keep her magic hidden. There's then a different subversion when people find out and the general response includes some Fantastic Racism and accusations of "monster," but no one's calling for a pyre yet and most people show more concern about the effects of her magic, rather than that it was magic at all, as an Endless Winter sets in and Elsa flees without explanation. Anna attempts to defy the trope and defend Elsa, but when the blizzard persists, the Duke sends men to kill her. The trope then becomes triple subverted when Hans redirects their arrow, saving her.^note A Freeze-Frame Bonus, more noticeable with knowledge of Hans's Evil All Along status, adds another twist by showing Hans looking at the chandelier before redirecting the Mook's arrow toward it so it would fall on her. He then exploits the trope to have Elsa sentenced to death, not for magic so much as for appearing to have used it to murder her sister and curse the country. The trope gets twisted yet again when the execution fails because Anna takes the blow for her sister.
• Busby Berkeley Number: "In Summer" plays this trope up, with Olaf dancing with cartoon seagulls.
• Cain and Abel: Inverted when Anna saves her sister Elsa from being killed by Hans. Made particularly interesting in that this act involves Anna forgoing a cure for, and thus being killed by, a deadly curse from her sister - a curse that had only been placed accidentally.
• Casting Gag: Elsa's voice actress, Idina Menzel, originated "Defying Gravity," another "I Am Becoming" Song of a misfit witch finding herself like in "Let It Go," in Wicked.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: A minor variation. Elsa never realized just what she triggered when she ran off to the North Mountain and believes she's doing everyone a favor. Then Anna goes and proves her wrong during "For the First Time in Forever (Reprise)".
• The Cameo: Rapunzel and Eugene appear for just a moment among the guests arriving for Elsa's coronation.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: The wolf attack scene. First as Anna and Kristoff are being chased by the wolves, they momentarily banter about Anna's Fourth-Date Marriage. Then when Kristoff is pulled off the sled by a wolf, Anna cries out "Christopher!" and his first response as he's dragged through the snow is to correct her. After Anna lights a bedroll on fire and uses it to take out the wolves biting on Kristoff, he's more upset that she almost set him on fire.
• Changing Chorus:
  • The chorus to "The First Time in Forever" changes every time, but it still counts as a chorus because it has the song title several times in each one.
  • In "Let it Go", the chorus changes every time, with the only consistent lines being "Let it go! Let it go!" and "Let the storm rage on".
• Character Tics: The film uses these to give the characters further personality. See the Characters pages for specific details.
• Chekhov's Gun: Hans mentions his twelve older brothers as a counterpoint to Anna's problematic relationship with Elsa. During his Motive Rant he points out that all those older brothers put him so far down the line of succession, he needs to marry into another kingdom's throne to fullfill his ambitions.
• Church of Saint Genericus: The bishop at Elsa's coronation wears Arendelle's crocus on his mitre instead of a cross. Similarly, the orb used in the coronation is not topped with a cross but a crocus flower. So at most we can surmise this is some form of Christianity, but don't know anything more specific. His vestment looks very Catholic, though Arendelle would most likely be Lutheran and Scandinavian Lutheran Bishops usually dress very differently from their Catholic and Anglican counterparts.
• Circle of Standing Stones: The magical trolls live in such an area (when they aren't being the standing stones themselves).
• Closed Door Rapport: "Do You Wanna Build a Snowman?" is basically this in song form.
  Anna: Do you wanna build a snowman?
  It doesn't have to be a snowman!
  Elsa: Go away, Anna.
  Anna: Okay, bye...
• Clothing Reflects Personality: At the start of the film, Anna and Elsa wear light-colored clothes, which symbolizes their relationship with each other going well. After Elsa is separated from Anna and they grow apart (especially during the "Do You Want to Build a Snowman" sequence), their clothes become progressively darker, with Elsa regaining lighter clothes after fleeing the kingdom once the eternal winter is unleashed. Then at the end, both the sisters' clothes are light again representing they have finally reunited. See the Characters pages for more details.
• Colour Motif: See the Characters pages for more details.
  • Anna's outfits nearly all contain some form of green (even her mostly blue and violet winter outfit has green stems on the rosemaling), tying her to spring.
  • Elsa, by contrast, has outfits that are some shade of blue, tying her to winter. Even her coronation dress is teal, with cyan gloves.
  • Hans is associated with white, which only drives home his status as a subversion of the Disney Nice Guy archetype.
  • Kristoff wears mostly brown, symbolizing his down-to-earth nature and his humble origins.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • Anna misinterprets Kristoff's repeated question "You got engaged to a man you just met that day?" as inattention rather than incredulity, from the way she replies, "Yes! Pay attention!"
  • When Kristoff asks Anna if her parents ever warned her against strangers (in relation to the above mentioned engagement), this only causes her to look at Kristoff, her hired guide, suspiciously and scoot farther away on the seat from him.
  • After her heart is frozen, he takes her to see his family in hopes they can heal it. They promptly try matchmake the two before either can explain the actual reason for their visit, and in the process, list all of the reasons they're concerned Anna might not be interested in him. Kristoff tries to bring up the fact that Anna is dying, pleading "We've got a real, actual problem here." Bulda responds "I'll say," and continues to list his flaws and traits that they think Anna might find unattractive.
• Coming of Age Story: A large part of the story is Elsa and Anna both growing up out of their cloistered childhood. In particular, the plot is kicked off by Elsa quite literally coming of age and having to take on adult responsibilities.
• Company Cross References': Rapunzel and Eugene are seen in the crowd entering the castle when the gates are opened.
• Composite Character: Elsa is not in the fairy tale, but is a merging of the eponymous Snow Queen and Kai, the boy whose heart freezes with all the negativity he sees and is thawed by sisterly love.
• Consolation Backfire: After Elsa reveals she doesn't know how to thaw the winter, either, Anna worries about how to save the kingdom. Then her hair starts turning white and she becomes colder and colder, and is told it's because her sister froze her heart, which is slowly turning her to ice. But at least she can be brought back to the castle, to her fiancé and True Love Hans, who will break the curse with his kiss, right? Wrong. He reveals his true colors, mocks her for falling for him, and leaves her to die.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • The fact that Kristoff, who has never seen Anna since witnessing Pabbie use his magic on her, would happen to cross paths with Anna 13 years later at Oaken's.
  • That Oaken's "winter department" happens to have the exact items that both Anna and Kristoff are looking for. In Anna's size. And nothing else.
  • Anna's curse turns her into solid ice at the exact second where she walks into the path of Hans's sword.
• Convection, Schmonvection:
  • In their childhood, Anna and Elsa play in the snow dressed in their nightgowns and seem perfectly comfortable. Elsa is immune to cold but Anna isn't.
  • We see it where extreme cold should be incredibly harmful. Twice in the film characters fall into water (Anna, then Sven) and are perfectly safe once they climb out despite that it's freezing cold out. Getting wet in freezing temperatures is bad, and getting out of the water does not remove the danger. Anna's dress freezes but it is Played for Laughs, and since she immediately goes into Wandering Oaken's Trading Post and Sauna moments later, it probably wouldn't be that serious. Sven, on the other hand, even if he is a reindeer, would potentially have been in trouble after he falls through ice into freezing water, even though he climbs out, had Elsa not ended the winter so soon after.
  • When the heroes go to visit Kristoff's troll family, Olaf does not melt, or even thaw a little, despite walking between what appear to be geysers of steam, and this is well before he gets his personal flurry. The steam suggests that the area where the trolls live has geothermal features, which are the reason why it stays clear of snow while the rest of Arendelle is snowed in.
  • At the end of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" Elsa is sitting against the door, and has flash-frozen it and the surrounding walls to the point where snow is raining from the ceiling. Anna's sitting against the same door on the other side, but has no reaction to how the door would feel.
• Cool Crown: Elsa gets a gold tiara for her coronation, but tosses it away. Marshmallow finds it in The Stinger, and takes it for himself.
• Cope by Creating: After Elsa escapes Arendelle, she creates a beautiful ice palace both to test her Elemental Powers and to release her pent-up emotions.
• Costume Porn:
  • As in Tangled, all of the characters' costumes, especially the royals', are detailed to the stitch.
  • In the various music videos for "Let It Go" (English and other languages), the singers usually are seen wearing fancy outfits. In the Mandarin version the singer is wearing a dress with a train of white feathers.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Anna points out "Of course, none of this would have happened if she had just told me her secret. She's a stinker!" in response to Elsa's powers.
• Counterpoint Duet: "For the First Time in Forever" for Elsa and Anna, towards the end of it. The former is dreading the day and the latter is ecstatic. They later have a second one in the Triumphant Reprise/Dark Reprise where the lyrics of the two melodies in the reprise diverge even further into dark and light emotions than in the original, to the point where the major and minor chords struggle for dominance.
• Crash-Into Hello: Anna meets Hans by bumping into his horse. They quickly become engaged.
• Creator Cameo: Anna and Elsa's mother, Iduna, is voiced by Jennifer Lee, the co-director of Frozen.
• Credits Gag: Before the information pertaining to Disney holding the rights to the film appears in the end credits, we get this legal disclaimer:
  The views and opinions expressed by Kristoff in the film that all men eat their own boogers are solely his own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of The Walt Disney Company or the filmmakers. Neither The Walt Disney Company nor the filmmakers make any representation of the accuracy of any such views and opinions.
• Crowd Song:
  • The opening song "Frozen Heart" is sung by ice harvesters as they work.
  • The trolls' song "Fixer Upper" is sung by every single troll, even the children.
• Cry into Chest: Elsa finally breaks down and does this to Anna's frozen body after she sacrifices herself for Elsa.
• Cue the Sun: At the very end of "Let It Go", which both represents and celebrates the awakening of the "new" Elsa, the sun rises, and this coincides with her walking towards it after singing "Here I stand, in the light of day."
• Cup Holders: According to Anna, Kristoff's new sled has one.
• Curse Escape Clause: "Only an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart." The characters assume this means True Love's Kiss, but what breaks the curse is Anna sacrificing herself for her sister; an act of familial love on Anna's part.
• Cut the Safety Rope: Anna cuts the rope so she and Kristoff could escape Marshmallow. They fall 200 feet but land in soft snow.
• Dagwood Sandwich: During "In Summer", Anna and Kristoff are confused as to why exactly they appear in Olaf's dream sequence holding these when Olaf imagines what summer will be like.
• Dance Party Ending: Skate party ending, but the idea's the same; happy fun at the end.
  Olaf: And glide, and pivot, and glide, and pivot...
• Dangerous Interrogative: When Kristoff refers to Oaken as a "crook", Oaken stands up (revealing himself to be much taller than Kristoff) and asks, "Vhat did you...call me?" Cue him tossing Kristoff out of his store.
• Darker and Edgier: A contender for this among Disney films, despite having permanent deaths of only two minor characters (the King and Queen), and the villains punished justly without death. The film features childhood trauma, parents lost at sea, friendly noblemen who turn out to be murderous, a comic relief character that spends the movie dreaming about the thing that will kill him, and the entire kingdom nearly dying in a massive snowstorm near the end.
• Darkest Hour: Elsa has accidentally frozen Anna's heart and only an act of true love can save her. Kristoff takes her back to the castle to be kissed by Prince Hans, who turns out to have been playing Anna for a sucker so he can kill Elsa, who had been captured and imprisoned, and take over Arendelle, leaving Anna to freeze to death.
• Dark Reprise: Although "For the First Time in Forever (reprise)" starts off as a Triumphant Reprise, it quickly descends to become a Dark Reprise, resulting in Elsa freezing Anna's heart. Also, listen to the ominous music that follows right after and the fact that you hear the percussion from the ice harvesters' song "Frozen Heart", from the line "beware the frozen heart".
• The Day the Music Lied: When Anna asks Hans to kiss her, he leans in and both pucker as the romantic music swells...but then suddenly the music stops, Hans pulls away and gives a Slasher Smile, and delivers his Wham Line below.
• Decon-Recon Switch: Several. To wit:
  • True Love saving the day. Rather than Love at First Sight and Fourth-Date Marriage being the cure for isolation and abuse, this movie treats it as a symptom, for both Anna and Hans. After years of isolation and neglect (as Elsa was acting aloof in order to keep her powers controlled and secret), Anna Desperately Craves Affection and Thinks Like a Romance Novel and so confuses companionability for True Love, not having much reference for an actual healthy relationship. While she sincerely believes the two of them are meant to be, Hans himself is a subversion of the Prince Charming trope and a deconstruction of the Prince Charmless trope, his own neglect as the youngest of Massively Numbered Siblings turning him ruthless, and is exploiting Anna's vulnerability to get closer to a throne. While the realistic shock expressed by other characters in response to the sudden engagement and Hans' revelation as a Sociopath seem to deconstruct the tropes, the Power of Love is still what saves Anna, but through an Act of True Love rather than a Grand Romantic Gesture such as True Love's Kiss. She comes to a more sophisticated understanding of what love looks like and finds a healthier romantic relationship with a man who has proven himself true.
  • Anna veers between being an Action Girl and Damsel in Distress, but never in a stereotypical manner. When she's taken captive, she's on her deathbed, her heart and body slowly freezing solid, so one can forgive any "helpless" vibes, and she ends up breaking the curse herself. She's also a a princess who journeys to save her sister and their kingdom and always puts up a fight against threats, but as a Sheltered Aristocrat who spent most of her life locked up, and without any magic or training, it's a struggle with mixed results, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. In the end, she does succumb to the curse, but revives without being rescued by a Knight in Shining Armor or outdoing any villains in combat, but by curing the curse herself through her Heroic Sacrifice, because The Power of Love within her is what mattered, rather than whether other people wanted to rescue her ''or'' her Action Girl qualities.
  • "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", "For the First Time in Forever", and "Let It Go" are each an unusual "I Want" Song:
    • Anna has two I Want Songs about longing for love. "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" focuses on how much she misses her big sister and is becoming increasingly lonely as the two are isolated. It then transitions into "For the First Time in Forever", in which Anna, having come to believe her sister has no desire to mend their relationship, spends the first half of the song excited over the chance to connect with someone when the castle gates open. The second part brings another transition: after singing about desire for a friend, Anna begins singing about possibly finding romantic True Love. Immediately afterward, she runs into the friendly Hans, only later to discover he's not actually what she wants. Instead, he's a Gold Digger exploiting the Thinks Like a Romance Novel mindset she expresses towards the end of her second "I Want" Song, which resulted, along with low self-esteem and a starvation for love of which he also takes advantage, from the isolation and neglect demonstrated in both songs. She does want love, and love is what saves her from her curse later, but it's the mended relationship with her sister, which is what she'd wanted most all along, that takes precedence. Moreover, the love that saves her is the love within her for her sister, demonstrated with an Act of True Love, as opposed to receiving a True Love's Kiss or other gesture, romantic or otherwise. She does get that romantic love she'd come to also desire, but it's secondary to her repaired relationship with Elsa, and when she does, it's with a man who's proven himself sincere.
    • In "For the First Time in Forever," Elsa has her own part, but sings about what she does not want, namely to lose control of her powers. Yet there's a hint that part of her does want to use her powers, but is afraid to. "Be the good girl you always have to be/Conceal/Don't feel/Put on a show/Make one wrong move and everyone will know." This desire becomes more apparent in "Let It Go," when Elsa flees the kingdom and believes that increased isolation means freedom to enjoy her powers, not realizing that her unchecked magic is destroying the kingdom. In the end, Anna shows her love can thaw the ice and she gains better control and is able to truly embrace her powers without fear.
  • "Let It Go" is a speech of these expressed through song. After having spent most of her life concealing her ice powers, once Elsa runs to the North Mountain, she realizes she has no one to fear and no one to hurt. "Let It Go" comes on and she starts testing the extent of her powers, creating a new dress and an entire ice castle. However, she trades one form of isolation for another and still does not have full control, and ends up setting off an Endless Winter in the process and later accidentally cursing her sister. When Anna sacrifices herself to save Elsa, her love for her sister is enough to reverse the effects of the curse, and Elsa realizes that she will still be loved and that love will thaw - love, not a life of fear, is the key - and finally truly embraces her powers.
• Deconstructed Trope:
  • Talking to animals. Anna talks fondly to adorable ducklings, but they're ordinary, non-talking ducklings. Kristoff, the outdoors man, is the character who has full conversations with an animal companion, but even Sven, while a reindeer of relative intelligence, doesn't actually speak. In fact, when "Sven" does, it's Kristoff saying things for him in a goofy voice, the way real pet owners often do with their pets. When he tries to communicate, he must use body language, like a real pet. And neither human Speaks Fluent Animal. For both of them, it's connected to their social isolation — Kristoff's Establishing Character Moment is singing a lullaby to Sven called "Reindeers Are Better than People," about his negative experiences and subsequent distrust of other humans, and Anna excitedly tells the ducks about her excitement over the chance to meet people for the first time in the years since the castle gates closed.
  • It turns out locking princesses up for most of their childhood isn't so great for their psychological development. Afraid that Elsa may be attacked if her powers become known, King Agnarr and Queen Iduna keep Elsa and Anna shut up in the castle in a misguided (albeit well-meant) effort to protect her. Elsa, having been raised to fear interaction, ends up severely withdrawn and avoidant. Anna, having never been told this and instead isolated by her family without explanation and seemingly rejected by the only friend she had left, ends up so desperate for affection that she throws herself headfirst into a relationship with a guy she just met, agreeing to marry him less than a day later.
  • Even though Anna is a Princess and Hans is a Prince, and they sang that love duet "Love Is an Open Door", Queen Elsa refuses to let them marry right away no matter how infatuated they are, since Fourth Date Marriages aren't actually as normal as they usually are in fiction.
    Elsa: You can't marry a man you just met.
• The Defroster: Anna's Heroic Sacrifice, and subsequent resurrection (her act of love for her sister thawing the frozen heart inflicted on her accidentally by Elsa) being the thing that finally breaks Elsa out of her own (figurative) Ice Queen status. She still remains a literal Ice Queen, but a happy and cheerful one, now.
• Descent into Darkness Song: The Dark Reprise of "For the First Time in Forever" starts out mainly positive. Anna starts the song with hope she and Elsa can be close again and that she can give Elsa support. But the tone ends up degrading into this, thanks to Elsa's fear getting the better of her and her expressions of panic drowning out Anna's ones of hope and utmost confidence that she can control her powers and bring back summer; since her powers respond to emotion, it culminates in her accidentally releasing a blast of magic which freezes Anna's heart.
• Description Cut: As the castle prepares to open its gates, we hear a couple of townspeople discussing how beautiful and elegant the princesses must be. Cuts to Anna looking like a complete bedhead: fast asleep, very messy hair, snoring and drooling all over her pillow.
• Designated Girl Fight: A gender-flipped subversion. Kristoff rolls up his sleeves to deal with Hans at the end, but Anna stops him to deliver the thrashing herself.
• Despair Event Horizon: By lying to Elsa about Anna having already died and emphasizing the part her powers played in the curse, Hans deliberately pushes Elsa over it. Would've worked too, if it hasn't made Elsa so emotionally empty that her Psychoactive Powers shut down, ending the blizzard and allowing Anna to spot them and save her sister.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?:
  • The Duke of Weselton says this in his introduction when he openly says how he plans to exploit Arendelle's profits.
  • Anna, briefly, after running into Hans. "You're gorgeous. Wait, what?"
  • Kristoff when he gleefully tells Anna "I could kiss you!" when she gives him his new sleigh.
• Did Not Think This Through: As a Reconstruction of The Heart and the Plucky Girl, although Anna is brave, optimistic, and extremely loving, these strengths come with the downside that this is one of her weaknesses:
  • When the castle gates temporarily open and Anna gains a reprieve from her isolation, she becomes excited about the chance to meet and befriend new people. Among the new visitors is the charming Hans, the first person in years to treat Anna as a friend. She agrees to his marriage proposal before the night ends and the gates close, despite not having met any other potential suitors yet to compare and the two only having known each other for a day. Despite being aware the decision is "totally crazy," in her happiness and fear of losing her only apparent friend, Anna neglects to consider potential issues with the quick decision, some of which are later discussed by Kristoff. First, the queen refuses to allow the marriage because of its suddenness, and then, Hans turns out to be a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing. Lampshaded by Hans after The Reveal:
    Prince Hans: You were so desperate for love, you willing to marry me, just like that.
  • Her plan to find Elsa and bring back summer. She's so quick to undertake the journey that she leaves unprepared for the ordeal. She also has no assurance that Elsa will want or know how to thaw the Endless Winter the snow queen's powers created and is acting out of optimism and faith in her sister, but without a backup plan. She's right about Elsa not being malicious and the curse on the kingdom being an accident, but it ultimately takes more than words of support to show Elsa how to thaw. Lampshaded by Kristoff:
    Kristoff: That's your plan? My ice business is riding on you talking to your sister?
• Did You Actually Believe...?: Hans calls Anna out on being so willing to marry him when they don't truly know each other. "You were so desperate for love, you were willing to marry me, just like that!"
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Hans claims that Anna died in his arms, when really he's locked her in a room and left her to freeze to death.
• Dies Wide Open: A magical variant, combined with Taken for Granite. When Anna's curse completely envelopes her and turns her to ice, her eyes are wide, staring, and fearful.
• Disney Acid Sequence: A mild example with Olaf's number, "In Summer". The movie has its fair share of anachronisms, but "In Summer" feels like it comes straight out of the 1950s or even from something like Mary Poppins. Its visual style, with blazing sunshine, saturated colors, and bloom, is completely unlike the rest of the movie. It's lampshaded when Anna and Kristoff seem surprised and confused to find themselves in it towards the end.
• Disney Death:
  • Princess Anna turns into an ice statue but thaws moments later.
  • Sven falls into a chilly ocean when the ice breaks, but resurfaces moments later.
• Disneyfication: As expected, the story bears little resemblance to "The Snow Queen" beyond a few elements. Unusually for this trope, it's probably an overall darker story than the original! Sure, Gerda and Kai have problems, but nowhere on the psychologically torturous level of what Anna and Elsa face.
• Disney Villain Death:
  • Downplayed. Anna punches Hans hard enough to knock him overboard, but not to his death.
  • Subverted. Marshmallow "dies" when falling off a cliff, but returns in The Stinger. Notice who else just narrowly escapes falling to his death in that scene...
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Marshmallow's response to Anna hitting him with a snowball is to chase her and Kristoff off a cliff.
• Dodgy Toupee: The Duke's toupee comes off at one point.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Kristoff asks if Anna knows how Hans picks his nose. Anna says Hans is a prince, he doesn't do such disgusting things. Kristoff's response: "All men do it", which is usually a thing they say about masturbating.
  • "Oh, hey, do me a favor and grab my butt." Olaf's (detached) butt is wandering by at the time, but the fact that Olaf follows it up by saying something along the lines of, "Oh, much better..." once Kristoff puts Olaf's head back in place brings a whole new meaning to the innuendo.
• Doomed New Clothes: Anna's coronation ballgown doesn't really last. When she falls into an icy creek, the skirt is frozen solid within seconds of Anna standing up, thus further justifying that her main purpose for stopping at Wandering Oaken's Trading Post and Sauna (conveniently just a few hundred feet away from the creek) is go get more appropriate cold weather gear.
• Double Aesop: "Fixer Upper" is about a potential romantic relationship with Kristoff, but the song applies perfectly to Anna's sisterly relationship with Elsa.
• Double Meaning:
  • "Let It Go" is about how Elsa can finally stop trying to hold in her powers, but also about how she is leaving her past and her kingdom behind.
  • "Love Is An Open Door" and "Fixer Upper" are both about romantic love but also can also be applied to the familial love between Anna and Elsa. The former song can also refer to Prince Hans's plan to use Anna's infatuation with him ("Love") as a way to gain access ("Open Door") to the throne.
  • At the end of the movie, there's an exchange that refers to not just the literal castle gates, but also to Elsa and Anna's relationship.
    Anna: I love the open gates.
    Elsa: We are never closing them again.
• Double-Meaning Title: As revealed by co-Director Chris Buck in an interview, the title refers to not only the frozen landscape but also the relationship between the two sisters, "which is frozen in the film when they were little girls".
• Dramatic Irony:
  • After getting Laser-Guided Amnesia and until the Internal Reveal, Anna is unaware of Elsa's magic and the reason for their separation; Anna doesn't know that Elsa still loves her and pushes her away in an attempt to protect her.
  • When the sisters meet in the ice palace and Elsa loses control of her magic again, she doesn't exactly see her curse hitting Anna's heart, unlike the audience.
  • Unlike the audience, Elsa doesn't see Hans Motive Ranting to the dying Anna, extinguishing the fire, and leaving her in a locked room, so Elsa seems to see him as a good man as she asks Hans to take care of Anna.
• Dramatic Wind: Elsa's emotional state can usually be determined by observing how hard it's snowing. You can also tell whenever she has hit a full-blown Heroic BSoD, which causes the Dramatic Wind to halt completely and the snow to simply freeze in the air. This only happens twice in the film — once after she learns that her parents have died, and again after Hans tells her that Anna is dead.
• Dreamworks Face: In all the posters for the film, Elsa is shown making this face. Typically, the rest of the main cast will be all smiles alongside her, although there are some posters of the sisters where Anna attempts to imitate Elsa's, which shows how much she looks up to her big sister.
• Dual-Meaning Chorus: The first appearance of "Let It Go" begins with the chorus indicating Elsa is now free to use her powers, but ends with it being a declaration that she is leaving her past behind.
• Dying Candle: A variation is used for a Murder by Inaction: Hans extinguishes the candles in the room where he leaves Anna to die.
• Dysfunction Junction: Everyone has or is implied to have a Dark and Troubled Past, and as a result, Anna is a reckless Love Martyr with unspecified mental issues, Elsa is a Broken Bird suffering from anxiety and Internalized Categorism, Hans is The Sociopath, and Kristoff is a bit of a misanthrope.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Elsa and Anna reconcile and reconnect and they and the kingdom are happy. After all the tragedies both sisters have been through, they really, really deserve one.
• Easily Forgiven: Elsa is well-intentioned, and most of the harm was accidental, but she also has very bad publicity, and is quickly and easily forgiven without her innocence being proved:
  • Anna has been straight-up abandoned by her older sister for 13 years without explanation. Elsa continues their parents' policy of keeping the family isolated, still without explanation, before opening the gates for one day, only in order to hold her coronation ceremony. During a confrontation about this, when Anna begins begging for an explanation, Elsa snaps and shoots ice spikes at her, and then promptly runs out of the room and the kingdom as an Endless Winter begins. Anna blames herself for this and defends her sister against the naturally suspicious townspeople and dignitaries, despite the situation looking as if Elsa had cursed the kingdom on purpose. An apologetic Anna heads into the blizzard to save the kingdom and her sister, but when she informs the queen that the latter had frozen the entire kingdom, Elsa's response is to insist there was nothing she could do and accidentally curse Anna's heart, before summoning a giant Snowlem to literally throw Anna and Kristoff out of her Ice Castle in her panic. Despite not even knowing that the cursed heart was an accident, Anna doesn't hold any of this against Elsa, and doesn't hesitate to sacrifice her life to save Elsa.
  • Also applies to the populace of Arendelle as a whole. Despite the fact that Elsa abandoned her kingdom and plunged the world into an Endless Winter that could surely have caused some casualties, as well as froze her sister who magically turned to ice from inside out in public view, and no one - even Anna - has any evidence that these things were accidents besides her word, none of the people of Arendelle have a grudge against her and they actually welcome their queen back with open arms. Made especially impressive by the fact that until that point, Elsa had stayed shut up in the castle and only opened up the gates for her coronation ceremony and its celebration, during which she had a fight with her sister that ended with her snapping and shooting a ring of ice spikes, so she didn't exactly have much of an established reputation to help, either.
• The Eleven O'Clock Number: "Fixer-Upper" occurs at the end of Act II, right before the climax gets set off with the reveal that Elsa's frozen Anna's heart, which will kill her without an Act of True Love. The song focuses on the movie's themes of giving people chances and realizing that "people make bad choices if they're mad or scared or stressed."
• Emotional Powers: Elsa's powers are tied to her emotions. Positive emotions tend to lend themselves to positive creations, such as Olaf and her ice castle, which she constructs beautifully while in a self-affirming mood. Negative emotions can have more negative consequences: her fear when she flees the kingdom brings about an Endless Winter, and when her sister tells her about the curse on the kingdom, cracks start appearing and a red light appears within. She comes to fear that her powers go out of control when she feels even the smallest bit of emotion, and eventually takes her father's well-meaning advice to "conceal it, don't feel it" in order to deal with Power Incontinence to the point that she attempts to suppress her emotions in general, which increases her fear of losing control, and by extension, her Power Incontinence, which grows the more fear she feels.
• Endless Winter: Elsa sets off an endless winter in Arendelle, though she didn't intend to do it and is shocked when Anna tells her that.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Although the Duke of Weselton attempts to exploit Arendelle, he's the first to put a consoling arm on a devastated-looking Hans and help him into a chair.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: When Kristoff's (wooden, freshly lacquered) sled falls off of a cliff, the impact breaks a lit lantern, splashing the sled with flaming oil.
  [sled bursts in to flames]
  [Beat]
  Kristoff: But I just paid it off!
• Evolving Attack: Elsa is born with ice powers than only grow as she gets older. At eight years old, she can cover a rather big room with ice and snow. Ten years later, she can plunge a whole country into a premature, apparently Endless Winter — complete with dangerous snow storms when she's feeling agitated. This is even mentioned by the trolls when Elsa's parents seek their counsel. She can also suffuse life onto her snow/ice constructs. After Character Development kicks in, she obtains the ability to reverse the effects of her magic.
• Exact Words:
  • "Only an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart." And it doesn't have to be romantic love, nor does it state who has to do said act — or even which heart needs thawing. Anna's heart — and body — literally freeze solid, but when their sisterly love unfreezes Anna, it also thaws Elsa's metaphorically frozen heart.
  • The troll's warning at the beginning of the film when he says that "Fear will be your enemy." The king and queen think that he's talking about how people will fear Elsa when they find out she has powers. In reality, it's Elsa's fear of her own powers (along with her parents' fears) and her constant repression of them that leads to them running out of control.
  • The king advises Elsa to "Conceal it; don't feel it; don't let it show" when coaching her on controlling her power, but she grows up shortening it to "Conceal; don't feel" and attempting to completely suppress her power and the emotions that set them off, which just makes her fear — and by extension, her Power Incontinence — worse.
  • A funny example is when the group first arrives at Elsa's castle. After Anna tells Kristoff that he shouldn't go in yet, Olaf tries to go in with her, and Anna tells Olaf to give her a minute. Cue Olaf quietly counting the seconds. It's made even funnier when Olaf sits down beside Kristoff, and Kristoff very reluctantly joins in counting as well. If you count along slowly while Anna goes in to talk to Elsa, it is almost sixty seconds exactly when Olaf comes in. In real time it feels a bit closer to seventy seconds, but they did have to get up the stairs.
  • Deconstructed and played with heavily in one case, with the film raising the question of which parts of the spirit of a wish matter:
    • In "For the First Time in Forever," Anna dreams of love and of meeting "a beautiful stranger, tall and fair." Hans seems to more or less deliver: a beautiful stranger, not particularly tall but relatively so compared to her, and redheaded, so debatably fair. He also seems to capture the spirit of the wish: just as charismatic, regal, brave, and friendly as the Prince Charming implied. But since the charm is a cover for Hans also being selfish and cruel, and the relationship between the two isn't love as Anna first believes it to be, he doesn't fit the most important parts of the spirit of her wish after all, making him a downplayed example of the trope.
    • Anna also meets Kristoff, who fits the literal description better, as he's blond and tall. On the other hand, Kristoff differs from the classic Prince Charming archetype implied in that he is a gruff, aloof, decidedly non-royal Pig Pen who can be rude. But he also has a has a heart of gold and he and Anna fall in love, so he fits the most important part of the spirit of her wish.
    • On top of that, while Anna's dream is implied to be romantic, the Exact Words can also be applied to the platonic case of her sister, "a beautiful stranger, tall and fair", since the two have been separated for most of their childhood so as to be near-strangers. Not quite what Anna had been implying in those particular lines, but their reconciliation is in line with the most important parts of her wish, as the two sisters truly love each other, and as seen in "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", what she really wanted all along was her big sister back.
    • While Anna is bonding with Hans, he promises her he would never shut her out. After his true motives are revealed, Hans leaves Anna to die by shutting her in a room.
• Exposed to the Elements:
  • Justified Trope. While surrounded by snow and ice, Elsa changes from a conservative summer dress to what looks like a winter-toned sundress, with bare arms and light enough material that it would probably be a little chilly even on a bright spring day. And it's made of ice and snow. She doesn't have a problem with it because she wields ice magic; as she says, "The cold never bothered me anyway." She puts it on specifically because she wants to play with that magic.
  • Subverted Trope with Anna who runs off to find her in a blizzard still wearing a summer ballgown. This is because she's so worried about her sister that she rushes out, not because the writers want to avoid showing the environment affecting her. The temperature is shown to affect her, and she shivers and pulls her cloak closer. Anna then changes into a more suitable winter outfit when she finds a shop.
• Expository Hairstyle Change:
  • During "Let It Go", Elsa undoes her hair that was in a bun before to show how free she now feels. However, it is still bound up in a long braid, indicating a second, deeper level of emotional binding.
  • Anna's hair gains a platinum blonde streak after she is struck in the head by Elsa's ice powers. Later, her hair goes completely white after Elsa strikes her in the heart and she is slowly dying as a result. After Anna thaws from being frozen solid, the platinum blonde streak in her hair is gone.
• Eye Recall: When Anna comes to Elsa's ice palace and reminds her about their happy childhood, camera zooms on Elsa's eyes and a flashback shows her nearly killing Anna.

Tropes F to M

• Failed a Spot Check: Elsa apparently doesn't notice that she accidentally caused an endless winter until Anna tells her, or at least she isn't aware of how far it extends, which is strange because Arendelle can easily be seen from the mountainside.
• Failsafe Failure: Deconstructed. The failsafes actually make things worse.
  • After accidentally hitting Anna in the head, a troll tries to warn Elsa about needing to learn control by showing a vision of Elsa's older self being attacked by an angry mob. To protect her from such a thing happening, the king decides to close the family off from the world as a temporary precaution while Elsa is still learning, but this increases her fear and thus her Power Incontinence. He gives her gloves as another way to hide the magic from people, telling her "Conceal it, don't feel it, don't let it show," but again, this ends up increasing Elsa's fear.
  • As a result of that anxiety, once it becomes apparent she cannot completely hide her powers, Elsa tries another failsafe and runs to the mountains, believing she can push her powers to the limit without endangering others or attracting their anger because of her isolation, only to find that her Power Incontinence has reached such an extent that the kingdom has actually plunged into an Endless Winter and that some people suspect she's done it on purpose.
• Failures on Ice:
  • In the teaser trailer, Sven has difficulty crossing a frozen lake. He even gets his tongue stuck to the ice at one point! Olaf the Snowlem isn't much better.
  • In the film itself, Olaf's actually pretty decent on the ice, and along with Elsa, actually helps Anna, who's learning to skate for the first time in the epilogue.
    Anna: I got it! I got it! ... I don't got it! I don't got it!
• Fairy Tale: Inspiration is drawn from Hans Christian Andersen's original The Snow Queen.
• Fake Memories: Grand Pabbie replaces Anna's memories of snow play indoors with Elsa in their nightgowns to regular memories of them outside in winter gear.
• Falling Chandelier of Doom: When an arrow meant for Elsa, due to the intervention of Hans, heads towards the ice chandelier of Elsa's castle, it causes the chandelier to fall and break apart. While Elsa manages to run away from it, the ice shards from the chandelier fly in all directions upon hitting the floor, hitting her. She falls and is knocked out as a result.
• Falling-in-Love Montage: "Love Is an Open Door" acts as one for Anna and Hans. To further drive the nature of the song home, they agree to marry the second it ends.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The landscape and setting of the movie is heavily based on Norway. What's more, Arendelle sounds like "Arendal", the name of a small Norwegian city,◊ whose economy is built around a port as well. There's also some influence from other Nordic countries, with Oaken having a sauna (associated with Finland) and there being so much steam (associated with Iceland) around where the trolls live. The Southern Isles are Fantasy Denmark (which becomes explicit in Frozen Fever) and Weselton, in its antagonistic relationship with Arendelle in a 19th-century setting, is implied to be Fantasy Sweden. Kristoff is a Saami, from his clothes and having a reindeer as a companion.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Despite its ambiguous setting, the clothes and architecture resemble those from the Victorian Era, but the only ranged weapons are javelins and crossbows.
• The Farmer and the Viper:
  • Zigzagged. Elsa is never evil, yet she does lose her temper and shoot spikes of ice at her younger sister, Anna, before plunging the kingdom into an Endless Winter. But Anna continues to trust and try to help her, despite the warnings of others. Anna turns out to be right, though. Despite her outburst, Elsa doesn't usually like hurting people and the Endless Winter is actually an accident. Still, Anna's attempt to do a good deed does get her hurt when Elsa, in a fit of panic, freezes her heart. But Anna continues to try to help Elsa, without knowing she only froze her heart accidentally and despite just having had her heart broken by Hans, and her support for her misunderstood sister helps Elsa recover and harness her powers for good.
  • From the moment they meet, Anna shows Hans nothing but kindness. That doesn't change his Evil Plan one bit and doesn't soften his attitude towards her — when he reveals his true colors, he mocks her for wanting to marry him "just like that" and for being "dumb enough" to try to help Elsa, locks her in a room to die, and tells he was planning to murder her sister.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Elsa's main flaw is being overwhelmed by fear after an accident involving her powers nearly kills her sister and the trolls warn of the possibility of angry mobs if she doesn't learn control, and her Character Development revolves around learning how to deal to with it.
  • Played with in the case of Anna, who has two: naivete and impulsiveness. After falling for Hans, she impulsively agrees to a Fourth-Date Marriage. She also shows impulsiveness and naivete when she rushes after Elsa as the Endless Winter begins, with no protection, no plan to bring Elsa back beyond talking her down somehow, no idea how she'd accomplish that, and no reason to be sure that Elsa really isn't evil and intentionally cursing the land. As a result, she nearly dies when Elsa accidentally curses her and Hans leaves her to die. However, while her trust in Villain with Good Publicity Hans is misplaced, her trust in Elsa is validated, and the film shows Hans to be a talented actor who fools all the other characters and even the audience. The Reveal creates An Aesop for the audience as well as Character Development for Anna, who realizes that after her childhood of isolation she does not know much about love and her Wrong Genre Savvy mindset was wrong. She uses her experience to grow and gain a more sophisticated understanding of love while keeping her large heart and choosing to continue to see the best in Elsa, her unflappable bravery and loving nature saving herself, her sister, and the kingdom. Lampshaded repeatedly:
    Kristoff: That's your plan? My ice business is riding on you talking to your sister?
    Anna: Yup.
    Kristoff: [after nearly being impaled by one of the spikes created by Elsa's magic] So you're not at all afraid of her?
    Anna: Why would I be?
    Olaf: Yeah. I bet Elsa's the nicest, gentlest, warmest person ever.
    Olaf: [after actually being impaled by one of the spikes] Oh, look at that. I've been impaled.
• Fat and Skinny: The two servants of the Arendelle castle who have given names: Kai (fat) and Gerda (skinny).
• Fictional Age of Majority: It's suggested that 21 is the age of majority in Arendelle; according to Jennifer Lee, Elsa is 21 years old during the main events of the story and although her parents died when she was 18, she isn't formally crowned queen until she "comes of age" three years later.
• Finishing Each Other's Sentences:
  • In "Love is an Open Door" to show how well Anna and Hans fit together. Except Anna says "sandwiches" instead of "sentences"... and Hans's reaction, very brief confusion followed by claiming "That's what I was going to say!", foreshadows how he is tailoring himself to fit Anna's ideal to manipulate her.
  • Anna botches it again a little later in the same song, finishing the phrase the way it usually is supposed to be finished, but not realizing that doesn't quite fit the particular circumstances. At least, it's not supposed to, since Hans leaving her to finish "and I" implies that it's just her alone. Anna thinks she and Hans are meant to be together, but his love is faked.
    Hans: You—
    Anna: And I—
    Both: Were just meant to be—
  • "Fixer Upper" has it so that every other line is sung by a troll other than the line before or by the group.
• Final First Hug: For thirteen years, Elsa was suppressing her emotions and denying Anna any form of affection. In the end, Anna turns into an ice statue, and Elsa hugs her as she breaks down in tears. Anna gets better though.
• Finger Extinguisher: During the climax, Hans takes off his gloves and extinguishes a candle with his fingers so Anna will freeze to death faster.
• First Girl Wins: Played with. Though Hans is the first boy shown to the audience as a love interest and the first boy to properly meet Anna, Kristoff appears in the movie before him during A Minor Kidroduction along with Sven, Elsa, and Anna. This means that Kristoff is the first boy introduced to the audience.
• Fisher Queen: Elsa inadvertently creates an Endless Winter for her entire kingdom that can't be lifted until her emotional problems are dealt with. On a smaller scale, her ice palace on the mountainside changes between beautiful and scary depending on her mood. Her moods can also more acutely affect the weather: strong anxiety and emotional turmoil tend to cause a swirling snowstorm around her, while emotional shock and numbness tend to cause such a frozen stillness that snowflakes are suspended motionless in midair.
• Flashback Cut: When Anna tells Elsa that they can be close again like they were as kids, Elsa has a sudden flashback to the traumatic accident in which Anna was hurt by her magic, leading her to rebuff Anna's request, since she is dealing with Power Incontinence.
• Flower Motifs: The crocus flower, generally associated with Spring and rebirth, is a symbol of Arendelle and is found throughout the film, including on banners, wallpaper, and costumes.
• Flyaway Shot: The movie ends with a zooming out from the court to an aerial view of the entire castle, now partially ornamented with Elsa's ice powers.
• Forced into Their Sunday Best: One boy, for Elsa's coronation, as seen in this exchange:
  Son: Why do I have to wear this?
  Mother: Because the Queen has come of age! It's coronation day.
  Son: That's not my fault!
• Foreshadowing: Has its own page.
• The Foreign Subtitle: Some countries keep the main title of Frozen, but add a subtitle in their local language, most commonly translating to "The Kingdom of Ice", "A Freezing Adventure" or "The Frozen Kingdom". Good examples are the two Spanish titles: "Frozen: El reino del hielo" in Spain ("The Ice Kingdom") and "Frozen: Una aventura congelada" in Latin America ("A Frozen Adventure").
• Forgot About His Powers: Downplayed. When her ice palace is under attack, Elsa initially retreats rather than use her powers, but begins to use them once her attackers start firing at her.
• Forgotten First Meeting: Played with. Kristoff sees the troll elder curing Anna when they are kids, and when they meet as adults, he initially appears not to recognize her. He later tells her about the event, but does not tell Anna, who had been unconscious at the time and unaware of its occurrence, that she's the girl he saw healed and she remains unaware.
• The Four Chords of Pop: "Let It Go", in the chorus.
• The Four Loves: Played with. The "act of true love" that would save Anna is initially implied to be romantic (Eros), but it turns out to be a combination of Anna's unconditional, sacrificial love (Agape) for her sister (Storge) in the climax. Learning to understand the difference between Grand Romantic Gestures and love in all its forms is a large part of Anna's Character Arc as she befriends Olaf (Philia), finds the caring Kristoff to be a better lover than the romantic but selfish Hans (Eros), realizes that she and her sister have loved each other all along (Storge), and shows unconditional, selfless love for all three.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Upbeat, active and optimistic Anna is the sanguine, her elegant, responsible and ridden with fear sister Elsa as the melancholic, laid-back, snarky-but-staunchly-moral Kristoff as the phlegmatic and ambitious, hard-working, do-whatever-it-takes-to-get-my-goal Hans as the choleric.
• Fourth-Date Marriage:
  • Lampshaded, subverted, and deconstructed with Anna and Hans becoming engaged very quickly, despite every character who knows about it (including Anna and Hans themselves) acknowledging how unusual this is. The engagement ends before the wedding, since Hans turns out to be a Gold Digger manipulating Anna, who's vulnerable because she grew up isolated and seemingly rejected, so she Desperately Craves Affection and Thinks Like a Romance Novel.
  • Played with further when Kristoff brings Anna to his family of trolls and they assume it's because the two, who have barely known each other a day, are romantically involved. When the trolls find out that's not the case, they try to conduct a wedding for them on the spot, despite the fact that neither of them is interested. The two become an Official Couple later on, but take things slowly when they do.
• Fractured Fairy Tale: The movie has many of the classic Disney elements; the Plucky Idealist Princess who believes in Love at First Sight, the Powerful Sorceress who curses the land and/or protagonists, a Race Against the Clock to save the princess (with True Love's Kiss no less) and a Prince Charming waiting in the wings. Except, Elsa didn't curse the land on purpose; it's just a case of Power Incontinence gone very wrong. Anna's naive belief in Love at First Sight proves to be disastrous, as Hans turns out to be the Big Bad, and was manipulating her naivete to get the throne. Finally, the curse is not broken by True Love's Kiss, but instead a Heroic Sacrifice, on Anna's part. We never find out if the kiss (from Kristoff) would have worked.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Rapunzel and Eugene are two of the guests at Elsa's coronation.
  • When everybody else is panicking after Elsa reveals her powers to the public, one of the Duke of Weselton's guards (to be more specific, the beardless one) smiles and looks momentarily attracted to her.
  • Literally: When Hans is about to strike the ice-infused Anna, you can see the frost forming on his blade just before it shatters.
  • When Pabbie alters Anna's memories so that she won't remember Elsa's magic and puts them back in her head, look closely and you can see Anna's tired expression change to a smile.
  • More noticeable to a viewer when rewatching with knowledge of Hans's Evil All Along status, Hans looks at the chandelier above Elsa's head before redirecting the Mook's arrow toward that chandelier so that it'll fall on her.
• Freudian Excuse: Played with heavily. In particular, subversion of this trope in particular is a key theme in the film, with several non-villainous examples. "Throw a little love their way, and you'll bring out their best":
  • Kristoff's a hero rather than a villain, but his initial misanthropy is implied to stem from a history of poor treatment by other humans. His Establishing Character Moment is a song called "Reindeer(s) Are Better Than People", which includes lyrics such as "People will beat you, and curse you, and cheat you". Subverted as he begins to warm up over the course of his adventure with Anna.
  • When they're children, Anna gets hurt in an accident involving Elsa's powers. The trolls who heal her warn Elsa she must learn control and that "fear will be your enemy", showing a vision of a mob. Fear of causing more harm and of others' reactions contribute to Elsa's avoidant tendencies later on, which make her appear cold-hearted and exacerbate her Power Incontinence, hurting Anna further in the process with misguided Break Her Heart to Save Her treatment and leading to an Endless Winter that contributes to her Hero with Bad Publicity status. Subverted when Anna's act of true love shows her that love is stronger than fear.
  • Despite being poorly treated by his older brothers, Hans appears to still be a well-adjusted and heroic Prince Charming. The trope is actually Double Subverted in his case. He's a Villain with Good Publicity who knows how to act charming, but is revealed to be selfish and cruel beneath the act.
  • Anna's spent most of her life feeling unloved and shut out, so she makes sure to be friendly and to show love to others by being open with them. After Elsa kicks her out of the ice palace without attempting to undo the Endless Winter and curses her heart (accidentally, but only Elsa and the audience are aware of that), and The Reveal of her apparent One True Love as Evil All Along, she questions whether she "even knows what love is", but rejects a Cynicism Catalyst and retains her big heart, instead adjusting her view of what love looks like to one that blurs the line between apparent openness and love.
• Friendless Background: Both Anna and Elsa spend most of their childhood in seclusion, and both of them have no friends growing up.
• Friendlessness Insult: A very cruel example occurs when Anna, while slowly freezing to death, tells Hans that only an act of true love can save her. He asks "a kiss of true love?", touches her face with apparent tenderness, bends to kiss her... just to retreat and says, "Oh, Anna. If only there was someone out there who loved you," before revealing his intention to get rid of Elsa and Anna to get the throne of Arendelle. It is particularly nasty because Hans knows how lonely and desperate for affection Anna is, and doesn't hesitate to rub how few people she has in her corner in her face.
• Friend-or-Idol Decision: A rather tearjerking one happens in the climax: Anna has nearly completely frozen to death and Kristoff is about to approach her and give her a kiss to save her, but then she notices Hans about to murder Elsa with his sword. Willingly, she uses her last breath to throw herself in front of Hans and freezes over just before the strike. Her sacrifice was the "act of true love" which thaws her minutes later.
• Frothy Mugs of Water: In keeping with Disney tradition, this trope is not in play: the party guests, Hans included, are quite obviously drinking champagne, making his line "or maybe it's the party talking" in "Love is an Open Door" suddenly make a lot more sense.
• Funeral Cut: During the song "Do You Want To Build A Snowman?", we see Anna and Elsa's parents on a ship in bad weather, and the next shot is their funeral.
• Funny Background Event:
  • During "For the First Time in Forever" (about 22 seconds after Rapunzel & Flynn's Blink And You Miss It cameo), Anna very briefly grabs a random man's hand and then immediately runs away from him. It's easy to miss because Anna's singing in the foreground, but in the background you see the man first quickly looking confused, and then he gets a smile on his face upon recognizing it was actually the Princess who just ran into him.
  • During Elsa's coronation, while Anna and Hans wave to each other (right before the bishop places the tiara on Elsa's head), you can see the guy sitting on Hans's left is apparently so bored by the event that he has fallen asleep and is leaning against him, gently snoring.
  • When Anna and Kristoff are tossed out of Elsa's ice palace by Marshmallow, Sven is shown to have his tongue stuck to the railing of the staircase.
  • During the coronation, when Anna is announced she runs on stage and awkwardly waves at the crowd. If you look at the bottom of the screen one of the guests waves back at her.
• "Gaining Confidence" Song: "Let It Go", where Elsa firsts laments how her power has caused her to become an outcast, but then she embraces her powers and basically declares "This is me? Deal with it."
• Get Out!:
  • Elsa doesn't exactly say it, but this is what she conjured up Marshmallow to say.
  • Oaken physically throws Kristoff out of his store after Kristoff calls him a crook.
• Gilded Cage: To shield Elsa's powers away from everyone else, her parents order the castle sealed off and take it upon themselves to help her control her growing magic. Elsa spends much of her time in her room, working desperately with her parents to contain her powers, and her sister Anna is Locked Out of the Loop and left alone, wondering why her sister appears to suddenly not care about her anymore. Consequently, both sisters have unhappy and very lonely childhoods despite living under the same roof, and said roof being that of a castle.
• The Ghost: Hans's brothers are only mentioned in the movie, but never appear in person due to Hans visiting Arendelle alone.
• Gilligan Cut: Two men say that they think Anna and Elsa will be beautiful. We then cut to Anna with a major case of bedhead.
• Girls Love Chocolate: Both Anna and Elsa love chocolate.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Heavily played with. Princess Elsa was born with powerful ice magic. An accident involving her powers seriously injures her sister, and the trolls warn of the necessity of control, showing an image of her future self and an angry mob. She then works to avoid becoming this trope, but her attempts make her come off as a metaphorical ice queen to those Locked Out of the Loop and exacerbate her Power Incontinence. The day of her coronation, after years of shunning her younger sister Princess Anna, Elsa forbids her marrying Prince Charming Hans and leaves the kingdom in an Endless Winter as she builds an ice palace on the North Mountain and sings about now seeing "no right, no wrong, no rules for me." The good-hearted princess journeys to save both the kingdom and Elsa, believing her a Hero with Bad Publicity, and Elsa makes no effort to unthaw the kingdom, instead cursing the heroine... yet really is a Hero with Bad Publicity: freezing the kingdom and Anna's heart were accidents, she doesn't know how to undo the winter and her response is a result of panic, she has understandable concerns about the engagement, and her seemingly-cold treatment of Anna is an act, because her powers are emotion-based, so she tries to be an Emotionless Girl to prevent Power Incontinence. With Anna's help, she learns how to deal with her fear and magic and becomes a Benevolent Mage Ruler, rather than an Evil Queen / Wicked Witch or an Emotionless Girl afraid to use her power.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Played for Laughs during the second verse of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", when Anna mentions that she has started talking to the paintings in the castle because of her lack of company. Takes a more serious turn when she agrees to marry Hans the same day she meets him, not having much reference for what a truly loving relationship actually looks like, and panics at Elsa reclosing the gates early. Also plays a role in Elsa's spiraling anxiety.
• Go Out with a Smile: Olaf smiles as the sisters are reunited and summer returns, although he's melting: "This is the best day of my life... and quite possibly the last."
• The Good Kingdom: Arendelle has a Benevolent Mage Ruler, a Princess Classic as her sister (if not demure, like typical examples), and people who love their queen after it was clear she would only use her powers, when under her control, for good (despite Elsa growing up worried how others would treat her regardless).
• Good Parents: Played with. Elsa and Anna's parents are shown to be caring and loving towards their daughters. They frantically search for a way to help Anna after the accident, and act very protective of Elsa, firing most of the staff and closing themselves off as they shut the castle gates to protect her from others. They also patiently attempt to help her control her Power Incontinence so one day the isolation can end with less fear. However, their well-intentioned attempts backfire and harm both sisters, exacerbating Elsa's anxiety and subjecting Anna to neglect that damages her own self-esteem and ability to recognize the difference between gestures and actual love. The issues of the two girls set off a chain of events that leave the kingdom in an Endless Winter and nearly get both of them killed.
• Good Princess, Evil Queen: Zigzagged. The "Good Princess" part is played straight, but the "Evil Queen" part is subverted. Princess Anna is a compassionate, goodhearted princess, who saves the day when Queen Elsa causes trouble after being crowned queen — in part because she is able to perceive that Elsa is Not Evil, Just Misunderstood, even in the midst of the Endless Winter that descends over the entire kingdom after Elsa reveals her powers and runs away. The majority of the harm Elsa does mostly has to do with not knowing yet how to handle her power. However, Hans plays on this trope when he tries to get the throne by vilifying Elsa and claiming to be be married to the tragically dead Princess Anna.
• Gorgeous Garment Generation: As Elsa reinvents herself as the Snow Queen, she uses her ice power to turn her restrained coronation dress into a magnificent, flowing ice-blue number.
• Grand Staircase Entrance: Elsa appears at the top of a staircase when Anna finds her in her Ice Palace. Anna even has the traditional "Whoa, Elsa, you look... different! It's a good different!" reaction in regards to Elsa's Snow Queen outfit.
• Grim Up North: Being a Fantasy Counterpart Culture to the Nordic Countries, Arendelle is very cold but it's a Played With example — it's a pretty positive portrayal. After Elsa leaves the kingdom in an Endless Winter, she makes her stronghold on the North Mountain. However, this is shown to not be entirely bad — once she's away from people, Elsa finally feels free to be herself for the first time in years, and in doing so, is able to create wonderful things again, including Olaf and a gorgeous ice palace. It also turns out Elsa truly isn't malicious; the Endless Winter is a result of Power Incontinence. Still, Elsa remains more isolated than ever, and doesn't realize how much the kingdom is suffering, while she appears to the people as likely having cursed them on purpose. The script highlights this nuance: "The place is beautiful, but also eerie."
• Grief Song: The first two-thirds of the song "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", are a downplayed version, a grief song about an unexplained separation. The tune is fairly fun and upbeat, although the lyrics are sad. The last verse, however, is about Anna mourning the death of her parents and desperately trying to reach out to her sister, her only remaining family, one last time.
• Hair-Contrast Duo: Elsa and Anna. Elsa has Mystical White Hair to go with her ice magic, stoicism, and Emotionless Girl façade, while Anna is a Fiery Redhead, outgoing, energetic, and warm-hearted.
• Hakuna Matata: "Let it Go", sung by Elsa where she believes that she can finally use her ice powers without harming anyone and live with no worries or responsibilities by going on a self-induced isolation in her Ice Palace. Unfortunately, what she doesn't realize is that she accidentally plunged the kingdom into an Endless Winter and upon being informed, she goes right back to square one and panics, accidentally striking her sister in the heart. Her Character Development involves learning to face her problems instead of simply avoiding them, in the end controlling and using her powers around others instead of repressing them or hiding.
• Hammerspace: Where did Hans get his sword when he's about to slice at Elsa out on the fjord? When he catches up to her, he is not wearing his sword or the scabbard to holster the sword in. We hear the shing of his sword being drawn while Anna is on screen, and when we next see Hans, he has his sword in hand but still no scabbard. This is in contrast to the attempt to capture Elsa at her ice castle, where Hans's sword and scabbard are clearly visible.
• Hand Behind Head: After he blurts out that he could kiss Anna, Kristoff rubs the back of his head in embarrassment.
• Hand Gagging: Kristoff covers Anna's mouth with his hand in an attempt to keep her quiet while he scans the surroundings for wolves.
• Happily Adopted: Kristoff and Sven are adopted by the trolls that act like doting parents.
• Harmless Freezing: Generally averted. Elsa's powers are scary because freezing is far from harmless.
  • Slipping into a winter creek wearing only a summer dress is a painful and dangerous situation. It's a good thing Anna found Wandering Oaken's Trading Post and Sauna very shortly thereafter.
  • Played straight at the end of the movie. Anna is fine after being an ice sculpture, but this was not a mundane freeze, nor was it a mundane thaw. The same applies to the plant life seen magically springing back to life when Elsa undoes the Endless Winter.
• Harmony Versus Discipline: Of the Emotions vs. Stoicism variety. Elsa has spent years trying to master her Emotional Powers through Discipline and attempting to be an Emotionless Girl, staying in a carefully controlled environment and trying to avoid strong feelings. It turns out that they are better controlled through a selective use of Harmony. While acceptance doesn't cure her Power Incontinence, too much discipline and attempting to completely suppress her emotions and her powers often makes it worse, prevents the benefits of the magic, and isn't healthy for her. Embracing her emotions and magic allows her to harness and enjoy it, is healthier for her, and mitigates Power Incontinence. In fact, it's The Power of Love that's the key to thawing unwanted effects, shown through Anna, the more emotional red oni to Elsa's more stoic blue.
• Heal the Cutie: Anna and Elsa go through a lot of hardship, what with them being separated for 13 years due to Elsa's Power Incontinence. It only gets worse when Elsa accidentally creates an eternal winter everywhere and fatally freezes Anna's heart. Then Anna is betrayed by Hans, who deceives Elsa into thinking that she killed her. Then he tries to kill her, but Anna rescues her. Anna's Act of True Love thaws her heart, the two are reunited, and Elsa realizes she can undo the eternal winter. As it turns out, love is the ultimate salve for cuties.
• Held Gaze: Anna and Kristoff have more and more of these as the journey progresses.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Happens with Elsa twice in the film. First during the final verse of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" when she discovers that her parents have been killed in a storm, and then later when Hans makes her believe that Anna has frozen to death. On both occasions, the snow stops moving in the air as a visual cue to Elsa's mental state.
  • Kristoff gets one when Anna freezes solid. He mentally shuts down to the point that he just stares at the ground with a blank expression on his face. His mental detachment from reality is to the point that when she starts to thaw, he doesn't even notice until Sven nudges him to snap him out of it.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • When Anna sees Hans about to kill Elsa, she steps in front of her to stop him — just as she freezes solid, shattering Hans's sword. Making it even more of this is the fact that Anna does this instead of trying to get a kiss from Kristoff, which would save Anna's life but cost Elsa hers.
  • Sven shoves Kristoff off of the cracking ice onto (more) solid ground, falling into the freezing water himself. Only played with, as he scrambles out of the water himself shortly afterwards.
  • Olaf helped Anna and Kristoff bring back summer, even as he came to realize—if he didn't realize all along—that this would ultimately kill him. Ultimately averted though by Elsa's creation of a special cloud for Olaf.
    Olaf: Some people are worth melting for.
• He Was Right There All Along: When Hans' group approach Elsa's ice palace, there's a new pile of snow next to the staircase that we didn't see the evening before when Marshmallow was tossing Anna and Kristoff out. Turns out the pile is Marshmallow sitting down with his back to the camera to catch them off-guard.
• High-Class Gloves: Elsa and Hans, the more formal main characters, generally wear gloves regardless of the weather, while the less formal Anna and Kristoff either go barehanded or use mittens when the weather gets too cold to do so. Played with:
  • In the case of Elsa, who uses gloves as a Magic Feather to keep her powers controlled. When she opens up the gates for the day during her coronation, she has to take them off to accept the scepter and orb, and is visibly uncomfortable without them because she is having such a hard time keeping the regalia from icing over. When she fights with Anna over their isolation, one comes off and she loses control of both her powers and herself. When she flees the kingdom, she discards the other one and decides to completely let go and stop pretending to be The High Queen.
  • In the case of Hans, he takes off his gloves once, during The Reveal of him as Evil All Along. Like Elsa, the gloves represented him not being himself.
• Hollywood Costuming: The film is supposedly set somewhere in the 1840s (as implied by much of the wardrobe and architecture), yet the skirts of both sisters' costumes don't even show a hint of crinoline. They either fall in tight folds that flounce nicely when moving, like Anna's ballgown, or they fall straight down, like Elsa's coronation dress. A scene from an earlier draft showed the sisters together in a dressing room where Anna tries on a dress spoofing the increasingly large crinoline skirts around that time, with a comment made about it being a gift from "one of the bigger countries", suggesting it may be a deliberate example to highlight the girls' isolation. However, the dresses of the coronation guests also lack the expected stiffness.
• Hollywood Law:
  • While there are precedents for revolutionaries to charge monarchs with treason against their own countries and sentence them to death (e.g., Charles I in the English Civil War), it's hard to interpret Hans, a representative of a foreign nation, judging and carrying out such a sentence as anything other than an act of war.
  • Hans' scheme to become King of Arendelle couldn't possibly work in any European monarchical system. If Elsa dies and he marries Anna, he'd only be Prince Consort, and if Anna dies the throne should pass to her cousins, no matter how distant they might be.
• Hood Ornament Hottie: Spoofed. When Kristoff's sled is replaced, Sven does a pose on it similar to this trope.
• Hope Spot:
  • A subtle one for the audience — during the last verse of "Do You Want To Build a Snowman", Anna asks "do you want to build a snowman" for the third time, as a desperate and ironic callback to the first two verses, which took place in her youth. The rhyme scheme and meter is such that for a few long moments, it feels as if Elsa might respond with "yes, I do". Instead, we get quiet sobbing from Elsa as the last few chords just hang quietly.
  • During the ball, Anna is happy when Elsa is finally talking with her again, and they seem to get along as well as before. But Elsa shuts her down hard when Anna suggests that things could be like this every day, and because Elsa still wants to hide her powers, she can't tell Anna why. This only makes Anna more depressed than before.
  • During "Let It Go", Elsa embraces her powers; she believes she won't hurt anyone anymore and will live happily by herself. Then, she learns she unwittingly set off an Endless Winter in Arendelle, and she still has no idea how to undo her magic.
  • Anna gets a perfect opportunity for her True Love's Kiss, only for Hans to make the reveal.
  • Subverted when Anna gets another opportunity for a True Love's Kiss, only for Hans to succeed in pushing Elsa over the Despair Event Horizon. This leaves Elsa vulnerable to his attack and halts her magical storm, which allows Anna to see him about to strike the mourning queen. Anna then turns away from Kristoff to use the remainder of her strength to take the blow for her sister. Her Heroic Sacrifice turns out to count as the Act of True Love that breaks the curse, thus saving her as well as Elsa.
• Horseback Heroism: Subverted twice.
  • Sven is a huge reindeer but he is treated much like a horse in this way, and Kristoff dramatically rides him to help Anna during the whiteout at the climax until he's separated from Sven and Anna sacrifices her life for Elsa's.
  • When Anna sets off on a mission to save Elsa and the kingdom, she does so riding on a horse. Said horse later gets spooked and runs off, and she then continues on foot.
• Horse Returns Without Rider: Soon after Elsa accidentally sets of an Endless Winter and retreats to the North Mountain, her sister Anna sets off riding Prince Hans's horse to find her, only for said horse to abandon her midway through her journey. When the horse manages to find its way back to Arendelle, Hans takes it as a sign that Anna is in danger and mobilizes a search party to find her.
• How Do I Shot Web?: From the age of eight until she flees her coronation at twenty-one, virtually every time Elsa's powers have manifested, it's been an accident spurred by emotions. Only in "Let It Go" does she start to experiment and quickly realizes just how much control she actually has over them if she puts her mind to it.
• Huddle Shot: The trolls have a brief one during "Fixer Upper".
• Humans Are Bastards: Kristoff believes this, as detailed in "Reindeer(s) Are Better Than People":
  Kristoff: Reindeers are better than people / Sven, don't you think that's true?
  Kristoff (as Sven): Yeah, people will beat you and curse you and cheat you. / Every one of them's bad, except you [Kristoff]!
• Hurricane of Puns: During a few of the lines in "Let It Go", Elsa makes several ice/snow puns as she makes her ice palace (e.g. in the line "A kingdom of isolation, and it looks like I'm the queen," she stresses the first syllable of "isolation"). Likewise her thoughts "crystallize" (a wordplay not all of the dubs manage to translate).
• I Am a Monster: Elsa thinks this of herself because of her ice powers.
• "I Am Becoming" Song: "Let It Go", sung by Elsa as she transforms herself into the Snow Queen and creates an ice castle after running away from Arendelle. It works as a I Am What I Am as well.
• Ice Breaker: When the icy curse completely overwhelms Anna, the extreme cold shatters Hans' sword.
• Ice Crystals: Elsa's ice palace seems an exercise in just how crystalline the animators could make ice look. It probably helps that it's magical, and with a mind guiding it, the ice would of course be able to do a stunning crystal palace. The crystalline ice chandelier she creates sure seems deliberate. Later on, when she begins to use ice to attack people, the ice is polished, but still more jagged and less crystalline than her castle is. Some crystalline ice she creates appears to be accidental, but it's still magical and tied to her emotions, which seems to explain it. As a general rule, when Elsa makes ice accidentally, its form tends to reflect her emotional state, and that includes the ice getting spikier when she's upset.
• Ice Palace: Elsa, the Snow Queen, lives in an ice palace she created.
• If Only You Knew:
  • Inverted when Hans mocks, "Oh, Anna... If only there was someone out there who loved you", having picked up on how unloved Anna felt. In truth, Elsa does care about Anna but attempts to be an Emotionless Girl in order to keep her powers controlled, creating an appearance of aloof jerkass in the process. Kristoff and Olaf also care about her, but Anna doesn't know it yet.
  • Later played straight. Elsa asks Hans, "Just take care of my sister", not realizing that Hans was Evil All Along and wants both sisters dead.
• Ignorant About Fire: When Olaf sets the fireplace alight to warm Anna up, he gets quite curious about the fire itself. He gets close to it, not knowing that as a snowman, he could very easily melt from the heat.
  Anna: Olaf, g-get away from there!
  Olaf: [amazed] Whoa. So this is heat. [he puts his hands in front of the fireplace] I love it! [his hand catches on fire and he waves it, putting the fire out] Ooh! But don't touch it!
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Averted. Elsa is never shown to resent her abilities and just accepts they are part of who she is; she's just afraid that she or someone she loves will get hurt as a result of them. The times she is shown to be happiest are when she is free to use her powers to their limit.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Hans knocks one of the assassin's crossbows up, preventing it from directly hitting Elsa, but the bolt shoots up and hits the narrowest part of the icy chandelier, dropping it on Elsa and knocking her out. If that was intentional, it certainly qualifies. Implied to be intentional with his glance up at the chandelier before rushing to the goon.
• Improvised Lockpick: Snowman Olaf uses his carrot nose to unlock the door behind which Princess Anna is dying of her frozen heart.
• Improvised Weapon: While being chased by wolves, Anna drives one off by swinging Kristoff's lute at it like the lute's a baseball bat.
• Inexplicably Awesome: Elsa's the only human character who has supernatural abilities in the film. Why? Because the plot requires that Elsa has ice powers. It isn't explained in the movie itself.
• Inspiration Nod:
  • Recursively: In "For the First Time in Forever", Anna jumps in front (and assumes the pose of)◊ this◊ painting, which was the basis for the art style of Tangled.
  • In the script, there are minor characters called Gerda and Kai, the names of the main characters in the Andersen tale that inspired the film. Both work at the castle. Gerda is a portly servant, while Kai is the servant who introduces the sisters at the coronation ball.
  • The names of four of the leads? Hans, Kristoff, Anna, Sven.
• Inspired by…: The credits say the film is "inspired by" Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. Both of these works feature a queen with ice powers and a girl who goes on a dangerous journey through a winter landscape to find the Snow Queen in order to save an estranged and depressed childhood friend, but reasons why the friend has to be saved, how the girl saves them, how the two characters had come to know each other and how they came to be estranged, the course of the heroine's journey, and the characters she encounters all differ significantly.
• Internal Reveal:
  • Elsa's powers are revealed to the world only during her coronation, while they have been central to the plot since the beginning.
  • Elsa only discovers that her powers have triggered an Endless Winter two thirds of the way through the film, when Anna arrives to tell her during "For the First Time in Forever (Reprise)".
• In the Style of: "Fixer Upper" sounds a lot like the kind of songs that appeared on Fraggle Rock. The songwriters, husband and wife couple Robert and Kristen-Anderson Lopez had initially become famous for parodying Jim Henson in Avenue Q.
• Ironic Echo: Kai mispronounces Weselton as "Weaseltown" the first 2 times it is said. The third time, it's deliberate.
• Irony:
  • When Anna tells Elsa that "I can't live like this anymore!" Elsa responds by telling Anna "Then leave!" Moments later, it's Elsa herself fleeing the castle after accidentally displaying her powers in front of all the guests.
  • "Let It Go" is about how after years of being forced to isolate herself, Elsa finds happiness and freedom... by isolating herself further.
  • Olaf's entire song about what he'll do in the summer is completely riddled with irony and black comedy because everything he daydreams about is something that will only melt him faster. And Kristoff almost contemplates interrupting the song to tell Olaf this, only for Anna to say, "Don't you dare!"
    Olaf: Just imagine how much cooler I'll be in summmerrrr!!!
  • Both the first and last time Hans encounters Anna, he ends up in the water.
  • Kristoff bases his disparagement of Anna's Fourth-Date Marriage on him having friends who are love experts. When we meet said love experts, they immediately try to get him and Anna, who have known each other for about a day, married on the spot.
  • In "For the First Time in Forever", Anna wonders if that night she'll meet the one, thinking he'd be "a beautiful stranger, tall and fair". While she initially thinks it's Hans, Kristoff is the "tall and fair" one (being a husky blond), and she does meet him that night. See Exact Words for more detail.
  • When Anna tells Hans about her tragic childhood and being shut out all these years, he promises her he'll never shut her out. After his true nature is revealed, Hans leaves Anna to die by shutting her in a room.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Played with.
  • A platonic and unusual variation with Elsa. As she becomes more afraid of her powers, Elsa worries about the harm they can do to other people, including Anna, and so avoids her. Exposited at the ice castle, when Anna tries to reach out to Elsa and Elsa declares that she thinks it's best if she stays alone in her ice palace, "where I can be who I am, without hurting anyone." However, Anna has to tell Elsa that despite her distance, the kingdom is in an Endless Winter and that they need to find a way to thaw it. Elsa panics at the news and tries again to protect Anna by summoning a giant snowlem to throw her out. While the story explicitly supports this trope, declaring "Love is putting someone else's needs before your own," Elsa's fear - both of and for others - makes things worse. In the end, Elsa realizes that love itself is the answer and that it's safe to be with her other loved ones without repressing her powers.
  • Played straight with Kristoff towards Anna near the end, thinking that bringing her back to Hans will save her life, despite his own growing feelings towards her and that he may never see her again afterward. Sven tries to get Kristoff to defy this.
• It Was with You All Along: Anna spends most of the story longing for love. Then at the climax, her heart is frozen and she needs an "Act of True Love" to break the curse. Naturally, she goes to her fiance for a True Love's Kiss, only for the act of true love to be her own act when she sacrifices her life for her sister. All she needed was her own love.
• "I Want" Song:
  • "For the First Time in Forever" for Anna as it talks about the companionship (romantic and otherwise) that she craves.
  • "Do You Want To Build a Snowman?" is a sadder "I Want" Song for Anna, as she just wants her beloved sister back.
  • "In Summer" for Olaf describes all the things he wants to do in summer.
• Jerkass Has a Point: The Duke. He's prejudicial and a definite jerk, but when he worries, "If we don't do something soon, we'll all freeze to death", it's part of the ramping up of the emotions in anticipation of the climax, reminding viewers of how high the stakes are, as Anna is on her deathbed and Elsa's fear is growing stronger and stronger. There are a ton of innocent civilians who are going to freeze or starve to death if summer never comes back, especially with the frozen fjord and blizzard-wracked mountains making evacuation unlikely.
• Job Song: The opening song "Frozen Heart" is sung by ice harvesters and poetically describes their job.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Subverted. Elsa almost does this when she nearly kills the Duke's men, but Hans points out that she's on the brink of becoming the monster that people fear her to be. By the end of the movie, she remains on the side of good.
• Just Between You and Me: Hans tells Anna of his Evil Plan to leave her to freeze to death while he executes Elsa in public. This way, he will be seen as the hero who saved Arendelle from the evil Snow Queen who brought eternal winter and killed her own sister. Then, he can rule the kingdom with both sisters out of commission. It's implied he pulls this because he thinks that it'll break Anna and the despair will speed up the freezing process.
• Kick the Dog: When Anna needs an "act of true love" to live, the characters assume this act would be a True Love's Kiss. Her supposed True Love Hans, rather than attempting a kiss in case it might be helpful or to keep the act up as part of common decency or to cover his tracks in case she survives, picks up a Villain Ball and reveals that he was Evil All Along, gloating about his Evil Plan to to manipulate Anna, murder her sister, and take over their kingdom in a sadistic monologue. He extinguishes all warmth in the room, even though speeding up her death has little benefit for his plan, and to twist the knife further, he leaves her to die alone before she's finished freezing. He veers into Bond Villain Stupidity territory in the process, since had he waited to watch her die, he might have prevented her from escaping with Olaf, and had he kept the act up and pretended to be at least well-intentioned, even if not actually her One True Love, he could have kept his Villain with Good Publicity status.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Elsa fights the Duke's two guards while wearing a flowing gown and high heels. Justified Trope in that she's the only magic user in the battle and doesn't need to move around very much at all.
• Kill It with Ice: Subverted, although it was a very close call for Anna. The movie makes it crystal clear that if Elsa wanted to kill someone with her powers, she could easily do so.
• Knife Outline: Elsa does this to one of Duke of Weselton's bodyguards using icicles.
• Lampshade Hanging: While Kristoff and Anna are chased by wolves:
  Kristoff: [smacks away a wolf with his foot] Who marries a man she just met?!
  Anna: [picks up Kristoff's lute] It's true love! [Anna hits another attacking wolf with the lute]
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: Rugged mountaineer Kristoff has a strong square jaw and is a powerful and heroic man while Hans' jaw is a bit narrower.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: In the prologue, after Anna is almost accidentally killed by Elsa, Grand Pabbie heals her by readjusting her memories of Elsa's magic; she still remembers the events, but as just mundane winter days.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • The Duke of Weselton loses his trade treaty, and is hit with an outright embargo, for his little attempt to have Elsa shot with arrows.
  • Hans is sent home to be judged by his brothers. Royals throughout history have taken a dim view of family members A) trying to take shortcuts to a throne, any throne, especially without clearing it through them; and B) failing spectacularly at doing so, leaving the crowned head in question in a position to demand restitution.
• Last Note Nightmare:
  • The reprise of "For the First Time in Forever" is shut down abruptly by Elsa's scream of "I can't!", then shifts to a minor key when the results become apparent.
  • And "Do You Want to Build a Snowman" has a downer ending, listed under Hope Spot above.
• Last-Second Word Swap:
  • From "In Summer", we have this gem:
  Olaf: [singing]
  Winter's a good time to sit close and cuddle
  But put me in summer and I'll be a...
  [stares at, then jumps over a puddle in front of him]
  Olaf: [brightly] ... happy snowman!
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • On one version of the DVD cover, Hans is nowhere to be seen making it obvious to people watching for the first time he's not the nice guy he seems.
  • The "Making Frozen" documentary that aired on TV 10 months after the movie's release doesn't attempt to avoid spoiling that "the handsome prince is the bad guy".
  • Trailers made Elsa look like a villain instead of one of the heroes. Since she became the Breakout Character, virtually every bit of marketing and licensed item has been very open that she's a good person.
• Laugh of Love: Anna tends to sigh and giggle a lot around Hans from the moment they meet, at least until he reveals his true colours.
• Leave the Two Lovebirds Alone: When Anna comes back and asks Hans to kiss her after being accidentally struck with ice in the heart from Elsa, the other people in the room excuse themselves with "we'll give you two some privacy".
• Left for Dead: Hans does this to Anna by leaving her in a cold room so Elsa's ice magic can kill her and removing all sources of heat and light.
• Leg Focus: During "Let It Go", tellingly in the line when Elsa sings about not being a good girl any more, the camera pans up her newly created dress which has a split up to the thigh on the right side.
• Leitmotif:
  • The five-note theme representing Elsa's magic is first heard in a major key when Elsa and Anna play as children. After the accident, the motif is transposed into minor keys for the rest of the movie until Elsa thaws the ice at the end, where it returns to a major key.
  • Kristoff has his own five-note motif, which is heard most strongly when he kisses Anna at the end of the movie.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: Hans's original plan would have taken at least a couple years, but the Endless Winter allows him to speed those plans up to only a couple of days.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Elsa's first instinct is to run away from Weselton's goons, but then they corner her...
• Letting Her Hair Down: Elsa unravels her bun into a French braid and changes her outfit when she sings "Let It Go"; this signifies how she finally feels free to do what she wants with her ice powers and doesn't have to hide her emotions anymore.
• Light Is Not Good: Elsa's magic manifests as a bright white glow, even as it freezes people's heads and hearts.
• Literally Shattered Lives: Inverted, as Anna's frozen body is so cold that it breaks Hans's sword.
• Literal-Minded: When Anna tells Kristoff and Olaf to wait a minute, Olaf starts counting. Olaf then barges in exactly one minute later.
• Littering Is No Big Deal: Elsa throws her cape and glove into the wind after embracing her ice powers. Not that the cold is a problem. Those two things are never seen again. She also tosses her tiara away just before the third running of the chorus, and during the post-credits stinger, Marshmallow picks it up and dons it himself.
• Little "No":
  • Elsa utters a barely audible "no" when Hans tells her that Anna is dead because of her.
  • Anna utters one of these when she starts to see visible signs of her skin turning to ice.
• Locked into Strangeness: When they are playing as children, Elsa accidentally hits Anna in the head with a blast of her magic, and a lock of Anna's hair turns platinum blonde; due to Grand Pabbie wiping her memories of Elsa's powers to heal her, she thinks she was born with it. The platinum blonde streak persists as she grows up, but is gone after she is fully unfrozen at the end.
• Lonely Piano Piece: "Let It Go" starts off as this, reflective of Elsa's self-imposed sorrow from isolation (the tune is the same one that plays when the King and Queen die). The percussion then builds as she realizes that this isolation is liberating for her and that she doesn't mind it.
• Love at First Sight: Downplayed when Anna and Hans agree to a Fourth-Date Marriage after spending the day together, as well as deconstructed as part of the film's exploration of the power and nature of love.
• Love Epiphany:
  • Kristoff is utterly in denial about his developing crush on Anna even despite Sven's efforts to turn him back around...until he sees the huge snowstorm gathering in the area where just he dropped her off, and he immediately rushes to help.
  • A non-romantic example comes when Elsa realizes that love is the key to controlling her powers.

• Love Floats: During "Love Is an Open Door," Hans and Anna dance on the balcony of a lighthouse and their shadow is projected onto the sails of a ship in the harbor. However, they are seemingly dancing in mid-air as there is no shadow of the floor they are dancing on nor the railing of the lighthouse balcony.
• Love Revelation Epiphany: Olaf tells Anna that Kristoff is in love with her. This coupled with Hans's betrayal also makes her realize it's mutual.
• Love Theme: "Love Is an Open Door" is set up as one, but it's downplayed and subverted in that while Anna is sincere about her verses, Hans is later revealed to be Evil All Along and is just using that time to get Anna to fall for him.
• Love Triangle: Downplayed and subverted. Anna and Kristoff bond throughout their journey to Elsa's Ice Palace, and by the time Kristoff's Shipper on Deck family tries to push the two together, it's clear to the audience that he's starting to see her in a romantic light, although the two both quickly try to explain that they are not a couple to the trolls and that in fact, she's engaged to Hans. Then Hans is revealed to be a Gold Digger who never cared and was manipulating Anna into a relationship so he could gain access to the throne. Both Anna and Kristoff don't realize their feelings for each other until Hans is already out of the picture and become an Official Couple in the film's epilogue.
• Lyrical Dissonance: "Let It Go" has gained a reputation of being an Empowerment Anthem. While it technically is about Elsa finally accepting her powers, it's also about her choosing to live a life of isolation away from everyone else.
• Madness Mantra:
  • When her skirt freezes like ice after falling in a river, Anna repeats: "Cold! Cold! Cold! Cold! Cold!"
  • After learning that her escape to the mountains actually brought on an Endless Winter, Elsa repeats: Don't feel, don't feel, don't feel, don't feel!
• Magic Feather: Elsa's gloves don't actually hold back her powers, but her confidence in them to do so helps give her a measure of control over them. This also means that deliberately covering her hands to keep her from breaking out of a prison cell is only temporarily effective at best.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Twice with Olaf:
  • His reaction to accidentally being split by an icicle is "Oh look at that. I've been impaled." in the most casual tone you can imagine. Being made of snow, it's a mild inconvenience, and actually amuses him, if anything.
  • He's placid even while he starts melting at the end.
    Olaf: Hands down, this is the best day of my life! And quite possibly the last...!
• Manly Tears:
  • Kristoff's reaction to seeing Elsa's ice castle:
    Kristoff: Now that's ice. I may cry.
    Anna: Go ahead. I won't judge.
  • Invoked by Hans when he announces his marriage to Anna followed immediately by her death, without adding that he did all he could to finish her off.
• Match Cut: There's a subtle one where Anna is shown outside and everything around her changes so she's now inside.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • When they're little girls, Elsa builds a snowman and names him Olaf, and manipulates his arms while telling Anna "Hi! I'm Olaf and I love warm hugs!" Years later, she recreates him as she's leaving Arendelle, but unwittingly creates an anthropomorphic version who says this as his introduction. Fitting, as Olaf is a living symbol of the loving relationship Elsa and Anna shared before things changed between them.
  • Elsa refuses Anna's request to marry Hans by asking, pointedly, "Anna, what do you know about true love?" When Olaf finds Anna freezing in the library after Hans betrays her, Anna says "I don't even know what love is."
  • Elsa and Olaf make similar "I love you, so go" remarks to Anna: Elsa's "Just stay safe and you'll be safe from me" in "For the First Time in Forever (Reprise)", and Olaf's "Because I love you, Anna, I insist you run" when he thinks Kristoff is going insane.
  • Anna's awestruck "And this place, it's amazing!" reaction upon entering Elsa's ice palace and seeing Elsa in her new dress mirrors her childhood shrieking of "This is amazing!" in response to Elsa making it snow in the ballroom.
• Meaningful Name: Four of the main characters' names, ("Hans", "Kristoff", "Anna", "Sven") combine to reference Hans Christian Andersen. See the character pages for the meaningfulness of the individual names.
• Meet Cute: Anna and Hans meet when he nearly knocks her into the water with his horse. Hans turns out to have exploited this trope as a way to get close to Anna and take advantage of her naivete. Turns out that he's just heartlessly using her and manipulating her into a quick engagement to get to the throne of Arendelle, and couldn't give two craps about her.
• Metaphorically True: The troll prophecy. While the verbal message is just a standard Self-Fulfilling Prophecy with a Prophecy Twist, he is simultaneously showing various images to go along with his words. It is later shown that "fear will be your enemy" refers to the emotion of fear in Elsa. However, he visually represents fear as a violent mob attacking Elsa, which is completely at odds with the intended message.
• Mickey Mousing: The song "Frozen Heart" consists entirely of action coordinated with the music.
• A Minor Kidroduction: The film starts with Anna, Elsa, Kristoff, and Sven as children, followed by a small montage which shows Anna and Elsa growing up.
• Mistaken for Insane: When Olaf first sees Kristoff talking to his troll family, he thinks he's crazy, since the trolls were disguised as rocks.
• Modeling Poses:
  • Spoofed when Sven did a hood ornament hottie pose to show off Kristoff's new sled.
  • Played with in "For the First Time in Forever." In preparation for the ball, Anna imitates poses in paintings, not experience or much other indication of how to act. She also attempts one while trying to emulate her sister.
• Moment Killer: A platonic version. Anna and Elsa were doing some much needed bonding during the coronation party when the Duke of Weselton, looking for a dance, interrupts. Notable in that he interrupts right when Anna has opened her mouth to speak.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • After the heartbreaking ending of the song "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" with the scene of the two sisters being orphaned and alone, the movie immediately time-skips to three years later where after some comments about the princesses being lovely and beautiful, we see Anna sleeping in a comical bedhead and drooling and cheerfully singing about how she could finally find true love.
  • The cheerful troll song "Fixer Upper" is followed by Anna collapsing due to her freezing heart, which causes a dramatic mood switch.
  • When Anna asks Hans for a kiss after Elsa freezes her heart, at first it seems all will go great, but then Hans stops and refuses, revealing his true nature, leaving not only Anna, but also the movie's audience, completely shocked.
• Mook Chivalry: One of the two mooks going after Elsa at her castle aims at her with his crossbow but waits to attempt to shoot until she is finished with the other mook and turns against him.
• Moral Event Horizon: An In-Universe example occurs when Hans begs Elsa not to "become the monster they think you are", as she is about to kill the two guys sent by the Duke of Weselton to shoot her, not knowing she that they attacked her first.
• Morality Kitchen Sink: The only true heroic characters are Princess Anna of Arendelle (who, is probably the most upstanding, noble, and moral character in the story and believes in doing the right thing no matter what, but as a Deconstruction of the typical Disney heroine, suffers a few Wrong Genre Savvy moments), Kristoff (who's gruff and standoffish, but turns out to be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold) and Olaf (as a living symbol of the bond between the two sisters). Queen Elsa, a Deconstruction for the Evil Queen archetype, is a Dark Magical Girl of Mass Destruction who can create sentient life and declares herself Above Good and Evil. But she soon suffers a severe case of Power Incontinence that plunges her country in an Endless Winter that she eventually learns how to lift and has one Trauma Conga Line after the next. Anna and Elsa's parents, serving as a deconstruction for the typical Missing Parent, are just regular people who are Unwitting Instigators of Doom by isolating Elsa (and Anna) from the rest of the world for so many years. The trolls, despite their best intentions, are rather vague on their instructions and caused the above misunderstanding on the part of the Arendelle royal family. The Duke of Weselton is a Not-So-Harmless Villain who is very egocentric but he is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants to save Arendelle from the winter Elsa cast (if only for selfish reasons). And then there's the Deconstruction of Prince Charming, Prince Hans who is a manipulative would-be usurper but has a Freudian Excuse.
• Motif:
  • Locked doors, warmth/cold, concealing things, catching people, snowflakes, boats.
  • Paintings. Anna begins turning to paintings for company during her isolation in "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", the passing of the girls' parents is marked by their portraits being covered, Anna models the behavior portrayed by the pictures in the portrait room portray as she prepares for the castle to open up again, and Elsa looks up at a depiction of her father's coronation as she practices for her own. The motif even shows up again in the sequel short "Frozen Fever" and Christmas Special "Olaf's Frozen Adventure," as well as Tie-In Novel A Frozen Heart.
• Mr. Exposition: Olaf, when discussing True Love with Anna:
  Anna: I don't even know what love is.
  Olaf: That's okay, I do. Love... is... putting someone else's needs before yours; like, you know, how Kristoff brought you back here to Hans and left you forever.
  Anna: Kristoff... loves me?
  Olaf: Wow, you really don't know anything about love, do you?
  Anna: [seeing Olaf's face melt] Olaf, you're melting!
  Olaf: Some people are worth melting for... just maybe right not this second.
• Murder by Inaction: Exaggerated Trope. Hans attempts this when he finds out his fiance is dying and needs an "act of true love", assumed by him and other characters to be a True Love's Kiss, to break the curse. Instead, he leaves her to freeze to death after a Break Them by Talking speech in which he taunts her for trusting him and trying to help her Hero with Bad Publicity sister, as well as gloats about his plan to murder her beloved sister. He also locks her in the room and extinguishes all sources of heat in order to prevent any chance of her being cured.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Elsa when she sees the deep freeze that has affected her kingdom, and again when she thinks she killed Anna.
  • Anna gets through this when it takes Hans betraying her to realize Elsa and Kristoff were right about objecting to their engagement.

Tropes N to Z

• Nature Is Not Nice: The storm at sea that kills the princesses' parents. Then the finale, with hero and villain alike all on the verge of dying from a massive cold front thanks to Elsa's powers growing out of control, is a stunning reminder of the impersonal, terrifying power of ice echoed in the middle of "Frozen Heart".
  Beautiful, powerful, dangerous, cold!
  Ice has a magic, can't be controlled!
  Stronger than one, stronger than ten,
  Stronger than a hundred men!
• Nature Tinkling: Nobody ever does this during the movie, but apparently, Kristoff likes to do it, as evidenced in Fixer Upper.
  Young Troll: Or that he only likes to tinkle in the woods?
  Anna: I did not need to know that.
• Nature Versus Nurture: Elsa's internal struggle. Her parents attempted to nurture her into controlling her powers and acting like a queen. But Elsa's true magical nature constantly pokes through this façade.
• Nervous Tics:
  • Elsa wraps her arms around herself whenever she's feeling stressed.
  • Anna brushes a lock of hair behind her ear whenever she feels nervous or embarrassed. She also tends to wring her hands together during a moment of anxiety.
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • Olaf's melting scene.
    Olaf: Some people are worth melting for but just maybe not this second.
  • Early previews gave the impression that the film would be pure comedy (teasers usually focused on Olaf and Sven antics, neither of whom had a great deal of screen time), but the story itself is more a mixture of drama as well as comedy.
  • Some TV ads focused entirely on Olaf portraying him as if he was the main hero, not even acknowledging Elsa or Anna at all.
  • The first full trailer made it look like Elsa created the Endless Winter on purpose — all of her shots showed her using her powers aggressively, with an angry look on her face. In truth, the winter is purely an accident, and the scene where she is angrily using her powers, it's to defend herself from the Duke of Weselton's men who are trying to kill her.
    • One of these aggressive-seeming shots used comes from a test animation of the scene where Anna and Kristoff jump off the cliff to escape from Marshmallow, for an earlier draft where she had been a villain, but this was changed by the film's release, as were several other aspects of the clip also sometimes included in promotional material. This test animation is similar, but also very different from the final version: among other things, Anna looks scared shitless while preparing to jump off the cliff, Marshmallow is actively trying to kill Anna and Kristoff instead of just chasing them out of Dodge, and his arms are made from tree branches instead of from solid ice. Kristoff and Anna are caught in a driving blizzard and Kristoff shouts "Now we have to survive this blizzard!" Anna replies "That's no blizzard, that's my sister!" The camera then shows Elsa casting her ice magic at the tippy-top of the North Mountain.
    • It also gave the impression that Anna's relationship to Elsa would be a secret to the rest of the cast until a big reveal.
  • The American TV commercials make the movie look like Tangled... IN THE SNOW!
  • The movie's nature as a musical was also mostly hidden, with only one of the songs included in any of the pre-release trailers.
  • A lot of ads for the movie make Hans out to be one of the heroic characters by having him pictured along with Anna, Elsa, and Kristoff with a friendly look. This is ultimately revealed to be an act — and by the end, he has revealed himself as the film's most villainous character.
  • Elsa is portrayed all over merchandising and promotional material with a confident Dreamworks Face smirk... but that belies the tightly wound ball of neurosis that she really is.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Both the trolls and Elsa's parents try to protect her from Burn the Witch! treatment, but their attempts backfire. The trolls warn Elsa needs to learn to control her gift, and that "fear will be your enemy" while showing an image of an angry mob attacking her future self. Her father responds by vowing to protect her by isolating her while she is still learning control, but teaching her to hide it increases her own fear, which both hurts her and in turn exacerbates her Power Incontinence.
  • While healing Anna, the trolls remove her memories of Elsa's magic. The memory removal part isn't essential to the cure — they just do it "to be safe." This not only raises a host of ethical problems, but leaves Anna clueless as to why her beloved sister is suddenly ignoring her, effectively making Elsa's attempts to be an Emotionless Girl and Aloof Big Sister treatment of Anna look like she suddenly stopped caring, creating psychological damage that makes Anna vulnerable to Gold Digger Hans's manipulation.
  • Elsa's response to the eternal winter? Hiding in an ice castle, leaving the rest of the people to suffer. She chases away the one group of people who were trying to help her, arguing they're safer that way, by creating Marshmallow, who attacks them with a ferocity that endangers their lives and prolongs the discovery of the solution.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • Hans tries to kill Elsa, meaning that Anna saving her would be an act of true love, thus saving Anna herself from the curse. In turn, said act also gives Elsa the inspiration she needs to realize that The Power of Love is the key to controlling her powers.
  • Just before that moment, when Hans lies to Elsa about her curse killing Anna, Elsa's fear gives way to despair, resulting in the raging blizzard her emotions had conjured to subside as she goes numb. This gives Anna a clear view of Hans about to kill Elsa, prompting her to rush to her sister's side to block the blade.
• No Cartoon Fish: Sven is depicted in a cartoony manner (as are the ducks and ducklings that Anna encounters in "For the First Time in Forever"), but the pickled jar of lutefisk at Wandering Oaken's Trading Post and Sauna looks very realistic.
• No Endor Holocaust: Once Elsa figures out the "undo" aspect of her powers, all the floral life affected by it is magically returned to a summertime state. Flowers exposed to the biting winter storm perk right up after the frosty wisps blow by them and whisk the snow and frost off, and the fairy tale color palette returns to the fjord (not to mention that just before, Anna turned from ice to normal, being just fine).
• No Flow in CGI: Averted as much as possible, with plenty of flowing hair and skirts. It becomes really noticeable in contrast, when Anna's dress for the coronation gets frozen stiff at the skirt when she falls into an ice-cold creek, and then she staggers like a Stop Motion cartoon the rest of the way to Wandering Oaken's Trading Post (and Sauna).
• No Ontological Inertia: Played with — the Duke of Weselton operates under the assumption that killing Elsa will automatically undo her winter. Hans, on the other hand, saves her specifically because he thinks they need her alive to stop the winter. Once she makes it clear she doesn't know how to reverse it, Hans concludes killing her is the best way to try to fix everything. Fortunately, we never get the chance to find out if this would have worked or not.
• Norse by Norsewest: Arendelle is basically Norway.
• No-Sell:
  • Anna throws a snowball at Marshmallow. Sure, it doesn't hurt him because he's made of snow, but, well, the giant snow rage monster in him comes out and he tries to chase her down.
  • Hans and the guards try to shoot arrows at Marshmallow. Since he's, you know, made of snow, it doesn't hurt him.
• Not Allowed to Grow Old: Elsa's and Anna's parents look to be in their mid-twenties in the prologue. At first it's understandable, given that the girls are about 8 and 5 at the time. However, they don't age a day by the time of their death, when Elsa is 18 and Anna is 15. Older Than They Look may be in effect by then, but at the time of her death, Iduna looks like the animation model used for Elsa at the coronation with brown hair and a different dress, which looks egregious when an 18-year-old Elsa is standing right in front of her.
• Not What It Looks Like:
  • A mild example, when Anna and Kristoff confront Elsa in her ice palace. One of the first things Elsa does upon seeing Kristoff is to ask Anna, "Who's this?" in a suspicious tone that suggests Elsa thinks Anna has found another stud to have a whirlwind courtship with.
  • Anna's first meeting with Hans, as she crashes into his horse, then falls into a precariously positioned rowboat. Hans's attempt to apologize to her ends up with him falling on top of her, and then she falls on top of him.
    Hans: Oh, boy! Uh...
    Anna: This is awkward. Not you're awkward, but just because we're... I'm awkward — you're gorgeous. Wait, what?
• Obvious Villain, Secret Villain: The Duke of Wesselton is at first set up to be the main villain, calling Elsa a witch and calling on his guards to use deadly force on her. So when the real villain is revealed to be Hans, who is manipulating Anna and is willing to kill Elsa, the audience is taken completely by surprise.
• Odd Name Out: In a more subtle example, Kristoff is the only main character whose name is not four letters long, including even the Duke (of Weselton). It could symbolize his role as an outcast, but it's probably just a coincidence. Even the queen and king are only referred to as the four-lettered "Mama" and "Papa" in the film proper.
• Ode to Apathy: The song "Let it Go" is sung by Elsa and about how she doesn't care anymore about people finding out about her powers since now they know. She also mentions not being bothered by the cold.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Elsa has several of these, but her biggest one comes when she sees the ice chandelier falling towards her.
  • Anna has some too, her biggest one is when Hans, instead of attempting to help her when she's cursed, taunts her and reveals he only faked his love for her to seize the throne.
• One-Steve Limit: Played for Laughs. When Anna is introducing Kristoff and Sven to Olaf, Olaf asks "who's the funky looking donkey over there?" Anna thinks he's referring to the reindeer, Sven, and tells him Sven's name, only for Olaf to follow up with "And who's the reindeer?". Anna repeats the reindeer's name, leading to a Running Gag where Olaf thinks that Kristoff and Sven are both named "Sven" for much of the movie.
• One-Winged Angel: Downplayed with Elsa's ice creature "Marshmallow". Although he's already pretty intimidating, make him mad and he'll sprout giant ice spikes that make him look like Bowser if Bowser were made of ice, before attacking.
• One-Woman Wail: Used over the end of For the First Time in Forever (Reprise) after Anna is struck in the heart by Elsa's ice magic. It really drives home how screwed she is. Oddly, the wail is absent in the soundtrack version of the song.
• Only Six Faces: Elsa, Anna, and their mother all have the same facial structure. However, like many other Disney animated films, the basic reason is that they share a Strong Family Resemblance.
• Opening Chorus:
  • "Vuelie", sung during the opening credits and logos (including the Disney castle logo).
  • "Frozen Heart", sung by ice harvesters in the prologue, right after the opening credits.
• Orphan's Ordeal: Anna and Elsa's parents lose their lives in a storm on their way to visit a foreign kingdom by sea at the beginning of the film. This robs Elsa of the only two people who know what she's going through, Anna of the only people who seemed to care about her, strains Anna and Elsa's failing relationship further than it already was, and forces Elsa to become queen at the young age of 21, a responsibility that she is by no means ready for.
• Outside-Context Problem:
  • Elsa is the only being with magical powers in the entire film, and even she doesn't comprehend how powerful she is, so when her magic sets off an Endless Winter, it comes as a shock to even her.
  • On the other side of the scale, Prince Hans comes completely out of nowhere as a scheming, politically-minded manipulator. In a story about magic and the bond between sisters, no one was expecting the villain to have based their plans on medieval laws of succession.
• The Outside World: Elsa and Anna both are trapped in the castle. They both emerge into the Outside World in two different ways. Anna goes on a journey searching for Elsa, who decided to let it go and stop holding in her powers by fleeing into the snowy mountains.
• Pair the Spares: Averted. Once Anna and Kristoff go on the adventure together — and especially after "Fixer Upper" — Hans seems to be the odd man out. Hans's apparent sympathy toward Elsa in the ice palace suggested a possible pairing, but Hans's later Evil All Along revelation upends this.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • The king and queen perish in a storm at sea.
  • The introduction shows Kristoff with a group of ice harvesters but by the time Anna and Elsa's parents run through the woods to seek the trolls, he and Sven are on their own, and are adopted by the same trolls not long after... without any parents nor even other ice harvesters anywhere to be seen. Kristoff later explains to Anna that "it was just [him] and Sven" before the trolls took them in but doesn't elaborate.
• Parental Bonus:
  • When bantering with Anna about her engagement to Hans, Kristoff starts asking her how much she knows about Hans. One of the things he asks is "foot size?" Anna quickly responds, "Foot size doesn't matter!" And you know the old joke. In fact, Kristoff looks a little... smug.
  • Anna also gives us this line when trying to open Elsa's eyes to the wintry predicament her magic has left the kingdom is in.
    Anna: Arendelle's in deep, deep, deep, deep... snow.
  • The trolls insinuate that the relationship between Kristoff and Sven is not quite within "nature's laws".
• Parental Marriage Veto: In this case, Older Sister Marriage Veto. Elsa doesn't approve of Anna and Hans marrying when they've only known each other for a day. It also serves as a warning that Hans is not who he seems.
  Elsa: You can't marry a man you just met!
• Parental Neglect: In "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" Anna's parents seemingly never notice that their youngest daughter is Going Mad from the Isolation after the castle gates are closed, the staff reduced, and the people allowed in limited. She is seen lamenting "all these empty rooms," turning to paintings for company, and is alone for most of the song, the one exception when she hugs her clearly surprised parents goodbye. The sequence implies they're busy dealing with Elsa, who is struggling with dangerous levels of Power Incontinence. The younger princess is even seen alone as she rides a bike clearly meant for two. Down the stairs. Standing on the backseat. On one foot. ''Completely unsupervised.'' When we see the inevitable crash, there's no evidence anyone came to check on the kid, who's established to have extreme bravery to the point of recklessness as a strength but also as a Fatal Flaw.
• Parent Service: Elsa doing her Supermodel Strut in "Let It Go" in a slinky dress.
• Pent-Up Power Peril: Elsa has grown up fearing her powers and trying to avoid using them, which just causes the power to build up and leak out (which makes her even more afraid of losing control of her powers, so she clamps down even more, which only leads to an ever repetitive cycle). Things come to a head when she plunges the kingdom into an endless winter without meaning to. But when she stops worrying about being found out and starts using her powers deliberately, she quickly gains full control of them.
• Pep-Talk Song: Anna's part of the Dark Reprise of "For the First Time in Forever", showing she's confident that Elsa will control her powers and will use them to end the Endless Winter.
• Perpetual Storm: Elsa's Power Incontinence causes one. It gets worse when she gets agitated.
• Persona Non Grata: The Duke of Weaseltown^note WESELTON! IT'S WESELTON! becomes this in Arendelle at the end as a result of his shenanigans throughout.
• Personal Horror: Elsa freezing Anna while trying to drive her away to protect her.
• Personal Raincloud: Olaf gets his own personal snow cloud at the end of the movie, although it's not for grief; it's meant to keep him alive in summer.
• Phantom Limb Pain: Inverted and played for laughs. After a fall off of a cliff, Olaf worriedly states that he cannot feel his legs. Kristoff helpfully points out where are his legs.
• Pimped-Out Cape: A handful of pretty capes appear in this movie.
  • Elsa's rich purple coronation cape has lots of subtle trimmings.
  • When Elsa becomes the Snow Queen, she makes a lovely ice cape with snowflake patterns.
  • Anna gets a green cape decorated with rosemaling when she goes after Elsa. After she loses that, she gets a magenta cape lined with white fur on the collar.
• Pimped-Out Dress: Anna, Elsa, and their mother wear dresses with some highly elaborate and lovely Norwegian inspired rosemaling (easy to miss at a distance). Then, once Elsa reinvents herself as the Snow Queen, she conjures herself a stunning off-the-shoulder gown complete with ethereal cape out of ice.
• Platonic Declaration of Love: Near the end, Elsa asks her sister, Anna, "You sacrificed yourself for me?" Anna replies, "I love you."
• Please Wake Up: Elsa, for a moment after Anna is frozen solid, before she breaks down.
• Plummet Perspective: Some snow falls off a cliff when Anna and Kristoff are fleeing from Marshmallow.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • A lot of problems might have been avoided if the parents or Elsa had just told Anna about Elsa's powers when they felt she was old enough. Anna has no idea why Elsa has suddenly cut her off or why the gates have been closed, leaving her feeling unloved when she grows up and vulnerable to Hans's manipulation, believing the relationship between her and Hans to be "true love" after only a day. Given this belief and knowing that she only has one day of the gates being open to form and solidify relationships, she agrees to his proposal, but when she tells Elsa and starts talking about inviting more people over, Elsa panics and orders the gates immediately closed again. Anna, not knowing about the powers, doesn't understand why Elsa is continuing to keep the family isolated, resulting in a fight that ends with Elsa shooting ice spikes at Anna in the middle of the party.
  • Some of Elsa's repression after her parents died appears to result from misunderstanding. When Agnarr gives Elsa her gloves, he tells her "conceal it, don't feel it, don't let it show", which suggests Elsa should hide her powers. Elsa later drops the "it"s, making the "conceal, don't feel" mantra she uses on her coronation day. She then simplifies it further, to just "Don't feel," which changes the intended meaning from "hide your powers" to "I must suppress all emotion so my powers can't flare up."
  • The trolls have no idea how to help Elsa gain control of her powers—only that "fear will be your enemy." The parents take this as meaning other people's fear, and worry about Elsa being attacked by mobs, so they close the castle gates and try to keep her powers hidden to protect her. Unfortunately, growing up hiding her powers exacerbates her fear, which in turn exacerbates her Power Incontinence, which then makes her more afraid, in a dangerous cycle.
  • After young Elsa accidentally strikes Anna in the head and calls their parents for help, the parents come into an ice-covered room to find their child with ice magic cradling their younger one, who is unconscious and suddenly has a streak of white in her hair. The father exclaims, "Elsa, what have you done? This is getting out of hand!" and when he takes her to the trolls, both he and Pabbie assume the problem was Power Incontinence. Pabbie tells Elsa her power is beautiful but also that it needs control and the father responds "She can learn to control it, I'm sure." Except that Elsa had been controlling her powers; she just tripped and misaimed when she accidentally hit Anna. If her parents had asked or Elsa had been able to articulate what really happened, the situation would've probably been handled differently because then the issue that needs resolving would be "Elsa and Anna need to exercise more caution when playing with Elsa's magic" than "Elsa needs to control her powers".
• Power Incontinence: Elsa is born with ice powers but a major plot point is that she (initially) can't control them well and that her ice powers sometimes manifest unintendedly and hurt others. Elsa accidentally hurts her sister Anna when they are small children, and later as a young adult she inadvertently puts the entire country of Arendelle in an eternal winter.
• The Power of Family: The "Act of True Love" that saves Anna's life turns out to be Anna sacrificing herself to save her sister Elsa.
• The Power of Love: A big theme for the film, but it also plays around with expectations on what love is. This is also what allows Elsa to finally control her powers.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Hans to the extent that there's a possibility he might not make a bad ruler had he succeeded (save for anyone he felt he could throw away). He's great at maintaining good publicity, and accordingly, will act perfectly nice to anyone who might be useful. When Anna asks him to take care of Arendelle while she's trying to get back Queen Elsa and return summer, he offers shelter in the castle and hands out supplies personally.
• Present-Day Past:
  • Olaf's Imagine Spot in "In Summer" shows picnic and beach scenes in the style of the 1940s and 1950s, especially the Mary Poppins reference where he dances with seagulls.
  • Although sailing vessels were in wide use until at least the mid-nineteenth century, the type of sailing vessels shown look more at home a century or so earlier.
  • The word 'OK', which was invented in 1839, is used frequently throughout the film, especially by Anna. It works for post-coronation day events in the film, but Anna says 'OK, bye' to Elsa in "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", which was before the word 'OK' was around.
  • Characters often speak in modern colloquialisms. For example, Oaken's "big summer blowout" sale, Kristoff complaining that he'd just paid off his sled, or Anna saying that the new sled is "the latest model" — "and, it even has a cup holder."
  • In "Let It Go" Elsa refers to frozen "fractals", a word invented by Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975.
  • Chocolate sweets like the ones staked on the buffet were first manufactured in 1847, so they're not out-of-place, albeit as a very new and exotic treat, but chocolate fondue is still about 140-150 years off, though, alas.
• Princess Protagonist: The two main characters, Anna and Elsa, are both princesses, though Elsa becomes a queen early on. Anna thinks of herself as a Princess Classic who dreams of a life filled with balls and handsome princes, though that doesn't quite work out for her. Instead, the plot is dominated by Anna's quest to bring Elsa back home.
• Pronouncing My Name for You: The Duke of Weselton insists it is pronounced "Wessel-ton" when everyone pronounces is "Weasel-town". Once his treachery is exposed, Kai relays a message from Queen Elsa: "Arendelle will henceforth and forever no longer do business of any sort with Weaseltown."
• Prophecy Twist: "Only an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart" is assumed to refer to Anna's still beating, ice-cursed heart, and an act of another toward Anna, such as a True Love's Kiss. In the end, Anna's selfless act thaws Elsa's (figuratively) "frozen" heart and her own literal one, and Elsa's love for Anna unlocks the part of her magic that undoes the curse of the ice and restores spring to Arendelle.
• Pulling Your Child Away: After Elsa accidentally freezes the fountain and shoots ice at the Duke's guards while running from her disastrous coronation ceremony, the crowd backs away from her in fear, including a mother who clutches her baby closer (who had earlier asked her if she was alright) and a father who pulls his two children away.
• Purple Is Powerful: Elsa's coronation cloak is reddish purple. Her mother wears a purple dress.
• Race Against the Clock: The second half of the movie becomes this after Elsa strikes Anna's heart with ice magic. The countdown timer isn't a clock; it's Anna's hair.
• Rage-Breaking Point:
  • The Duke of Weselton's two men come to kill Elsa. Elsa is afraid to use her powers and begs them to turn away but is forced to use them to defend herself, and when they continue to take shots at her, Elsa finally goes into a state of Tranquil Fury and nearly impales one and almost pushes the other right off the balcony of her ice palace.
  • Anna's years of frustration with Elsa boil over when Elsa orders the gates closed again and she then has at Elsa with that fateful fusillade of armor-piercing questions.
  • After the stress of being in public for a day while worried about her secret Power Incontinence, Elsa snaps at her Locked Out of the Loop sister's series of Armor-Piercing Questions and shoots an array of ice spikes at her.
• Ramp Jump: Dramatically subverted during the sled chase. Kristoff steers the sled across the canyon but it doesn't make the gap so he has to jump off to save himself.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: There's a reason why the sword shattering upon contact with the just-frozen Anna was listed under both Shown Their Work and Beyond the Impossible. Those unaware of the effect low temperatures have on steel will likely assume that The Power of Love (in a way, at least) was at work here.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Prince Hans, after revealing his true colors, taunts Anna for being naive and playing right into his plans by giving both him and Elsa a chance.
  • Anna gives a minor one to Hans at the end of the movie.
    Anna: The only frozen heart around here is yours.
  • Played for Laughs in regards to the trolls naming all of Kristoff's flaws, and doing so in order to get Anna to fall in love with him.
• Rebuilt Pedestal: This trope is implied to apply to the way the general public sees Elsa. It's implied in the beginning that they adore her, with crowds excitedly cheering her public appearance, but they become horrified and start doubting her when she creates a massive summer blizzard over the kingdom. When it turns out that it was an accident, their good opinion of her appears restored, with cheering crowds appearing once again in the epilogue, this time at her magic ice rink.
• Recurring Camera Shot: We get two shots set up with someone looking out of the study window. The first time, it is with Elsa during "For the First Time in Forever" number, where she is looking at the kingdom citizens waiting outside the gates. This is to show that's she nervous about opening up to all those people out of fear that her powers will be revealed to them. The second time, it is with Hans during his Motive Rant to Anna, where he looks out the window. Due to the blizzard outside, there are no people this time and he only sees his reflection in the glass, showing that he only cares about himself.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The wolves that ambush Anna and Kristoff's sled in the forest seem to have eyes that glow red as they stalk towards their prey.
• Red Herring:
  • The Duke of Weselton is made to appear to be the main villain when it is actually Hans. It helps that the audience may now subconsciously think they know what to expect when Alan Tudyk (previously King Candy in Wreck-It Ralph) voices a character.
  • Another red herring (within a red herring) is that "only an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart." Hans is Anna's true love, right? So all she needs is a kiss from him and she'll be saved. Or so you would think. Hans never loved Anna in the first place, and is only using her status as Princess to get into the Arendelle royal family. Anna realizes that it's Kristoff who is her true love, so Anna tries to find him for his kiss. Unfortunately, her curse freezes her solid just as Hans is about to kill Elsa, which saves Elsa from Hans's sword. This counts as "an act of true love", thus reversing the curse. (As is usual for prophecy, everybody — including the Wrong Genre Savvy audience — overlooks an equally valid interpretation of the statement.)
  • The even number of human main characters is something of a meta one. A lot of fans were convinced that whichever man lost the Love Triangle and didn't end up with Anna would be paired with Elsa instead.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Played with. Anna is the Red Oni to Elsa and Kristoff's Blue, and the trope is deconstructed for all the characters, subverted for Kristoff and Elsa, as well as Double Subverted for Anna.
  • Kristoff is implied to have become a cynical but sensible loner due to a Dark and Troubled Past, while Anna is an outgoing Wide-Eyed Idealist who has had a traumatic past herself but is still more of a naïve, Sheltered Aristocrat^note  Kristoff's Establishing Character Moment implies experiencing violent encounters in his past, while Anna's trauma has been emotionally-based., and the two initially butt heads. Subverted over the course of their adventure. Kristoff begins to warm up, is inspired by her fearlessness and open heart. Anna meanwhile has her optimism and faith repeatedly tested and comes to have a more sophisticated and less naive worldview, but after a talk with Olaf helps her work through her Heroic BSoD, she retains her energetic nature and chooses to remain warm-hearted. And as Kristoff remains The Straight Man of the cast, by the end of the film, the two have come to better appreciate each other's personalities.
  • Elsa's a deconstruction and subversion of the Emotionless Girl trope, one who attempts to invoke it and be as emotionless as possible in order to suppress her Emotional Powers, but it's taken a massive emotional toll on her, makes her appear uncaring, and in fact exacerbates her Power Incontinence. She's not emotionless or as rational as she appears, but rather consumed by fear. (See Failsafe Failure entry and first Fatal Flaw entry). Anna's a bit of a wild child who is more prone to acting on her emotions without always thinking them through. Next to Elsa's façade of perfection, this contributes to Successful Sibling Syndrome. The low self-esteem and desperate need for a loving relationship that result from this and her neglect combined with her two Fatal Flaws of impulsiveness and naivete lead to serious problems, including a manipulative gold-digging fiance trying to murder her and Elsa in order to take over the kingdom. Eventually, the Trauma Conga Line pushes her into Heroic BSoD. However, she works through it and in the end, it's her choice to remain open-hearted that saves everyone and helps Elsa to work through her own fear and begin opening up again.
• Related in the Adaptation: In the original story, Gerda (on whom Anna is based) is unrelated to Kai and the Snow Queen (the characters on whom Elsa is based), at least by blood, although Gerda and Kai are said to be as close as siblings. Here, Anna and Snow Queen Elsa are blood-related sisters. This was done to strengthen the connection between Gerda/Anna and the Snow Queen.
• Repression Never Ends Well: The main conflict stems from Elsa being forced to hide her ice powers most of her life, leading to her unleashing them at her coronation party due to stress and plunging the kingdom into winter.
• Required Secondary Powers: Immunity to cold (and even the ability to keep ice in contact with her skin fully frozen) go with Elsa's ice magic.
  Elsa: The cold never bothered me anyway.
• Requisite Royal Regalia: In the coronation, Elsa is required to raise an orb and scepter in her bare hands while the bishop of Arendelle pronounces her queen.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • Hans' introduction and song with Anna. He systematically builds a fake personality designed to appeal to Anna through a mixture of standard manipulation techniques and cold reading, all while playing it off as "coming out of his shell".
  • When Hans prevents one of the Duke's henchmen from shooting an arrow directly at Elsa, Hans looks at the chandelier above Elsa's head before redirecting the Mook's arrow so that it would fall on her. Doubles as a Freeze-Frame Bonus.
  • Rewatching the film knowing Hans is the villain allows one to notice the darker subtext in his scenes, like how he gestures to the kingdom while singing "I've been searching my whole life to find my own place" during "Love Is an Open Door" and him getting progressively angrier at the Duke also subtly illustrates he never cared for the populace and was more concerned about his authority being preserved. Even his introduction scene with Anna gets more sinister, due to the ambiguous nature of it.
  • He's always seen wearing gloves, but removes his right glove during The Reveal to show his selfish side. As he leaves Anna to die, he puts it back on so he can keep up his farce and pretend to mourn her death.
  • He also downplays the prank where three of his brothers he was invisible for two years as "what brothers do," but while it's another case of siblings teasing one another, it also shows the inner anger he has against his family.
  • When the Duke asks Anna if she has powers as well, Hans is quick to parrot her when she describes herself as "completely ordinary", only to back-pedal and say that he means it in "the best way." At first, one might think he's clumsy given he doesn't match Anna at times, but in reality, he gives subtle nods that she's just that easy to dupe.
• Riddle for the Ages: Why was Elsa born with ice powers? How do her ice powers make clothes; are they made of snow or cloth?? The powers were going to be explained by one of the trolls in an earlier draft, but that scene was removed to keep the flow of the film. It's not until the sequel that the question is addressed.
• Right Behind Me: When Anna, Kristoff and Olaf are being chased by Elsa's new pet Marshmallow:
  Olaf: Hey, Anna! Sven! Where'd you guys go? We totally lost Marshmallow back there! [Marshmallow roars behind him] Hey, we were just talking about you! All good things, all good things....
• Royals Who Actually Do Something:
  • Anna personally sets out on a journey to save her missing sister Queen Elsa and their kingdom, rather than commission soldiers or risk the prejudicial Duke of Weselton sending his men, and makes sure there is someone left looking after the kingdom while she's gone. It's both deconstructed and reconstructed, since for all of her courage and heart, after being locked up for most of her life, she doesn't actually know what she's doing and doesn't have any magic powers or special training to help her. Her horse runs away, she starts to freeze, and when Elsa responds to hearing that the kingdom is under an Endless Winter not by thawing it, but by revealing that she doesn't know how and panicking, Anna finds herself kicked out of the ice palace with no solution to stopping the winter. However, she realizes she needs — and finds — warmer gear, transportation, directions, and a way to thaw by herself, which in turn shows Elsa how to deal with her Power Incontinence.
  • Elsa qualifies, as the Duke of Weselton's concerns with securing his trade interests in her kingdom make this one of the few Disney Princess movies where political diplomacy and international affairs are an explicit concern. At the end of the movie, Elsa cuts off trade between Arendelle and Weselton after the Duke tries to have her killed.
• Rule of Drama: At the climax, the realistic thing for Anna to do would have been to simply push Hans when he's raising his sword at Elsa which would have spared them both from being struck. Instead, she jumps in between him and Elsa to take his blow in order to serve the film's "act of true love" requirement.
• Rule of Funny: How else to explain both Anna and Kristoff looking shocked that they are suddenly inside Olaf's Imagine Spot.
• Rule of Glamorous: So how can the power to manipulate ice allow Elsa to reweave her cloth dress into ice? Simple, it's pretty.
• Rule of Symbolism: According to Paul Briggs, Olaf represents the love between Anna and Elsa.
• Rule of Three:
  • The Duke of Weaseltown ^note WESELTON! refers to Elsa as a monster three times: first after she knocks him over at the castle doors, again when he questions whether Anna has any powers, and finally after Hans tells him about Anna's "death".
  • Elsa makes an ice surface by stomping the ground on three occasions; once during her and Anna's Minor Kidroduction, again during "Let It Go" when she's making the ice castle, and finally during the ending, when forming the skating rink in the courtyard.
• Running Gag:
  • Olaf's constant Accidental Misnaming of Kristoff as "Sven."
  • Throughout the movie, people keep calling the Duke of Weselton the "Duke of Weasel Town."
• Sadistic Choice: At the climax of the film Anna is forced to choose between running to Kristoff, where a kiss from him might save her from her freezing heart but at the cost of her sister's life. Or she can run towards Hans and stop him from killing her sister but at the cost of her own life. She chooses the latter.
• Sanity Slippage Song: Anna admits over the course of "Do You Wanna Build a Snowman" that she's going mad from the isolation.
  Anna: I think some company is overdue!
  I've started talking to
  The pictures on the walls!
  (Hang in there, Joan!)
• Savage Wolves: Anna and Kristoff are attacked by wolves at one point in their journey.
• Say My Name: All over the place, but it's justified when Anna and Kristoff are shouting each other's names on the fjord because there's a blizzard blocking their vision. They need to find each other so that Kristoff can save the dying Anna with true love's kiss.
• Scenery Porn: The ice and snow effects are particularly stunning, in a film already loaded with stunning visuals.
• Second Love: After Hans's betrayal, Anna ends up with Kristoff.
• Self-Deprecation: During the lyrics for "Reindeer(s) are Better Than People," Kristoff says that reindeer are better friends than people, but people smell better than reindeer — with himself being the human exception in both cases.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Pabbie's original warning to Elsa is that "fear will be your enemy", but he might as well have said "the only thing to fear is fear itself" for all it gets her stuck in a loop of being afraid of a part of herself in case she can't control it, trying to avoid it and getting even worse at controlling it.
• Self-Imposed Exile: Elsa retreats to the mountains and builds a "kingdom of isolation" when her ice powers are revealed to the people of Arendelle. When her sister Anna finds her and tries to bring her home, Elsa tells her "I know you mean well, but leave me be".
• Shaped Like Itself: "I'm never going back, The past is in the paaaasssst..."
• Shared Family Quirks: Both Anna and Elsa have a fondness for chocolate and even simultaneously do the "sniff in the air" motion when they smell it at the coronation banquet. On a more serious note, when Anna and Elsa are grieving for their parents' death, they sit down and hug their legs close to their chest in the same way.
• Shared Universe: With Tangled, apparently, if you catch Rapunzel and Eugene Fitzherbert being among the coronation guests filing in during "For the First Time in Forever".
• Shave And A Haircut: The first two verses of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" start with Anna tapping this on Elsa's door.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Kristoff repeatedly tells the trolls that he's not in a relationship with Anna. He even manages to briefly cut off "Fixer Upper" when he tells them she is engaged to someone else, but the trolls decide that a fiancé is not a fixed thing — and by the way, they don't see no ring.
• Shipper on Deck: The trolls heartily support Kristoff and Anna together, to the point of trying to marry them on the spot.
• Ship Sinking: The sheer brutality of the main plot twist did this to the Hans/Anna ship, and by extension, every other Hans-related ship. Essentially, Hans reveals that he only ever cared about getting the throne, and Anna was the easier sister to seduce. He then explains how now that she's dying, all he needs to do is kill Elsa. Said Evil Gloating is done with a smug, satisfied smile.
• Sigil Spam: The crocus is part of the official crest of Arendelle and is seen adorning various props and official regalia, including the scepter and orb Elsa takes as part of her coronation ceremony, her gloves, her cape, both sisters' coronation dresses, Anna's necklace, wallpaper, and tablecloths.
• Shoo Out the Clowns:
  • Plucky Comic Relief Olaf follows Anna into the ice palace but not to the second floor where Elsa and Anna's conversation goes south and Elsa freezes Anna's heart.
  • While Olaf manages to help give some well-needed points to Anna, during the climax he is quickly blown away. Sven nearly drowns in the cracking ocean, but manages to resurface and climb onto a floating ice chunk. Both return once the danger is past.
• Short-Lived Leadership: Once Anna goes off to search for her sister, she names Hans regent. He very briefly is accepted as the king of Arendelle after Anna's supposed death, having convinced the diplomats that he and Anna had exchanged their vows before she turned to solid ice and that Queen Elsa is guilty of treason, sentencing her to death. His brief reign falls immediately when in an attempt to kill Elsa, Anna suddenly swoops in and shields her sister from being killed, causing his claims to be exposed as false, and he ends the movie arrested and caged while Elsa returns to reestablish her title as the queen.
• Shout-Out: Now has its own page.
• Shout-Out Theme Naming:
  • Say "Hans Kristoff Anna Sven" really fast and the theming should be apparent. Plus, Elsa's name is only one letter away from Elisa, the heroine of another Andersen tale "The Wild Swans."
  • A subtle one for the name Arendelle. To the south of Norway lies the port town of Arendal.
• Shown Their Work:
  • The ice harvesting techniques shown in the opening sequence are all historically accurate — and modern accurate, too, since many of the tools the ice harvesters use, like the hooks and saws they use to lift blocks of ice out of the troughs and load them on the wagon, are still used in modern ice harvesting. With one exception: If ice is thick enough to stand on like shown in the opening shot, you don't thrust the saw directly into it without drilling a hole first (as shown in the very next shot).
  • Someone spent some time studying the proper way to trim the mane on a Norwegian Fjord horse.
  • When the camera tracks through Arendelle prior to the coronation, you may see a few people raising a green Maypole with two big green rings/circles, famous in Sweden during "Midsommar", an event that celebrates the summer.
  • What would happen in real life if a wooden, freshly lacquered sled carrying a lit lantern and a heavy load of ice were to crash into a snowy ravine? Why, the lantern would break, the flaming oil would set fire to the sled, and neither the ice nor the snow would put it out. Even if Kristoff just paid it off.
  • Making a snow anchor is a legitimate rappelling technique — specifically here, a snow bollard. Not that it did them any good because of Marshmallow (and realistically, that fall should have killed them or at the very least broken a lot of bones) but they get points for trying.
  • The animators travelled to the Ice Hotel in Quebec to use it as a basis for designing Elsa's ice castle interiors.
  • A few of the movie's crew walked through snow in dresses. They then used this information to develop software for animating character movement through snow, in particular, Anna's attempt to trudge through ankle deep snow after her horse gets spooked.
  • Regarding the scene with a shattering sword, those who look closely enough will observe that Anna's frozen hand is so cold that frost forms radiating outward from her hand over the blade. Any metallurgist will tell you that extremely cold steel is as brittle as sugar glass, and solid ice as thick as the frozen Anna is as hard as properly forged steel. Reality Is Unrealistic, indeed.
  • The sun can be seen from the same balcony of Elsa's ice castle at both sunrise (in "Let It Go") and sunset (in "For the First Time in Forever (Reprise)"), at the correct angle for summer in Norway. Putting Arendelle at about 63 degrees north.
  • While certain aspects of Sven's biology are suspect in a lot of ways, he does have his summer feet. Reindeer's feet spread in summer to cope with boggy tundra, and shrink again in winter. This might explain why he slips when he tries to climb the staircase to Elsa's castle.
  • Dr. Jackson Crawford, a lecturer on Old Norse at UCLA, provided consultation about the Norse language and runic scripts.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: After seeing Anna alive after he had locked her in a room to die from a curse, Hans is flabbergasted at her survival because Elsa had frozen Anna's heart. Anna gives Hans a piece of her mind (and then some) once and for all.
  Hans: Anna? But... she froze your heart!
  Anna: The only frozen heart around here is yours. [punches him in the face so hard it knocks him off the ship]
• "Shut Up" Kiss: Anna gives Kristoff one when he starts babbling.
• Sibling Murder: Elsa nearly accidentally kills her sister as a child. They are playing with Elsa's ice powers when Elsa slips and hits Anna in the head, knocking her out. Anna is saved by trolls, but years later she does die when Elsa accidentally freezes Anna's heart during a panic attack. Anna turns to ice in the climax but comes back through The Power of Love.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Anna and Elsa. Anna is cheerful, extroverted and a Badass Normal while Elsa is stoic, introverted and very powerfully magical. This is highlighted by their hairstyles, with Elsa's hair in a single, lone French braid and Anna's in pigtails.
• Sidekick Song: "In Summer", sung by Olaf.
• Sigh of Love: Anna tends to sigh and giggle a lot around Hans from the moment they meet, at least until he reveals his true colors.
• Sitting on the Roof: Anna and Hans are seen sitting on the castle's rooftop as part of their Falling-in-Love Montage.
• Skewed Priorities: When Hans is distributing cloaks and clothes to freezing residents suffering in the magical July blizzard, the Duke of Weselton complains that Hans is giving away tradeable goods. Hans's response, repeatedly stressing that he was left in charge, displays more anger at the duke questioning his authority than his apparent lack of concern for the populace.
• Small Start, Big Finish: Elsa's "I Am Becoming" Song, "Let it Go", is a "Gaining Confidence" Song that starts out in low tones and with minimal accompaniment as Elsa observes the icy landscapes. However, as she realizes she is finally free to be herself, she sings louder, the background music gets bigger, culminating in her belting notes as she relishes in her new palace.
• Sock Slide Rink: During the "Love is an Open Door" song, Anna and Hans do this during their Falling-in-Love Montage. Sliding across one of the vacant halls of the castle in stockings and socks respectively.
• Snowball Fight: Anna lobs a snowball at Marshmallow. This only makes him mad.
• Snow Means Cold: Justified Trope. The story takes place at the height of summer, which means warmer air, which means a lot more moisture in the air (both from more evaporated water, and from warmer air simply being able to hold more moisture in it), which means a lot of raw material to make snow with. Accordingly, the Endless Winter makes it not only cold, but a foot or so of snow everywhere.
• Snow Means Death: Played with. Most of the film takes place during an Endless Winter, but when the film reaches its climax, as Elsa is imprisoned, Anna is dying, and Hans reveals he was evil, the landscape turns from a relatively benign winter wonderland to wracked by a harsh snowstorm. Justified as Elsa at this point is terrified out of her mind that Arendelle has taken on the appearance of a wasteland and Anna is missing, and her emotions are directly causing the raging storm. Once Hans lies to her about Anna's death, Elsa falls so deep into despair that she no longer cares about anything, and the storm subsides.
• Solo Duet: "Reindeers are Better than People," is a "duet" in which Kristoff is the lead and Sven is supposed to be the second part. Except, Sven is a reindeer and can't talk, so "he" is actually Kristoff singing with a goofy voice.
• Song of Many Emotions:
  • In "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?", Anna is confused and upset about Elsa shutting her out, happy when she hugs her parents, excited when she tries to play by herself, despondent when she realizes it's not the same by herself, bored and lonely in the empty castle without a friend, and time and again, she hopefully knocks on Elsa's door. At the end of the song, when she receives the news about her parents' deaths and Elsa still doesn't talk to her, Anna is devastated. Elsa doesn't sing with Anna but is prominently featured in the fragment, adding her sorrow and fear to the mix.
  • "For the First Time in Forever" is shared between Anna and Elsa. While the former is hopeful and excited, the latter is apprehensive and sad.
  • During "Let It Go", Elsa embraces her magic and all the emotions she has been suppressing for so long. She flips between sorrow about her isolation, anger at the circumstances that made her repress her powers and feelings, and joy and pride about using her magic and being finally free. Analyzed in detail here.
• Spiritual Antithesis: To the 1972 Swedish film Cries and Whispers. Both movies deal with estranged sisters attempting to reconcile. It's very easy to see Anna and Elsa as Disneyfied versions of Maria and Karin, respectively: Anna and Maria both try to find affection in people they shouldn't, while Elsa and Karin are averse to physical contact and suppress their emotions until they can't take it anymore and explode (parallels between "Let It Go" and Karin's self-mutilation). Both movies also climax with an Act of True Love, however C&W is considerably more cynical than Frozen, as unlike Anna and Elsa, Maria and Karin vehemently reject any participation in said act (it involves a third sister and a maid instead), ultimately go their separate ways without reconciling and continue their miserable lives.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • To Tangled, from title to character design. This led many to believe it was just going to be Tangled IN SNOW before the film proved them very wrong.
  • The title is even worse in Chinese: only one character from the four-character title is changed, from "Tale of Magical Hair" to "Tale of Magical Snow" (or, slightly less obviously, "Tale of Ice and Snow" in some regions). Tangled's Chinese name was originally a pun on the translation for another Disney film, and it's lost on Frozen.
  • The same applies to the Vietnamese titles — "The Cloud-Haired Princess" (fancy term for someone with long, luxurious hair), and "The Ice Queen".
  • And the Swedish titles, "Trassel" and "Frost", or "Tangle" and, well, "Frost". Both are one-word titles resembling the English titles.
• Stealth Pun:
  • From the lyric "A kingdom of isolation / and it looks like I'm the Queen" from the song "Let It Go", Elsa stresses the first syllable in "ice-solation".
  • A great Woolseyism in the Finnish translation: "Let It Go" is translated as "Taakse jää", meaning something like "It stays behind". "Jää" here is a form of the verb "to stay"...but there's also a noun "jää", which means ice. Plus, "Taakse" can also be considered a command form of "back", so the phrase could be translated as something like "Stay back, ice", fitting with how Elsa wants to control her powers.
  • During "For the First Time in Forever," there's the line "Tonight imagine me gown and all / Fetchingly draped against the wall..." (this said while Anna has wrapped herself in the drapes)
  • In the Czech dub, Anna doesn't ask Elsa at the ball why she is shutting the world out, but rather why she is so cold (chladna) to the world.
  • Anna briefly holds three ducklings. Three is an odd number. Anna is the odd duck out.
  • Olaf mistakenly calls Kristoff "Sven" — he was referring to Kristoff with a pet name.
• The Stinger: Marshmallow finds the tiara that Elsa threw away and puts it on, and his angry spikes retract.
• Stink Snub: The trolls describe Kristoff as being smelly in the "Fixer-Upper" song and ask if that's why he and Anna aren't a couple.
• Stock Sound Effect: Baby Kate Cry.
• Storming the Castle: Hans and a raid of soldiers invade Elsa's ice castle.
• Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion:
  • "In Summer":
    Olaf: Winter's a good time to stay in and cuddle
    But put me in summer and I'll be a...
    [Olaf approaches a puddle, thinks for a moment, then jumps right over it, instead belting out...]
    Happpppppyyyyy snowman!
  • At the end of the second verse of "Let It Go", one expects her to say "The cold never bothered me anyway," like is done in verses 1 and 3, but Elsa goes straight into the bridge.
    Here I stand
    And here I'll stay.
    Let the storm rage on...
  • Played for Drama in the reprise of "For the First Time in Forever". The rhyming scheme sets Anna's final line up to be "everything will be all right". She gets to "be" before Elsa cuts her off with a Big "I CAN'T", a blast of Power Incontinence, and things getting much worse instead.
  • Subverted by the Last-Second Word Swap in the reprise of "For the First Time in Forever", where Anna sings that Arendelle is in "deep, deep, deep, deep...snow..." which does rhyme with the previous line, "I have a feeling you don't know."
• Subverted Trope: The film gained a lot of attention for subverting expectations and stereotypes associated with fairy tales.
  • Anna and Hans appear to fall in Love at First Sight, have a Dance of Romance and sing a cute duet together during a Falling-in-Love Montage, quickly become engaged and appear to be One True Loves headed toward the Fourth-Date Marriage trope so common in many films, and after Anna is accidentally cursed and only an "act of true love" can save her, all the characters assume a True Love's Kiss from Hans is the answer. Not only is it not, the film has Hans lean in as romantic music swells, only to pause, give a Slasher Smile, and deliver a Wham Line revealing himself to both Anna and the audience to not just be her One True Love despite all the love tropes that had been set up, but to have been Evil All Along.
  • The handsome prince riding in to save the day. Watch the Big Damn Heroes finale. While Kristoff is brave to ride on in, he has almost nothing to do with saving Elsa or Anna. Olaf saves Anna from freezing to death at the risk of his life and lets her out of that room. Anna sacrifices her life to save Elsa, which ends up being the Act of True Love that breaks the curse.
  • Villains being easily recognizable just by their appearance. We are reminded of this with the obviously greedy Jerkass Duke, and then it's flipped on its head with the gorgeous Hans. The Duke was a jerk, but he's not pure evil and is in fact a Red Herring, while apparent Prince Charming turns out to be a villainous Prince Charmless in disguise.
  • When Elsa runs to the North Mountain, she lets loose with her powers and sings what sounds like a Villain Song about she now sees "no right, no wrong, no rules for me," seemingly beginning a Start of Darkness and becoming an Evil Witch / Evil Queen. It's later shown she really didn't mean to curse the kingdom, and didn't even realize that it had happened Nor is she opposed to Anna's happiness, but rather was concerned about how quickly Anna and Hans were committing, and when that relationship does not work out, she shows no issue with Anna moving on and starting a relationship with Kristoff.
• Sunken Face: A blink-and-you'll-miss it moment, but Prince Han's face is briefly caved in when Anna punches him.
• Supermodel Strut: At the end of "Let It Go", Elsa sways her hips as she confidently struts to the balcony, as part of throwing away her old, proper life.
• Super Special Move:
  • During her iconic "Let It Go", Elsa assembles a small snowman with her magic, unknowingly giving it life. Later, when she becomes aware that she can grant life to ice/snow constructs, she forms a giant, monstrous guardian that is made of ice and snow. The snowman is harmless, small, and goofy while the guardian has ice claws, can easily throw two adult people around, and reacts badly to perceived threats.
  • Played for Drama with Elsa's ice strikes when directed at a human being. When Elsa is eight years old, she accidentally hits her sister with one of these, sending that person straight into a magical coma. As it struck that person's head, the mountain trolls are able to reverse it and the only lasting effect is getting a streak of platinum-blonde on her hair. By the time Elsa is eighteen, she accidentally shoots another ice streak at the same person, though at her heart. This proves far more dangerous as it eventually freezes that person alive. Now, it's a subverted example because it's as much a result of Elsa's ice powers getting stronger as it is of the fact the person is hit twice and that the second time it affected her heart, a weaker point.
• Survival Through Self-Sacrifice: Rather than getting a True Love's Kiss from Kristoff to thaw out her own frozen heart, Anna chooses to sacrifice her own life by throwing herself in front of Elsa just as Hans is about to kill her. She turns frozen solid moments after, however since it counts as an Act of True Love, she thaws out moments later and returns back to life.
• Suspiciously Apropos Music: Early on, the ice workers sing the "Frozen Heart" song whose lyrics double as a statement about the fair and foul Elsa and foreshadow the movie plot:
  Born of cold and winter air
  And mountain rain combining
  This icy force both foul and fair
  Has a frozen heart worth mining.
• Taken for Granite: The final effect of Elsa's magic striking Anna's heart is that Anna's entire body turns to ice from the inside out in the course of a few moments.
• Taking the Bullet: When Anna sees Hans about to kill Elsa, she tries to intercept his sword. Her body turns to ice just before the sword touches her, causing the sword to shatter.
• Taking You with Me: When Hans cuts Marshmallow's leg off and Marshmallow falls into the gorge, Marshmallow tries dragging Hans down with him, but Hans manages to grab hold of the icy staircase and get helped up by the soldiers.
• Tap on the Head:
  • Elsa gets one of these from a falling ice-chandelier, of all things (carefully dealt by Hans, though nobody realizes at the time). She's unconscious for what must be a few hours, but recovers very quickly after a few seconds of blurred vision.
  • The same happens to Hans in the climax via being thrown backwards with a magical shockwave — though he's only out for a few minutes and is visibly groggy afterwards.
• Tears of Awe: When Kristoff, an ice professional, sees the impossible fantasy of ice sculpture that is Queen Elsa's Ice Castle, he takes the time to stop and admire it with wide eyes, mentioning that he would cry (we don't see the tears though).
• Tempting Fate:
  • This happens to Anna when she bumps into Hans while finishing her "I Want" Song.
    Anna: For the first time in forever, nothing's in my waaaaay— [crashes into Hans's horse] Hey!
  • At The Reveal Anna says "You won't get away with this!" as Hans is about to leave her to die. His response? "I already have." It makes the punch that much more satisfying when it comes.
  • Hans, after having tried to kill Anna and Elsa, stays behind after Elsa thaws the kingdom out to exclaim his surprise to Anna that she is still alive rather than running away. That he's rewarded with a punch to face is letting him off way too easy.
• Terrified of Germs: Referenced, but averted. Anna suspected that Elsa's use of gloves resulted from a dislike of dirt.
• That Man Is Dead: In "Let It Go", it's clear Elsa feels this way regarding the persona she adopted while in the castle. Her complete visual transformation from "Queen of Arendelle" to "Ice Sorceress" really hammers this point home.
  Elsa: That perfect girl is gone.
• That's an Order!: Subverted when Anna's sweet, friendly nature makes her unable to go through with demanding that Kristoff give her a ride and she ends up convincing him instead of ordering, despite her being a princess.
  Anna: I want you to take me up the North Mountain.
  Kristoff: I don't take people places.
  Anna: Let me rephrase that. [tosses a sack at Kristoff containing supplies he had wanted] Take me up the North Mountain... please.
• That's What I Call "X"!: Kristoff's reaction to seeing Elsa's Ice Palace for the first time is "Now that's ice. I might cry..." Anna tells him, "Go ahead. I won't judge."
• They Died Because of You: During the climax, Hans tells Elsa that Anna is dead "because of you!", though he only thinks that's the case.
• Thinking Out Loud:
  • Kristoff likes to "speak for" Sven. Though Sven "agrees" with what's said, it's more so Kristoff can just tell us what he's already thinking. For some odd reason, "Sven" always "wins" the arguments.
  • Olaf does this to a lesser extent. This can be heard happening when Anna and Kristoff first meet him. Also, when Anna hesitates before knocking on Elsa's front door, he says, "Knock? Just knock. Why isn't she knocking? Do you think she knows how to knock?"
• This Cannot Be!: After seeing Anna alive after he had locked her in a room to die from a curse, Hans has this very revelation when he sees her and Elsa both alive and exclaims to Anna, "But she froze your heart!"
• Thwarted Coup de Grâce: Anna's Barehanded Blade Block to save Elsa from Hans's Coup de Grâce.
• Toilet Humor: Not blatantly but is still there:
  • Anna wondering if she's elated or gassy during "For the First Time in Forever".
  • Olaf is rambling a bit about yellow snow when he comes across Anna and Kristoff in the woods.
  • The "Fixer Upper" sequence has two:
    • One of the trolls says he passed a kidney stone.
    • One of the troll children mentions how Kristoff only tinkles in the woods, something Anna didn't need to know. ^note In case you're wondering, we're talking about him relieving himself near trees.
• Tongue on the Flagpole:
  • In the teaser trailer, Sven gets his tongue stuck on a frozen lake during a quarrel with Olaf over a carrot.
  • In the film proper, he does manage to get his tongue stuck to the rail of Elsa's ice staircase while Anna and Kristoff are inside talking to Elsa.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Anna and Elsa have a sweet bonding moment when they simultaneously smell out their favorite sweet, chocolate, complete with synchronized motions. It shows that the two still have a bond in spite of the isolation from each other.
  • Anna also has a love of sandwiches.
  • Sven loves carrots, to the point where he tries at least three times to steal Olaf's nose.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: The "Party Is Over" scene that sets off the main events of the film is full of this, both sisters acting impulsively:
  • Anna asks to marry Hans, despite not having thought her decision fully through.
  • After Anna asks for Elsa's blessing and starts talking about inviting his family over, Elsa panics and orders the castle gates - which were only to be open for just that one day - closed again early.
  • This freaks out Anna, who is Locked Out of the Loop with all knowledge of Elsa's powers removed from her mind says she can't take living in isolation anymore, and she tugs Elsa's hand as Elsa starts to leave, which makes one of Elsa's gloves come off, freaking Elsa out further.
  • Elsa then snaps at Anna's begging for an explanation and impulsively shoots an array of ice spikes at her.
  • Elsa then immediately flees without trying to explain the situation first, contributing to a Hero with Bad Publicity situation and keeping her from realizing the kingdom's begun to suffer from what appears to be an Endless Winter in the middle of July, and it doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon.
• Tragic Dream: Defied. Since he's a snowman, Olaf's dream of being out in the sun during summer would count as this. Fortunately, Elsa gives him a miniature snow cloud to let him live it out.
• Trailers Always Spoil:
  • The "Elsa" trailer briefly shows a clip of Elsa saving Olaf from melting. Although you could be forgiven for thinking it's when she creates him. She actually creates him during "Let It Go".
  • In the merchandise, notice how Hans is left out of the merchandise unless it's a set of the full cast, but Kristoff isn't, marking him as the male lead. Notably, Kristoff has a Mattel and Disney Store fashion doll, but Hans only has a Disney Store one. The Disney Store makes dolls of the villains, so the fact that a Hans doll is present isn't all that strange after you learn the twist.
  • Some of the trailers spoil the scene where Elsa thaws Arendelle at the end. In fact, the promos for Disney Channel and Freeform all play up scenes from the epilogue, spoiling the movie's resolution for those who didn't see it yet.
• Translation Convention: The characters are shown singing in their own language at the beginning of the movie, then sound as if they're speaking English throughout the rest of the movie.
• Trauma Button: When Anna tries to convince Elsa to come home with her, Elsa suddenly has a flashback back to the moment in their youth when she almost killed Anna with her powers, which Anna didn't remember due to Pabbie altering her memories.
• Trauma Conga Line: For both sisters:
  1. At a young age, Elsa inadvertently almost kills Anna, which leads to a warning from the trolls that makes her fear both the reaction of other people and the potential of her power to cause harm, and becomes afraid to show any emotion at all. She won't even let her parents give her a hug anymore, for fear of hurting them.
  2. Meanwhile, Anna is given Laser-Guided Amnesia and is left to wonder why her sister and best friend in the world suddenly doesn't want anything to do with her anymore.
  3. Then their parents die, leaving both of them utterly alone in the world.
  4. Elsa can't control her secret Emotional Powers in the aftermath of their death, and so can't even leave her room to attend their parent's funeral.
  5. Locked Out of the Loop Anna has no clue why Elsa is still avoiding her and leaving her to deal with the burden of their parents' death without any friends or family, as well as with the responsibilities involved in being the only living member of the royal family willing to leave her room at the time the previous monarchs are lost, including explaining the new queen's mysterious absence, without knowing why Elsa doesn't seem to care and wants to continue their parents' policy, started after the accident Anna had removed from her memories, of keeping the two of them as isolated as possible.
  6. Another three years of isolation go by and Anna finally finds someone she seems to connect with, only for Elsa, who's concerned about Anna entering into a committed relationship so soon (see first Decon-Recon Switch entry), to immediately close the gates again and tell Anna that she has to choose between a life beyond the gates or the only home she's ever known and her only remaining family.
  7. Elsa's secret is revealed when she snaps at an Armor-Piercing Question during the confrontation, and she faces calls of "monster" as her panic and Power Incontinence grow.
  8. As Anna deals with realizing that her family kept her in the dark about such a major secret, as well as feeling guilt for the confrontation, Elsa flees and the kingdom plunges into a magical blizzard in the middle of summer and the suffering people begin to express suspicion that her estranged but still beloved sister is doing it on purpose.
  9. Just when Elsa thinks she can live without any magic-related problems, she's informed about the Endless Winter, and she feels she has just doomed everyone in Arendelle and is powerless to stop it.
  10. Anna gets unintentionally shot in the heart with magical ice, which starts to slowly freeze her from the inside out.
  11. Elsa, meanwhile, feels even more guilty after Anna gets cursed.
  12. Anna then gets literally thrown out by her panicking sister's giant snow monster.
  13. Elsa survives an assassination attempt, only to be knocked out and imprisoned instead.
  14. Anna's one hope to save her, after she is left to slowly freeze to death when her sister once again accidentally hits her with ice magic, turns out to be a heartless manipulator who's only after the throne and leaves her to die after subjecting her to a sadistic monologue about how no one loves her.
  15. Elsa collapses in grief when she thinks her sister died because of her, only to be saved by Anna actually freezing to death, and looks up to see Anna's frozen body, as Anna had realized that her sister really was in danger and needed to give up her chance to live and to finally find love when she chooses Taking the Bullet for her sister instead.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot: Elsa takes apparently no more than a few hours to get from Arendelle up to the top of the North Mountain on foot. It takes about a day and a half to two days for Anna to travel up the North Mountain to Elsa's ice palace, first by horse, then by foot, then by Kristoff's sled, then by foot the rest of the way. This is likely because she was not initially traveling to the mountain specifically, but rather searching around for the missing Elsa — she may have been traveling away from the North Mountain until the scene at the trading post when she overhears Kristoff's remarks to Oaken about the storm coming from the direction of the North Mountain. Likewise, it appears to take Hans and the Arendelle soldiers roughly thirteen to eighteen hours to travel from the castle in Arendelle to the ice palace on horseback since they appear to leave in the early afternoon and are seen arriving at the ice palace just as dawn is breaking. The difference between the travel times of Hans and Anna could be explained by Hans and his team riding horses the whole way and with soldiers who may have known the terrain and/or been more experienced trackers, whereas Anna made the majority of the journey on foot and half of it unaccompanied, after spending most of her life in isolation, but no explanation is actually given how they found where to go.
• Triumphant Reprise:
  • "Eatnemen Vuelie", the chorale at the beginning of the movie, is sung again, this time with instrumental accompaniment, when Anna's Heroic Sacrifice breaks her curse and Elsa channels her love for her sister to thaw her Endless Winter and restore summer.
  • The "Epilogue" track, which is a reprise of "For the First Time in Forever" and "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?". For the first time in forever, Anna finally has the bond with her sister she had been seeking for years. Note that they're skating together with Olaf, just like in their introduction.
  • "For the First Time in Forever (Reprise)" starts off as a Triumphant Reprise, but ends up becoming a Dark Reprise about halfway through.
  • The scene where Anna congratulates Elsa after she thaws Arendelle is accompanied by a brief instrumental reprise of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?".
• Truck Driver's Gear Change: Some of the songs contain gear changes that are very noticeable.
  • "For the First Time in Forever" starts in F major and goes up a half step on each verse.
  • "Love is an Open Door" ends a full step up from the key it starts in.
  • "In Summer" ends a full key up from where it begins.
• True Blue Femininity: Anna and Elsa both wear dresses that are mainly blue, although Anna's other outfits incorporate a lot of green because she is both feminine and significantly cheerier than her sister. Meanwhile, Elsa's costumes all include some form of blue: her sky-blue ice dress, the blue dresses she wears as a child, her teal coronation dress and cyan-colored gloves.
• True Love's Kiss: Played with. Grand-Pabbie Troll tells Anna that only an Act of True Love can save her. The first idea that occurs to the other trolls is, "like a true love's kiss!", so off Anna goes to get a kiss from her beloved Hans who doesn't actually love her.
• Truth in Television:
  • Quick involvement in a relationship can be a sign that something's not right. Sure enough, the reason why Hans was so quick to ask Anna to agree to marriage when they barely knew each other was that he was a manipulative Gold Digger taking advantage of her naivete and emotional vulnerability.
  • Abusive partners are capable of acting perfectly nice and charming, both in public and in private.
  • Abusive partners will also often engage in Victim-Blaming, as Hans does in his Break Them by Talking speech — "You were so desperate for love, you were willing to marry me just like that!"
• Twirl of Love: Near the end, Kristoff twirls Anna after she shows him his new sled.
• Unimpressive Progress Reveal: When Anna and Kristoff reach the North Mountain. Anna begins scaling the rock wall as Kristoff teases her for her inability to climb. After a few shots, the camera pans out and we see Anna about 5 feet up the side of the cliff.
• Unknown Rival: Kristoff and Hans are both in the running for Anna. Kristoff isn't really aware he likes Anna until later, Hans doesn't even know Kristoff exists, and neither even are in the same place at the same time until the plot is resolved.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: During "For the First Time in Forever", Princess Anna dancing and singing her way down the railing of the road to the castle with the visitors taking little notice of her.
• Unwanted Assistance: Kristoff's response to "Fixer Upper". He doesn't want his family's "help" impressing Anna because all they do is talk about his flaws. Also, and far more importantly, it's preventing them from examining Anna and determining what Elsa's magic blast did to her.
• Uriah Gambit: Downplayed and inverted. When Queen Elsa flees and an Endless Winter sets in, Princess Anna volunteers to find her and help the kingdom. Hans initially protests that it's too dangerous for her to go alone and suggests he accompany her himself — until she says that there needs to be someone to stay and take care of Arendelle and asks him to do it. Once he's in charge, then he's happy to have her go off on her own, although he's careful to take soldiers with him on the "rescue mission" later on when her horse very publicly returns without her. In his Break Them by Talking speech, he implies that this trope was his intent, gloating that in order to take the throne, he had already been planning to kill Elsa, "but then she doomed herself, and you were dumb enough to go after her!".
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Anna punches Hans off the ship for lying to her, then he is thrown into a jail cell onto a ship back to the Southern Isles to face punishment for such.
• Villain Has a Point:
  • "Don't be the monster they fear you are!"
  • In his "The Reason You Suck" Speech, Hans mocks Anna for so quickly accepting his proposal. Elsa and Kristoff agree, and by the end of the film, Anna admits she was wrong and made a mistake. Also a Played With trope when he also mocks her for going after Elsa. The film emphasizes that this was a reckless move, but ultimately validates her choice to keep faith in Elsa.
• Villainous Breakdown: The Duke of Weselton has a minor one when, as he is forced to return home to Weselton in disgrace, he insists that he is the victim of fear. Not only is Elsa having all trade with his country cut off due to his blatant act of attempted regicide, but the messenger deliberately pronounces its name as "Weasel Town".
• Villainous Face Hold: Prince Hans holds a weakened Anna's chin up so she's looking him in the eye whilst he tells her of his plan to kill Elsa and usurp the throne.
• Villainous Valour: Despite Elsa's vast powers, the Duke of Weselton's guards are willing to attack her armed only with crossbows. They hold their own for a surprisingly long time.
• Villain Song: Played with, greatly.
  • "Let It Go" is an odd case. It was actually originally written to be one of these, but the writers realized the song was too inspiring for a villain. Rather than changing it to make it more consistent with the villainous direction they were originally going for with Elsa, the filmmakers were inspired by the song to change Elsa from a Tragic Villain to a Classical Antihero Deuteragonist. Despite no longer actually being one, in some respects it still retains some of the beat and feel of a villain song, and contains elements that would be quite at home in one, such as a powerful magic user conjuring a giant fortress for herself while singing gleefully about how she's not going to live by anyone else's rules anymore. The German translation of the lyrics makes it sound more of a villain song, with phrases such as "Die Kraft sie ist Grenzenlos" (The power is limitless), "Die Kälte sie ist nun ein Teil von mir" (The cold is now part of me), and "Nur ein Gedanke und die Welt wird ganz aus Eis" (Just a thought will turn the world to ice).
  • "Love Is an Open Door" is a Villain Song disguised as a romantic duet. It originally comes off as a triumphant "I Am Becoming" Song of the Power of Love to heal. However, after Hans reveals his true colors, the song transforms into a stealth Villain Song, in which Anna's naivete becomes an "open door" for Hans's plan to usurp Arendelle's throne. Anna and Hans's exchange of "We finish each other's — Sandwiches! — That's what I was going to say!" goes from being a Birds of a Feather moment to evidence of Hans's manipulative prowess. The paired singing of "You and I were just meant to be" becomes especially emblematic of the film's Deconstruction of Love at First Sight; real-life romance takes time to develop.
  • The Frozen OST contains an outtake called "You're You", which implies more of Hans's ulterior motives than "Love Is an Open Door" does.
• Visual Pun:
  • In "For the First Time in Forever", the second verse starts "Tonight, imagine me, gown and all/fetchingly draped against the wall," as Anna approaches a nearby drape, twirls, wraps herself up in it, and then dramatically leans against the column, and hits herself with the drawstring.
  • As Olaf once more starts to melt in the heat, he says "Hands down, this is the best day of my life..." Immediately, his left arm falls off before Elsa resurrects him. Hands down, indeed....
  • Snowlem Olaf laments "Man, am I out of shape!" as he runs from Marshmallow — while his body parts are literally out of order.
• Wacky Wayside Tribe: The trolls are a detour from the mountain and the plot. While trying to stop eternal winter, the pair are held up because the trolls want to wed Anna and Kristoff.
• Walk on Water: Elsa can achieve this by using her powers to freeze the water on which she steps completely solid. She makes good use of this ability during her escape from the castle after her powers are exposed, when she flees across the surrounding fjords. She doesn't stick around long enough to see the ice left behind quickly spread to freeze the entire fjord, disrupting the water currents, and causing the air temperatures to drop and snow to start falling.
• Warning Song: "Beware the Frozen Heart", which serves as both a warning and as Foreshadowing.
• Warts and All: A key theme of the movie. Anna has Big Sister Worship towards Elsa, insisting Elsa "would never" hurt her and blaming herself for everything that goes wrong in their relationship at first. By the end, she confronts the fact that her sister isn't perfect, admitting "I was wrong" when Hans reminds her "You said she'd never hurt you." She still loves her after having this recognition, and the unconditional love she shows for Elsa the human, not just for the perfect facade Elsa had worn for years, is what helps Elsa handle her powers.
• Weather Dissonance: It's supposed to be summer in Arendelle, despite all the snow around. We are treated to a few funny reminders, such as Oaken's big summer blowout sale (and having almost nothing left in the "winter department"), him and Kristoff exchanging some words about the unusualness of "a real howler" happening on the North Mountain in July, and Olaf's fantasies about summer.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Implied for Elsa. During "For the First Time in Forever", the way she looks up at the painting of her father while she is mentally preparing herself for her coronation, not to mention her coping mantra involves the phrase "Conceal, Don't feel", which has its roots in her father suggesting that to control her powers she "Conceal it, don't feel it, don't let it show," and the way she interacts with her parents in "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" all seem to suggest that she fears being a disappointment to her deceased parents.
• Wham Line:
  • Isolated Princess Anna and Prince Charming Hans appear to fall in Love at First Sight, have a Dance of Romance and sing a cute duet together during a Falling-in-Love Montage, quickly become engaged and seem to be One True Loves headed toward the Fourth-Date Marriage trope so common not just in Disney movies, but many family-friendly films. To the surprise of many audience members, when Anna and Hans ask for her blessing, reclusive Queen Elsa neither approves nor refuses because of the God Save Us from the Queen! trope, but rather declines on grounds that are actually reasonable:
    Elsa: You can't marry a man you just met.
  • Near the end, when it looks like one of the major subplots is going to be solved. It's hard not to feel the impact when what you thought was the entire point of the movie starts falling around your ears... indeed, when one of the most famous and commonly-expected tropes in fairy-tale tradition is subverted in a single soft-spoken line:
    Hans: Oh, Anna... if only there was someone out there who loved you.
• Wham Shot:
  • Hans stopping inches away from Anna's lips and giving a wicked grin, which shocks the audience that something's not right.
  • As Elsa is bawling over the frozen Anna, her ice begins to thaw from the heart outwards, revealing she did the Act of True Love which in turn saves her.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Since Hans is being sent back to the Southern Isles for his crimes against Arendelle, the audience has no clarity over what becomes of his horse, Sitron.
• What's Up, King Dude?: Zigzagged. The castle doors were closed for thirteen years to try to hide Princess Elsa's ice powers. The plot is kick-started when the doors are opened again for Elsa's coronation ceremony. Once they do, Princess Anna rushes out among both aristocracy and villagers, eager to mingle with "everyone." The opening is only temporary, though, and Elsa continues to invert the trope so much that even her own sister, the usually bold Anna, awaits Elsa's permission to stand next to her - even after the royal steward physically moves her there, Anna steps back to try to give Elsa a respectful space until Elsa herself indicates her interest in speaking with her. However, Anna shows Elsa how to overcome her fear and the film ends with them opening the gates permanently and ice-skating together with the public.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Hans calls out Elsa for nearly killing Weselton's soldiers while they were defenseless. An unusual example in that from Hans's point of view, it also appeared as if Elsa had attacked first.
• Why Couldn't You Be Different?: Parodied briefly; while going after Elsa in the snow, Anna briefly mutters to herself how it would have been nicer if Elsa had tropical-related powers as opposed to ice-related ones.
  Anna: She couldn't have had tropical powers that covered the fjord in white sand and warm... [sees the smoke coming from the chimney of Wandering Oaken's Trading Post and Sauna] ... fire!
• Wintry Auroral Sky:
  • There are green and purple northern lights in many of the scenes set at night. The plot even starts because, when they are kids, Anna wakes Elsa up not being able to sleep due to the lights.
    Little Anna: The sky's awake. So I'm awake. So we have to play.
  • Later, the lights appear to be something of an Empathic Environment as they illuminate the trolls' comedic "Fixer-Upper" song, then vanish at the moment Anna's frozen-heart condition suddenly worsens in a Mood Whiplash.
• Worse with Context: At some point, Hans tells Anna about how some of his brothers once pretended he was invisible. Classic case of older siblings teasing the younger one, except it lasted for two years.
• Wrong Genre Savvy:
  • The trolls suggest that the "act of true love" needed to thaw Anna's heart is True Love's Kiss, and all the characters assume the same. In the end it's a Heroic Sacrifice that saves the day. Then it turns out, Elsa's platonic love also counts, as it was necessary to end the perpetual winter.
  • Anna adamantly believes in Love at First Sight with Prince Hans, and is tragically proven wrong when the latter reveals himself as a Machiavellian Gold Digger, with even the audience being fooled right up until the denouement, so good is his act.
• Wrong Guy First: Anna falls for the gentlemanly prince at the start and spends much of the movie engaged to him. He turns out to be a jerkass and she moves on to the sincere mountain man.
• Yellow Snow: In thinking about colors he'd like to see in snow, Olaf mentions yellow right before he realizes that is a terrible color for snow.
• You ALL Share My Story: After Anna's accident, she is healed by a bunch of trolls, who just so happen to be Kristoff's adopted parents.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Anna to Elsa, especially in the Dark Reprise of "For the First Time in Forever", as she expresses her confidence that Elsa can bring summer back so Arendelle will be fine. When Elsa successfully does such in the end, Anna says to her, "I knew you could do it."
• You Are in Command Now: Anna leaves Hans in charge of governing Arendelle, so that she can go look for Elsa.
• You Are Not Alone: A major theme is that no one should be forced to face their troubles alone. Be they political or supernatural in nature, you can lean on friends and family.
• You Monster!: The Duke yells that Elsa is a monster three times when he sees her ice powers. It's implied he is prejudiced against people who can use magic.
• You Must Be Cold:
  • Averted by Hans. As the snow starts falling and Anna still wears her ballgown that leaves her arms and shoulders bare, he only pulls his jacket tighter around himself. Serves as a hint that he doesn't really care about her.
  • Played straight by Kristoff. As they race back to the royal castle with Anna freezing because of the curse, he puts his hat on her head.
• Younger and Hipper: Inverted. Kai and Gerda, who were the child-aged protagonists in the original story, are replaced by the young adult protagonists in this version. Their names are given to a pair of middle-aged servants.

---

"Gliiide, and pivot, and gliiide, and pivot, and gliiide, and pivot..."

---