catmuto
Since: Nov, 2012
01/21/2016 00:00:00
Not to mention that the obvious romance-bait Fixer Upper song was horribly placed. Yeah, Anna, I know you're freezing from the inside out and could die if we don't heal you soon, but you could wait a bit longer? We REALLY need to bring this song out!
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Tries Too Hard To Do Too Much
Disney wants you to know that it's in the modern era. With modern sensibilities and modern theme and modern merchandising.
Hence - Frozen. Which is a classic Disney movie, as well as a subversion of the typical Disney tropes, and all the characters are conveniently created to perfectly match their toy line counterparts.
I actually went in with high hopes. I loved how Tangled told both a fairy tale and also carried themes like subtle emotional abuse and still held on to humor and felt lighthearted (mostly). And... I was massively, massively disappointed.
Frozen's main problem is that it just has too much going on at once. You have Anna's "romance" with Hans and UST with Kristoph which is also completely downplayed come the end because the writers wanted to make sure young girls understood to wait for *~true love*~. Which makes the "fixer upper" number (you know, the obvious romance bait one) completely unnecessary.
You also have Anna's desire to go bring her sister back and return the warm weather by doing so except it doesn't quite work out that way because of Elsa's sudden emotional outburst almost killing Anna and causing her to give up. So it's only convenience that the two end up back together and they forgive each other on the spot.
You have Elsa's awkwardly handled freakout over her all-powerful powers that were conveniently fixed and forgiven by the very end. I assume they were going for some kind of social anxiety but they couldn't spend too much time on it because why build deep emotional conflict when you have to zip to the next plot point?
Oh, you also have Hans's plot to take over the kingdom. Except that's not really focused on at all until the Wham Line, where any other antagonists in the movie are promptly downgraded.
And Kristoph... is there, to be a romantic interest and hang a lampshade on Disney romances (except not), along with Olaf to handle all the humorous moments.
At least one or two of these should have been cut out to make more room for the other plotlines. Everything ties together like a chewed-up jigsaw puzzle in the end but it feels like many of the stories were completely unnecessary and simply existed to lampshade previous established Disney tropes. Could have been worse, but could have been so, so much better.