Much like Princess Anna’s trek up the mountain, I knew I was in for a long haul.
And I didn’t even have any men’s lives or sleds to destroy along my way with DDS (damsel in distress syndrome) In fact, it was a man putting me in the distress… of watching “Frozen”, finally. “If you don’t”, he threatened, “I’ll steal your firstborn and put her in a tower. And when she’s old enough, I’ll scale her har and sneak up to make her read ‘Goodnight Moon’ to me every evening while I suck my thumb and rock back and forth in my snuggie.” And as bad as that threat that never happened sounds, it’d still be a better fairy tale than what I was about to see. Let’s review.
It took less than five minutes in before I was in hate with “Frozen”.
First, the ice cube collectors and their opening song felt like a forced combination chimera of the “Hi-Ho-Hi-Ho” Snow White dwarves mixed with “The Lion King”. And the baby reindeer and his carrot felt like a dangling carrot. (“Don’t get bored yet! There’s cuteness coming,” they lie-implied.) I kept waiting for the cube collector dudes to be relevant later on in the story. Aside from it being the trade Kristoff was born into and raised doing, it didn’t. He just… sells ice. And then later on, his maybe-at-some-point sister in law would also make ice from her hands. So that’s a… nifty coincidence? I tried racking my brain for a meaning behind that connection and all I can come up with is maybe it’s meant to be some metaphor for wealth or something? Like it comes so easily to the queen that it’s a curse – but people like Kristoff have to haul ass and work so hard that he has a better appreciation for it? Even when it’s fashioned into an icy death castle?
That’d be fine and make sense if there weren’t too many other pieces of more obvious symbolism that don’t match up to it. Like the fact that when her parents notice that they’ve got the opposite of Barrymore Firestarter on their hands (when she near-misses on committing wintry sister-cide), they do what any keeping-up-appearances family does: cover it up and dance around the issue with kid gloves. No acknowledging the problem. No seeking professional help. Just cover up your hands like Hitler did when he started to get Parkinson’s from too many drugs.
That way we don’t look imperfect to the commoners we need to fearfully revere us.
(“Help who? And at what cost, dad? AT WHAT COST?!”)
I should probably pause to make a few concessions so this review doesn’t sound like Grumpy Cat supplanted Siskel for the purposes of ripping apart a kid’s film. First, I like the sister-love theme. I’m a sister, so that was a green check mark for me. Second, the awkwardness scene of when Anna and the Prince meet wasn’t terrible either. At least it wasn’t as overdone or cliché as the scene where she’s dancing around and talking about wanting to comfort-eat because she’s nervous (which is, ironically, exactly what the movie itself was making me want to do).
That and Olaf – who unfortunately showed up too late to mitigate this blizzard of emotion I was experiencing to make the movie salvageable. But it didn’t matter anyway (*end concessions*) because his qualities double as defects. Despite his fun random one-liners like “I have no skull. Or bones” (that made me laugh), it doesn’t take long to see he’s little more than Jack Frost jester and a bouncing punchline.
(Am I laughing? Yes. Does it still fail to augment to the tale? Yes.)
Rather than bringing anything solid to the table as far as advice-giving goes, he’s mostly just a “yes-man” who kind of makes people laugh and also comments on the obvious. No Jiminy Cricket conscience guidance. No talking about how the seaweed’s greener in somebody else’s lake. No hakuna matata affirmations. Where would I get this?
From igneous gnomes. Kind of.
Actually, not really.
Not even a little.
(How do I reverse this gif to make it look like they’re face-palming?)
This part of the movie was such a mental massacre that just recalling it, I’m having to pause and remember what the shrink I hired right after the credits rolled taught me in order to survive my sudden onset PTSD. Was the nature of these characters a last minute decision? Did they throw a bunch of ideas raffle style into a rotating cage like bingo numbers? Don’t get me wrong – I love random and spontaneous when it’s delightful and mystical and memorable. This was not that. It felt so forced that I had to send a cerebral search party into my head to uncover what these creatures might represent. Are they meant to be like the elders you go to to seek help and wisdom? To me, it felt like those friends you only go to when you need to vent or want help. Like they don’t even exist when life’s going alright. But then when you wanna cry and complain, you come sniffing around and expecting them to be your “rock”. That’s all they were good for when Anna was a kid – a quick spell. And that’s all they were good for when they were heading back home and needed a place to stop.
(Well done, whoever made this.)
All that might have felt more okay or genuine if they were serene and grandmotherly like the character in “Fern Gully”. But just like the gif-maker above suggests, everything’s so rushed and they try to shove everything in so quickly. When she’s little, she gets a quick hair streak spell. When Anna’s about to pass out, the grandpa troll rolls in and too-quickly has both the diagnosis and the solution for her icey-cardia. And right before that, they talk about him “being a fixer upper” in one breath and then squeeze in a tokenistic “I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’” about how no one can actually change. And even that’s right before saying they’ll be fixed if they get “fixed up” with eachother. What? After even trying to decode all this rapid-fire nonsense, I need a special spell. Because the only thing freezing and dying is my effing brain.
I feel like I’m justified in hating this song and these characters more than the others. Especially given the sister-love-is-enough ending which confirms you don’t need to be “fixed up” – and proves Anna doesn’t need Princes or Kristoff to complete her, like Zellweger once iconically said before fixer-uppering her face. So is the message there that while you can’t change your family (that’s what the trolls were supposed to be to Kristoff anyway), you just love them anyway and listen to their stupid spectacle when you come home with a grain of salt? (Rock salt? Ugh…) If it seems like I’m reaching or reading into this, it’s because I am. My brain can’t handle how much sense these characters didn’t make. So I’ve spent many a sleepless night now, trying to shove idea-blocks in cerebral circle holes while telling myself, “See?! It fits! Doesn’t it?!”
Oh, and let’s bring a recent-events relevant angle into my assessment.
Since it was just Halloween, I couldn’t help but wonder:
How come at Halloween, nobody wanted to be Anna? Instead of Elsa?
Despite her annoying demands of Kristoff, she was the one making her blizzard journey in the name of family love. She’s the one who got hit with ice and had her hair turn white. She’s the one who had to traverse icy puddles. She’s the one who had to outrun a goliath abominable snowman, have her heart frozen, sit through a suicidally bad song sung by bunch of boulder trolls, and only just narrowly escape an assassination-by-neglect attempt by Prince Psychopath.
That’s a ride or die bish right there. Where my props for the princess at?
Her fault or not – all Elsa did was destroy lives with ice and run away from her problems.
And that’s who all the kids wanna emulate? ‘cause she’s preettttty? And magicccc?
Plus, unlike Anna, her big life-changing epiphany is all of a two-second long realization, followed by an immediate reconciliation from fairytale-god when her sister doesn’t die in her arms. She didn’t go through the struggles to alter and manage her life long condition. We don’t see that. Just a brief surrender of her feels to family-love, Elsa lives again, and then all her bad habits of her past practiced for years on years are just totally forgotten from her brain. And the kingdom’s restored. So, she just spontaneously knows how to channel her defect into an asset? No medication? No Icy-anonymous 12 step program? No therapy? She just gets a reset button for life?
Nah, bish.
It doesn’t work that way. You almost murdered people with your power. You can’t manage it. You have a problem and clearly need to seek abstinence based recovery. It might look all lovely at the end there, but – if you think about it – all she’s doing is dragging everyone else into her dark ice world. You mark my words – next time homegirl’s on the rag, that kingdom will be nada but penguins toddling through pools of blood and bone piles by the end of the week.
#sorrynotsorry
But, what does make sense in the end is that this was written by a chick.
Because here’s how I’m pretty sure the real life story went before she breathed animated life and Tinkerbell dust into it: I’m picturing someone who had a sister with mental condition – maybe addiction, maybe something else. And they had neglectful parents who kept them apart. And then she grew up and met a dude who she thought was cool but turned out to want to use her for money or something. Then she settled for a less sexy long-time-friend dude with a clumsy dog and crazy family who had nothing but bad advice to give. And used him just like the guy she just got rid of tried to do to her (#hypocrite). Then, during one of her sister’s bad episodes, she rushes off in his car (which he lets her, because: spineless). And crashes it. But she still doesn’t marry him in the end because she has to move home and play codependent enabler to her sister. Meanwhile, he sticks around waiting for crumbs and taking emotional punches from her because he’s doofy and hopeful and who else will love him and his Shrek face?
Also, in real life she didn’t replace his car.
So… these are just some of my gripes with “Frozen”. More to come later.
This has been a reading from the gospel of loathsome Fairy Tales.