Review of Frozen (2013) by Martin J — 01 Feb 2015

Personally, this is probably one of the best Disney animated movies of this decade considering it focused on some really deep topics and attempted to make a story all ages could enjoy, more than what I could say about most modern animated movies...however it's not Disney's BEST animated feature film, not even close to the best. One of the main problems with this movie is the lack of story structure and character evolution. While the characters have really lovable personalities, they do not have any growth throughout the movie and continue to stay stagnant. Elsa, the character I particularly took interest in, had the most disappointing lack of evolution of all the Frozen characters. While her powers intrigued the audience (and Disney used her underdog persona to draw in audiences), Elsa was highly neglected by creators because she had potential to do so much more than make a fancy castle. I understand that they wanted her to be similar to the snow Queen from the original fairy tale "The Snow Queen", however, by changing her character role, they left us wanting more from her, such as the origins of her powers, and an expansion on how her powers could be used for good. Its not smart to make a character with so many interesting traits if she is not the main character or has no expansion/evolution.

The story itself was also very sloppy. There was no focal goal or direction in this movie. The idea of a sister story was there, but there was no relationship growth between the sisters enough to call this a "sister story". The movie focused mostly on Kristoff and Anna's relationship instead, which completely confused the theme of the story. The movie tried to give many different "morals to the story" at once in the story which contributed to a lack of focus in the story. What was this movie trying to tell its audience? It was very unclear.

On a positive note, the animation was fantastic, and Disney managed to make one of the best Disney musical scores since the Lion King, "Let it Go". This song was the only song that I felt captivated both the emotion of the character singing it, as well as express an event that would move the story forward. This is something I felt was lacking in the last few Disney musicals Tangled and The Princess and the Frog. However, the rest of the music on the Frozen soundtrack, while catchy, were lacking the meaning and depth. They were just shallow; placed there to catch the ears of listeners, but lacking meaningful, creative lyrics, with real meaning to the story. To add, there were too many songs to be so shallow. Nine songs? No wonder the movie had no room for character and story development. The movie seemed to have a song every 2 seconds! lol The movie felt like the creators made the music first, and the story afterwards.

The movie would have been better if they had focused on one goal. Otherwise, they might as well had kept the original story...