Elsa and Anna and the others return for a robust fantasy adventure in 2019's Frozen II. I love this kind of story, a story about a band of adventurers heading out into a fairy tale world of magic and danger. Certainly the influence of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies is, as usual, apparent as it is in any European-style fantasy film or television series of the past twenty years. But Frozen II certainly has its own visual splendour from the autumnal tundra of the northern frontier to Elsa's glorious new costume and ice horse. How dearly I wish this movie were better written. But its screenplay is sadly a confused mess--the intention to tackle big ideas, both in terms of a personal journey and in terms of sociological consciousness, is clearly there but on both fronts an apparent inability to settle on the message results in an insubstantial tale. Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez do the best job one could expect with the music under the circumstances. To be sure, topping "Let It Go" was likely an impossible task but a lack of clear vision from the writers and directors seems to have left them without direction throughout production.
A documentary series on the making of Frozen II was filmed and, watching a bit of it, I was surprised to see how many of the issues I had with the film were recognised quite candidly by the filmmakers throughout the production. At one of several meetings discussing the ongoing problems with "Show Yourself," the sequel's ostensive answer to "Let It Go", directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee described listening to an early recording of he song. Buck said, "To me it wasn't adding up . . . It's not emotionally adding up, I'm not feeling anything. And then I turn on 'Let It Go' and--I feel it, I'm into it. I turn this on again and I go, *makes fatigued noise*." Ideas about what the song meant, along with just what Elsa (Idina Menzel) was pursuing, seem to have been continually shifting throughout the production. This is quite a contrast to the first film in which "Let It Go", written early on, crystallised a narrative motivation for the staff.
After conceptualising the song as Elsa meeting herself, the songwriters went to a meeting where Buck and Lee proposed that the hook rather be "coming home", necessitating either scrapping the song or significantly modifying it. Wondering what the mysterious voice might then be, Anderson-Lopez joked, "'Oh, a singing glacier!' Who doesn't have that problem?" She makes a sharp point; anyone can identify with "Let It Go" while "Show Yourself" is kind of alien.
The final decision to make the voice that of Elsa and Anna's mother, Iduna (Evan Rachel Wood), ties the song to the sociological plot because it's revealed Iduna belonged to the Northuldran people. This doesn't elevate the song to the level of "Let It Go" by a long shot but it makes the continued allusions to self-discovery and returning home slightly more interesting for being less at the fore. But these things can't compete with the catharsis inherent in "Let It Go".
The most effective character in the film is actually Olaf (Josh Gad) whose earnest manner and dippy jokes are effective enough to make it really touching when it seems like he's died. He's given some interesting lines attempting to give resonance to the film's themes--proposing the idea that water has memory and informing the group that the forest is a place of transformation. Water is usually interpreted in academic analysis as symbolising change, being fluid, so the idea of water having memory is a potentially interesting paradox. Instead, though, water functions as irrefutable security footage as it reveals the true reasons for the conflict between Arendelle and the Northuldra. Elsa and Anna's grandfather, Runeard (Jeremy Sisto), had feared the magic of Northuldra, saying it made them feel powerful and "entitled" and thus a threat to the kingdom. Elsa indignantly says he's wrong, magic doesn't work that way, perhaps forgetting that her own magic nearly wiped out Arendelle in the first movie when she had a moment of feeling empowered and entitled.
Therein lies one of the big contradictions between the two films. In the first film, the environmental threat posed by the magic meant the source of the magic--Elsa--had to be stopped. In the second film, the environmental threat posed by the magic means that the source of the magic had to be appeased.
Part of the reason that the plot doesn't make sense may have to do with it being influenced by the real political issues relating to the Sami people. The film's plot revolves around a dam built by the people of Arendelle as an apparent gesture of friendship to the Northuldrans that instead turns out to be one that somehow harms and enrages the magic of the forest. It's implied that this is the true reason Runeard had for building the dam but how he knew the dam would have this effect, and why the Northuldrans only see it as negative after its construction, is never explained. In reality, the Virdnejavr Dam built in Norway in the early '80s was responsible for the flooding of a Sami village. Well, that's clear enough. Why couldn't we have a scene of a Northuldran village being flooded? Why not depict how the dam negatively impacted agriculture or hunting and gathering? This is a problem that would have been clear to the studio had this film been developed in the '30s or '40s when America was a more agricultural country and even city slickers in Hollywood had some appreciation for harvesting crops. You can see it Melody Time, Fun and Fancy Free, and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mister Toad. Even when modern Disney tried to go back to a farm setting with Home on the Range, they produced a move so meta and divorced from a real sense of the reality of farm life, it generally sabotaged the film's effectiveness.
Speaking as someone who lives in a town filled with rice fields where most of the kids are Disney fans, there's still a great big audience for that kind of story, if Disney just had the will to scout the proper talent for writing it.
So the sociological story fails to have an impact because it's meaningless while the journey of personal discovery is sabotaged by indecision on the part of the filmmakers. The main problem is that Jennifer Lee had run out of juice by this point. For Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, and Zootopia, she brought to the table the fairly old but good idea of recontextualising a story to make the villain into the hero. Frozen II, for whatever reason, decided to move away from this. By casting the people of Arendelle as villains, arguably it attempts to do the opposite--turning presumed heroes into villains. But maybe it's easier to turn a villain into a hero than a hero into a villain. When you do the former, the process involves giving plausible motives to the character while some may feel the latter involves depriving the character of plausible motives. But the point of the recontextualised villain stories of the '70s, at least the good ones, wasn't to do a hero/villain switcheroo but to show that everyone has plausible motives.
Maybe making villains into heroes was the idea behind making Elsa and Anna's parents so heroic in the sequel. But sidestepping the emotional repression they enforced on Elsa seems like a betrayal of the very heart of the first film. The second film acts like none of that happened.
But, damn, Frozen II sure is pretty. It's available on Disney+.
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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000
Dinosaur
The Emperor's New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo and Stitch
Treasure Planet
Brother Bear
Home on the Range
Chicken Little
Meet the Robinsons
Bolt
The Princess and the Frog
Tangled
Winnie the Pooh
Wreck-It Ralph
Frozen
Big Hero 6
Zootopia
Moana
Ralph Breaks the Internet
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