#and the second is the funny(tm) idea of her having a bit more plush on her

[spinning-feeling]

[redandfranticfeelings]

i am a whole month late but i saw frozen 2 and i actually have Opinions TM? which may not be very good, im not a good movie analyst, but this was a weird one. spoiler alert!

i like the backstory of anna and elsa’s parents and i like the idea that elsa’s powers are a gift, even though they really could have played into the powers being a gift more given how often she’s seen them as a curse. but they also kind of put the parents on a pedestal too much considering how they emotionally abused anna and elsa in the first movie. i would have loved to see the girls grapple with that trauma as well as remembering the good about them and feeling bad about their deaths.

on that note, they reference the first movie so much but it feels very gratuitous because a lot of elements feel detached from similar elements in the first movie. olaf recapping the entire first movie was funny but didn’t need as much time as it got.

that sums up olaf well too, actually. his anti-nihilistic personality was so batshit to me that it amused me, i like the idea of him dealing with maturity and change because it almost seems to be a deconstruction of his character archetype, and something that a lot of people who have aged since the first film could relate to. but it kind of came out of nowhere and then went nowhere, and he ironically ended up acting even more immature at times than he had in the first movie so it felt like they had no idea what to do with him, which sucks when he’s given entire scenes that don’t connect much to the plot. his song was probably my least favorite part of the movie, it felt even longer than his song in the original which at least served as a funny establishing character moment back then.

kristoff’s plot was sitcommy and meh and he was inconsequential to the story so much they p much forget about him in the second act but i gotta admit his song was so batshit bizarre it cracked me up. plus he is really endearing, even though they did not elaborate enough on his relationship with anna at all (and the first movie was already a bit rushed in that department). i would have liked more on how he sees her as a guiding figure in his otherwise very directionless life. in fact that could have even been subtle foreshadow for her role as a leader at the end of the movie!

as for anna herself...i like the idea of her plot! i like that she’s so paranoid and traumatized about elsa going anywhere alone and has to overcome that when elsa basically ascends to a higher power. i think people are too hard on her, i get her being overprotective and worried about not being around for her sister given how long she was shut out. it’s one of the few elements that actually seems like a proper follow-up to events from the first movie. i like that elsa is so gung-ho about taking all this responsibility alone but anna has to take up the mantle when she thinks elsa is gone, rather than sit alone and cry about it. however, i do wish her being queen had been built up more. maybe highlight her connection to the people arendelle, or even the northundra people, to show that she has leadership skills when not obsessed with elsa (since she is very personable). granted idk if she actually is qualified to lead a kingdom given how the first frozen is one of the few movies to reference how queens have to deal with things like the economy, but i’m willing to shrug that off since most movies of this kind don’t see queenhood as a responsibility thing but a title of honor.

i like elsa seeking out her history and heritage since that was kind of robbed from her as a child, but it would have been interesting if anna, who actually had her memories wiped, showed more interest in these memories being visualized. however i feel a lot of things came too easily for her. i like the idea that she had to conquer all the elements before she could find the truth about arendelle but idk it seemed like she didn’t struggle much, it just sort of Happened? it didn’t feel like her character developed or changed much. she started off hearing a call, decided to pursue it early on, and outside of a tragically-brief grapple with her parents’ death, just went through these individual challenges with nature basically the same way, by using magic. like as soon as the forest realizes elsa is magic each time it calms down. i get that she’s basically the chosen one but i would have liked a bit more emotional struggle, maybe more leftover insecurity about honing her powers or gaining new ones, maybe a stronger reaction to the fact her grandfather was basically willing to perform genocide due to the same beliefs about magic that had her hating herself throughout most of her life. i guess maybe her freezing to death might represent that, like how the truth hurts, and how her sister trying to make it up to everyone with a massive sacrifice is how she unfroze might be some sort of meaningful metaphor, but idk it felt a little too similar to the resolution of the last movie, and again things felt too easy for her.

super disappointed at how little the sami characters did. given how i’d heard they consulted sami folks to properly represent the culture, i expected the new characters to have a more direct role, but all they did was provide some mild exposition, and even then, anna and elsa found out most things. why couldn’t the people of the forest, especially the elders, just explain what anna and elsa’s grandfather did to them? honeymaren and ryder were cute but did basically nothing, which is sad since i heard so much hype about honeymaren being shipped with elsa.

also the people of northundra being shut out from the outside world by magic is a great parallel for elsa’s situation in the first movie but that connection was barely made because the new characters got sidelined so badly.

it would have been pretty cool to destroy arendelle and rebuild it, or maybe to give the northundra a new gift to replace the false one. but the whole thing with the dam generally felt a bit anticlimactic. and i appreciate a message about reparations and twisted nationalistic history but i dont really know what message they were going for there, and whatever it was, it would have been stronger if we got to know the actual people of the forest better.

the salamander was cute but it didn’t have much of a point any more than the other elements of nature and is almost as much of an Obvious Plush Toy Design as pua from moana. (btw, this movie reminded me a bit of moana, thematically, just way more complicated.)

the songs were nice but i dont remember most of them. ‘show yourself’ was my favorite. i like it better than ‘into the unknown’ lol, maybe because it came later in the story even though i wished there was more power struggle in the scene itself.