Banish Frozen to the Arctic

I watched Frozen.  There, I said it.  I have given all my doubters the perfect ammunition with which to shoot down my credibility.  I’ll even step further into my troubles; I bought Frozen, before I even saw it.  Well, no, that’s not right.  My mom bought it before any of us had seen it.  Heck, I even watched it all the way to the end instead of bowing out when the snowman showed up.  But don’t discredit me just yet.  Just because I watched it all the way through doesn’t mean I liked it.  I still have quite the review in store if you just keep scrolling down.  So without further introduction, I give you my review…

Tangled is the story of young adult Rapunzel, who…  Oh.  Right.  Let me start over.  Frozen is the story of eighteen-or-so year old princess Anna, who has been shut inside her castle for all her life, never allowed to see the outside world.  Her mother, Gothel, wants her to stay inside so as to hide her powers from the world…  Darn, I got the two mixed up again.  Just a second.  Her older sister Elsa, who randomly has the ability to control ice – no, it was never explained how she got the power – and their parents locked themselves and Anna away in the castle many years ago to hide Elsa’s powers after an accident with Anna, who is conveniently made to forget everything about Elsa’s powers by a bunch of little rock-trolls for no reason other than to add a plot twist.  Eventually, the time comes when Elsa, the older of the two sisters, must accept the crown and become queen of Arendelle, and the castle gates are opened, and people are allowed in and out of the castle.  So at last Anna sees the light, err, that is, for the first time in forever, Anna is let outside the castle gates, and she conveniently falls in love with a foreign prince who is visiting to see the coronation.  After a brief musical interlude, they decide to marry, a decision which everyone is shocked by:

Elsa: You can't marry a man you just met.

Kristoff: Wait. You got engaged to someone you just met that day?
Even Anna’s own boyfriend disapproves of her choice… 
Hans: You were so desperate for love, you were willing to marry me, just like that.

But when the two ask for Elsa’s blessing for their marriage, Anna and Elsa get into an argument, and Elsa ends up losing control of her power and freezes the kingdom.  Elsa runs away, deep into the mountains, where she constructs a giant castle to the tune of “Make it Flow”, errr, that is, “Let it Go”.  Anna, believing the frost to be her fault goes off to try to convince her sister to return the land to warm weather.  Along the way, she teams up with ice-cutter Kristoff, the silent reindeer Sven, and the anything-but-silent snowman Olaf.  Long story short, it turns out that Anna’s fiancée Flynn, uhh, Hans is really the bad-guy, and Elsa and Anna settle their past differences and get rid of him.
 
As I made known in the summary, Frozen is almost a carbon copy of Tangled, both in terms of plotline and visual appearance.  Anna bears a remarkable resemblance to Tangled heroine Rapunzel, and the dashing prince Hans looks almost just like the Stabbington brothers, a rather obvious tip-off to his devious nature.  Kristoff plays an irritatingly similar role to Flynn from Tangled, and his reindeer sidekick Sven is a shameless copy of Maximus.  Anna has been kept out of the real world for her whole life, just as rapunzel had been shut away in a tower by her “adoptive” mother, Gothel, and both of them immediately fall in love with someone of questionable character, although Flynn actually turns out to be a good person in the end.  Anna hires Kristoff to lead her up the snowy mountains to her sister’s castle, much the same as when Rapunzel hires Flynn to take her to see the floating lights in the city.  Yet for all its attempts to mimic Tangled, Frozen did not come close to matching the wit and charm of the Grimm brothers’ classic.  From the kind-hearted rouges and thieves at The Snuggly Duckling to the innocent, naïve Rapunzel, Tangled gave its audience heroes to cheer for and villains to fear, but Frozen has none of this.  It gives you no true villain for the first hour and ten minutes of the movie, and the story seems split between the two sisters, not focusing primarily on either one.  It seemed as though Disney wanted to incorporate Elsa into the story more, but this only succeeded in making the story imbalanced, and the scenes that did focus on Elsa were poorly executed and out of place.

 

Rapunzel to Anna comparison.  Not much difference that I can see.

Unfortunately, although Frozen was a musical (another parallel element to Tangled), its soundtrack was underwhelming to say the least.  Yes, I know it won several awards for best original song.  Yes, I know it won a bunch of awards for best animated film.  Yes, I know it made the number 3 spot on iTunes.  I don’t care if Adele Dazeem won an award.  I don’t care what all the other critics said.    If I agreed with them on everything they said, I wouldn’t have written this review at all.  I found the soundtrack to be dull and uninspired.  “For the First Time in Forever”, Anna's joyous song celebrating her freedom, is largely a copy of “At last I see the Light” from Tangled.  Then there was that troll song...  Not sure what that was about.  And I’m pretty sure everyone reading this already knows my opinions on “Let it Go”.  And don’t even get me started on that stupid snowman song…

This is the only blog-worthy trailer I could find... And it's not even a real trailer!

Actually, the most egregious, sinful, dastardly, flagrant, insulting, vile, insipid, nauseating, disgusting, loathsome element in this movie is the snowman.  Yes, the snowman.  I should have abandoned ship, jumped off the train, pulled the parachute, etc. when the snowman showed up.  Pulled the disc out of the DVD player.  But I was a fool.  I was a moron.  Worse, I was a victim.  I was a sad, sorry victim of the insurmountable stupidity of the snowman Olaf.  At one point during the length of movie, my dad commented that Disney should have gotten Jonah Hill to play Olaf, a thought that had been circulating in my head as well.  He is exactly the kind of obnoxious, stupid role that Jonah Hill would play.  I think in the end though, the person they did get to play Olaf was even worse than Jonah Hill.  Olaf is the dumbest, lamest, most insulting thing to my intelligence that I have ever crossed paths with.  Without the Olaf, this movie might have even been halfway decent.  I cannot express through words the true extent of my hatred for that idiotic snowman.  So congratulations, Josh Gad, you currently hold the world record for dumbest movie character ever.  Congratulations to Disney as well, they had a hand in his creation too.  

Grade Rating (For Frozen): C+

Grade Rating (For Olaf): If Frozen were elevated to an A+, Olaf might just be worthy of an F-…