Back in November, when you were taking advantage of Black Friday sales and buying Christmas presents for people who don't love you, the movie Frozen was released nationwide. The film went on to receive immense success, both critically and commercially, and won the award for Best Animated Feature Film at the 2014 Academy Awards. And, although it's five months too late and nobody cares anymore, I feel obligated to deposit my two cents. After all, who better to judge a Disney princess movie than a 23-year-old alcoholic, childless blogger who lives alone?
DISCLAIMER: This is not to be confused with the 1997 Chinese documentary, Frozen, a film about a performance artist who commits suicide by freezing himself (check it out on Netflix). I got a lot of flack when I bought that DVD for my niece. That might have scarred her for life. It was a total accident, though. My bad, for real. Truly an honest mistake.
Anyway, this Frozen revolves around two sisters—princesses Elsa and Anna—each trying to come out of their shell as they experience adulthood. Since she was a child, Elsa has had the magical ability to harness and produce ice and snow, while Anna has had the power of never shutting the fuck up for an hour and forty minutes. After finding out about her ability, Elsa's parents lock her up in her bedroom and don't let her leave the castle. I guess all the Christian straight camps were booked. "Look, it's okay if you do magic in the privacy of your own home. Just don't rub it in our faces, ya know?"
Flash forward fifteen years or so and we find out that the girls' parents are deader than Katheryn Heigel's acting career. The two sisters haven't talked to each other since the Clinton administration, but they're all like, "Oh hai, biatch. What you been up to, gurl?" as if it's no big deal. You'd think Anna (Kristen Bell) would say something more along the lines of, "So, that whole deal about being a prisoner in your own home and never experiencing the embrace of another human being or any outward stimuli at all for fifteen years was kinda fucked, right?" Turns out, she's got bigger fish to fry. Anna is thirsty as fuck and straight up gets engaged to the first dude she sees. This guy is a grown man and he's trying to hook up with a teenager, so I will obviously refer to him as "James Franco" for the rest of this review.
Meanwhile, Elsa is ready to become the new queen. Everything goes according to plan until Anna drops the engagement bomb on her sister. After a brief physical altercation, Anna pulls off one of Elsa's gloves, unleashing a wintery bukkake all over the party because, apparently, gloves > magic. Instead of calming the fuck down for a second and becoming the ruler of an entire empire, she's all "fuck that noise" because she's on her magic ice-queen period or something.
In the months since the film's premiere, the soundtrack has gone viral. Like, straight up social media venereal disease status.
She flies to the top of a mountain to, presumably, cry and watch re-runs of Friends. Eventually, she learns to be free through the power of song and dance and, in doing so, casts her town into a crippling eternal winter. Obviously, being unique is more important than the fragile agriculture-based economy of a quaint Norwegian village. Now it's up to Anna to rescue her sister and waste time that I could have spent watching The Masters.
Along the way she meets Kristoff, an out of work ice salesman, whom she immediately falls in love with because she's a psychopath. Later on, there's a sequence where a gaggle of the Troll Dolls you had when you were a kid sing an upbeat melody about how Anna should cuckold her fiancé and gobble Kristoff's icey balls (there’s even a deleted scene where the fiancé finds all the dick pics on her cellphone). She essentially gets starry-eyed for a homeless guy who holds both sides of the conversation when he talks to his pet Reindeer like a crazy person. I'm pretty sure I used to watch after school specials where the message was to do the exact opposite of what she does here. "Okay Anna, we'll go save your sister...right after you help me move this couch into my white van."
Walmart rollback discount version Jonah Hill, Josh Gad, plays the anthropomorphic, magic snowman, Olaf, a character so shitty that everyone around him laughs as he unknowingly plots his own suicide. That's right, Olaf breaks out in song, singing about how he wants to experience summer for the first time and, I assume, do blow off a hot snowwoman's ass in Daytona Beach, completely unaware that he will melt. Meanwhile, his two human friends just smile and get off on the thought of him rotting in snowman hell after he turns to soup and dies like an idiot. Olaf is essentially the punch-drunk, brain-damaged brother of Frosty, whose parents probably drove him into the woods and abandoned him like Haley Joel Osment in A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
In the months since the film's premiere, the soundtrack has gone viral. Like, straight up social media venereal disease status. From songs like "Do You Want To Build A Snowman," and "Love Is An Open Door," to gems like "Let It Go" (clearly a "Let It Snow" bite), every song in the film is straight up hot garbage. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't give a shit about your pathetic human emotions and will force-feed you these songs through posts via your estranged aunt and that ambiguously gay acquaintance you haven't talked to since high school. Basically, you're fucked, dude.
The real buzz around this movie, however, comes from its empowering message to young women. You know, that old feminist saying about how each and every little girl can grow up to a be strong, independent woman...with the help of a man. Wait, what? Sure, Anna ends up being the hero, saving her sister from sure death at the hands of James Franco, who ends up being the villain, but let's talk real quick about the rest of the story leading up to this point. Anna was rescued by her big muscly Norwegian boyfriend at every twist and turn. She would have been straight up decapitated ten times over if he hadn't been there to save her. So, while it was a valiant effort by the creators to try and bring Disney princess movies into the 21st century with a progressive message of female empowerment, the end result was almost as bad as the deus ex Brad Pitt ending of 12 Years A Slave.
Four Pins Rating: 1 Step Forward, 2 Steps Back For Women's Suffrage/5
Matt Rimer is a writer living in Boston. Follow him on Twitter here.
