Cartoon Corner- Frozen

Originally posted at the DL August 2015

Well let's start with the obvious.



Grade: 9/10.

I mean, I don't really need to TELL you Frozen is amazing.  It's self-evidently awesome.  So instead we're going to focus on the biggest strength of the film, the use of songs.

By which I mean a song-by-song breakdown.  Because ~

Frozen Heart- Basically expositing the main plot.  It's a bit akin to having the Greek Chorus talk about the dangers of hubris at the start of a play.  Basically the least relevant song in the movie but eh, I can see why its there.

Do You Wanna Build a Snowman?- Montage!  This song I think is the crux of the film emotionally, in that the rest of the film only makes sense because of the emotions of this song.  Anna has gone mostly nuts from isolation, while ... well, we'll come back to Elsa actually.  What's neat here with her is the visual progression of her ice powers.  First she walls off the world outside the window, then learns she has to cover up her powers, then with every time skip she ices up more and more of the door to her room- the one Anna is always just outside.  Not subtle, but pretty cool.

For the First Time in Forever- My favorite song as a song.  The bit where Anna goes to the picture gallery is just delightfully animated and the whole sequence in general is filled to the gills with amazing attention to tiny, largely irrelevant visual details that I adore.  It's really sort of a sequel song to the previous one, which fits considering approximately thirty seconds pass between them.

Love is an Open Door- It's great how much this actually sets up Hans as the ultimate villain of the piece.  Like you're sitting there going "this song is weirdly dissonant and the singers are only in harmony half the time" and OF COURSE IT IS.  Hans is at first taking a few seconds to sync up to what Anna is doing to sell the act, then later intentionally baiting her into following up his lines.  The visuals are a bit tamer this time but using the song structure to set up the plot is just a lot of fun to see.
This is a good time to talk about my biggest issue with the film (it is appropriately quite minor); Hans' reveal as douchelord the ambitious was kinda overblown.  It's not that his borderline sociopathic nature is too much, it's that the timing of the reveal seems needlessly risky for him.  Like... yeah, maybe, MAYBE the chancellors and other officials of Arendelle will buy your story, but not even pretending to go along with Anna and ditching her at that stage seems needlessly likely to backfire for someone who'd be so careful to that point.  Still, it doesn't change the plot much even if you tweak it to be more in line with the overall character so like I said, it's minor.

Let It Go- So let's talk about Elsa.  People like to take this song as a bit of a gay anthem, which out of context on the radio, yeah, totally.  Within the movie that doesn't make much sense, because it's not about Elsa embracing herself and being honest with the world, it's about Elsa giving up on the rest of the human race and embracing a life of solitude.  A lot of the subtext for the movie presents Elsa's powers as being a sort of gifted mental illness.  The tortured artist thing, where it's the depression that gives you the mental flexibility/different view of the world to be creative, y'know?  So Let It Go is just a deeply ironic song about her triumphant decision... to embrace the madness and just fester in her own juices forever.  Of course, it's not just irony... there is definitely a sort of liberating feeling in just giving up on trying to function.  But it's a delusion, everything is not awesome, and the rest of the movie bears that out.

In Summer- As a song this has a bit of "we needed to mark 'Sidekicks have reality-ignoring comedy song' off the List of Disney Musical Cliches" to it.  Buuuuuuutt... well, Olaf himself is quite likable as those go so it's not too intrusive.  More than that this marks roughly the halfway point of the film, and the second half of Frozen is kinda all drama all the time.  Having a moment of pure levity is a logical move here.

For the First Time in Forever (Reprise)- ;_;

Fixer Upper- More expositional songing.  Both for the red herring solution to the issue and to the real one.  Not a whole lot else I can think of to say for it.

Fun experiment this.

Er I mean.  So yeah Frozen is awesome and y'all already saw it of course.  But there's only so many ways to say "oh god the level of detail in this movie is amazing" so here we are.