by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago my husband Charles and I watched the movie Frozen
II, which came out on Blu-Ray and DVD just
three months after its theatrical release last November (the “window” is
getting shorter and shorter!). It was made by most of the same creative team as
the original Frozen from 2013;
Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee as directors, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert
Lopez as song composers, and all four of the above plus Marc Smith credited
with the film’s “original story” though Lee gets sole credit for the actual
script (and apparently there was some last-minute tweaking by Allison
Schroeder), with most of the voice actors from the original also returning:
Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell as the feuding sisters Elsa and Anna, princesses
of the city-state of Arendelle (that’s how it’s spelled on the film’s imdb.com
page, though in my comments on the original Frozen I had spelled it “Arundel” since that’s the original
British name) — only Elsa has the power to freeze things with a touch or a wave
of her hand, while Anna is a normal girl without this superpower. In the
original Frozen Elsa got mad at
having to restrain herself from using this power, and she froze all of
Arendelle and forced Anna to go in search of her in her ice palace and get her
to break the spell. She assembled the usual troupe of motley sidekicks,
including handsome iceman Kristoff (Jonathan Groff, who in a special feature
labeled “Outtakes” was shown as himself on the recording stage for the film —
and if anything he’s even hotter as a real person than he is as a
computer-animated cartoon in the film!); Sven, the reindeer who pulls his sled;
Olaf (Josh Gad), the enchanted snowman (a bit of Elsa’s magic between the first
film and this one has made it virtually impossible for him to melt) who’s a sort
of cross between Jiminy Cricket and R2-D2; and a new one, a salamander-like
familiar who breathes out fire whether the other characters want him to or not.
The film opens with a confusing prologue that made me wonder briefly just what connection this film had to its predecessor: it
appears to pre-date the prologue of the first Frozen, which featured Elsa and Anna as pre-pubescent girls
and showed how Elsa discovered her powers. In this one Elsa (Mattea Conforti)
and Anna (Hadley Gannaway) are playing a game of “Enchanted Forest” with toy
soldiers made of snow, but their dad comes in and says he’s actually been in an enchanted forest and it’s nothing like the one
they’ve invented for their game.
The story he tells is of how a delegation from
Arendelle went to the nearby kingdom of Northuldra and the two peoples swore
eternal peace and dammed the river as a symbol of their alliance — only the ink
was hardly dry on their treaty (though actually no one signed anything and they
were probably just doing a verbal agreement) that one side attacked the other [spoiler
alert: we assume from the get-go that it
was the Northuldrans who attacked the Arendellians and only very near the end
of the movie do we learn that it was the other way around — Elsa’s and Anna’s
grandfather led the Arendellian army intending from the first to conquer
Northuldra and occupy it]. The result was that the spirits of the four elements
— earth, air, water and fire — got pissed and put Northuldra under a sort of
permanent lockdown from which it can only be saved by … the adult Elsa, who in
the main part of the film, set three years after the end of the first Frozen, gets called by a mysterious “vapor voice” (the
Norwegian singer Aurora Aksnes, who’s billed only by her first name) to go
“into the unknown” and fix whatever’s wrong with this world. Idina Menzel belts
out a Kristen Anderson-Lopez/Robert Lopez power ballad called “Into the Unknown” that was trying hard to be this
film’s “Let It Go” but fell short both artistically and commercially; though
Menzel’s singing voice is as amazing as ever, the song didn’t win the Academy
Award (“Let It Go” did win; “Into
the Unknown” lost to “I’m Gonna Love Me Again,” the new song Elton John and
Bernie Taupin wrote together for the Elton John biopic Rocketman so they would have a new song that would be eligible) and it’s simply
not as good a piece of material. (Significantly, like “Let It Go,” “Into the
Unknown” is heard again over the closing credits in a version by a different
performer — only for the original Frozen “Let It Go” was reprised by Demi Lovato while “Into the Unknown” got a
more radical makeover by the band Panic! At the Disco, including a male lead singer, Brendon Urie.)
Anyway, Elsa is
determined to go to Northuldra alone to see if she can set things right, but
Anne, her fiancé Kristoff, the comic-relief snowperson Olaf and the reindeer
Sven all insist on accompanying her. Along the way, as Olaf puts it in a rather
wry post-credits sequence, “And then a bunch of important things that happen that
I forgot but all that matters is that I was right and water has memory, and
thus … ” Most of Frozen II is an
artistically gorgeous rendering of a plot that makes virtually no sense, with
the writers repeatedly making the usual mistake of a lot of bad fantasies:
since anything can happen in the
fantasy genre, they make anything
happen whether it makes sense or not. Their reaction when they realize they’ve
written themselves into a corner is to invent a new magic power, a new plot
device or a whole new race of beings — like the trolls whose leader appears to
rule Arendelle in the absence of princesses Elsa and Anna, or the “Earth
Giants” (sort of crosses between the Thing from The
Fantastic Four and the Transformers-like creatures who build Noah’s Ark in the Darren
Aranofsky version) who come on as dei ex machina at the end to destroy the dam the long-ago bad
Arendellians put up as part of their campaign to conquer and occupy Northuldra,
despite the concern of Our Heroines that the dam-breaking will create a
mega-flood that will inundate Arendelle. One of the coolest gimmicks of the
film is a flying horse literally made out of seawater ice which Elsa is able to
conjure up and ride. Another is the heart-stoppingly beautiful trail of
snowflakes Olaf leaves behind as the enchantment that had kept him intact since
the first film wears off and he starts melting.
Frozen II is wonderful to look at; it just makes no sense, or
when it does make sense it falls
back on plot gimmicks so old and corny Walt Disney himself would probably have
rejected them as too obvious. Along the way Elsa realizes that she is the mysterious “Fifth Element” that has to form
the bridge to put Arendelle and Northuldra back together (indeed, at times this
film seems like a PG-rated version of Game of Thrones without the bloodshed or the sex), and all the
principals appear to die — only they all come back to life, and Elsa does so in
time to freeze the big wave from the dam destruction before it inundates
everyone and everything in Arendelle. Even that damned crystal flying horse
that’s made of water (waves) comes back and helps achieve the happy ending. At
one point Olaf wonders if this business of saving the world from total disaster
is going to be a regular “thing,” and I joked back, “Yes, if this movie does
well enough to merit a Frozen III.”
(It did; it grossed $476,704,707 on an estimated investment of $150 million.) Frozen
II is a dazzling movie to look at but it’s
rather anemically powered by a weak story. The original Frozen also was no great shakes as a story film — it was an
effective quest narrative but came off as way too familiar — but at least the plot of Frozen made sense and had us rooting for Anna and her
friends as she searched for her scapegrace sister (to the extent anyone
can be scapegrace in a Walt Disney movie!)
whereas this one leads everywhere and nowhere at once. Frankly, Frozen
II works best if you can simply not pay
attention to what it’s supposedly about and just groove on the hypnotic visuals and ignore the nonsensical
plot and the lame, stupid jokes made by Olaf, who was genuinely funny and cute
in the original Frozen but just
comes off as annoying here.
