Truly alcohol is the best way to celebrate international connectivity
Anyway, in saying that, Frozen is not my favorite Disney film, nor is it my least favorite. (Looking at you two for the latter)
"I can't figure out what the moral to the story is!"
"Let's sing that one song everyone knows and then continue on with an incredibly boring story that explains a moral that has been done hundreds of times before and will be done hundreds of times afterwards in increasingly less creative ways!"
Once again, I LIKE FROZEN, I just feel like it's over-rated in how much credit people give it for its visuals, music, and supposed modern take on the "princess role".
Since I wrote that sentence like a thesis statement for a state assessment test or some shit, let's just go through it in that order.
Serious Advice - Take these serious enough to understand that you can't graduate high school without passing them, but don't take them too serious, because after you graduate high school they don't matter.
(TL;DR - Shoot for Meets)
OK, visuals in Frozen; they can be summarized with this.
Blue plastic!
That's the extent of how "amazing" Frozen gets in terms of visuals. Yes the characters are designed very well, but what Disney character isn't.
Well that's kinda the point in this case.
Maybe it's because you can only do so much with snow and ice. It'll always stick to the blues and grays in pallet color, and glass like ice objects have been done before in a million other ways. Not to say that it looks bad by any stretch, it's just it isn't the best Disney has done by a long shot.
This is magical.
This is also magical, and the one song that everyone remembers as previously mentioned.
Not to mention Paper Mario did the whole "ice palace" thing back in 2000.
(Picture given without context.)
Granted they didn't have as much as a progressive outlook on the role of princesses
In viewing Frozen, I just don't see what was so visually amazing that caused the movie to stick out so much in the reviews. I think it's not to the fault of the movie, I feel like the older Disney films had larger opportunities to explore visuals because they're 2D and can explore animation; while 3D films have less leniency on the audience's suspension of disbelief. That's why I think Tangled and Frozen are more tied down in realistic imagery than their 2D brothers and sisters.
Story in ancient Greece? 80's Popart!
So the music in Frozen, much like the rest of Frozen, (and the rest of Disney in general), not as good as Mulan. Seriously they've never managed to beat these.
I'll give you a few minutes to remember how great those were.
I don't care how much world you can see in Aladdin or how much world you want to be a part of in Little Mermaid or how much Hakuna you can matata in Lion King, nothing will beat Mulan's musical numbers.
Let's get to the two elephants in the room.
"Let it Go", Yes it is a pretty good song, personally my favorite is "Break the Ice" or "That one that plays in the beginning of the movie" for everyone else.
"Let it Go" does sound pretty unique in comparison to other Disney songs, but I think that's more to the credit of Idina Menzel's voicing of Elsa, because Elsa does sound very different from other Disney Princesses.
"BUT SHE'S A QUEEN!" you scream.
"FINE" I scream back.
She sounds different from the rest of the female royalty in Disney films. Mainly because they gave her a much more powerful voice to give her more maturity to contrast her sister Anna. Who I had to look up the name for, which is weird considering the movie is much more about Anna than Elsa. Which also may play a role in my opinion that Frozen is overrated since the marketing and reviews about the movie is mainly about Elsa, who is barely in the movie in which she is supposedly the protagonist in.
"Let it Go" also seems kinda short, which is weird considering "We Are Men" from Mulan is about the same length as it.
Maybe it's the action in the actual movie as suppose to the song, since there's much more going on in the action during other Disney musical pieces than "Let it Go".
Continuing the comparison: "We Are Men" is more or less a 80's training montage, and "Let it Go" is just Elsa being angsty on a mountain top, and the big climax to the song is the whole dress changing, while "We Are Men" has Mulan climbing a giant upright log and almost throwing an arrow into the patriarchy's crotch.
She's about 10 feet away from making this movie a lot more heavy handed in terms of theming
In finishing, "Let it Go" is good, but not the groundbreaking song that everyone makes it out to be. And I think that's more to do with how Disney animated movies are coming out less often and we don't have Tangled in the recent memory banks to compare to.
Did Tangled even have a musical number in it?
Yeah there isn't a lot of recent competition.
Now onto "Do You Want to Build a Snowman"
The only reasons why this song is popular is because it's cute, simple, and incredibly easy to sing along with.
It's OK, at best, I'm not going to stand on a soap box and proclaim to the world that I don't like "Do You Want to Build a Snowman", because honestly the only thing I can remember from it is the line
"Oooooooooooooook byeeeeeeee"
Which comes off as cute in regards to the small child singing it, and lazy in terms of song writing. And honestly the parodies are a lot better.
To name a few:
Do You Want to Build a Meth Lab?
Do You Want to Kill a Planet?
Do You Want to Kill Some Rebels?
Honestly if you don't have those knocks stuck in you head until the day you die than you're musically challenged.
Do-Do DoDo-Dooo
In closing, the best soundtrack for ANY Disney film ever so far is still this one.
I got you on a technicality.
Thought I'd never find a use for this .gif again.
OK, on to themes. Frozen was heralded as Disney finally stepping into the 21st century and showing us that girls can be princesses and not have to have a man save them and then get married to them.
I would agree, if they didn't spend the entire 1990's doing that same exact thing.
Excluding you, young teenage girl who has to get a man to love her and save her from her own mistakes and daddy issues.
Princess that wants to marry someone out of love and get to know him?
Been there done that.
Independent and intelligent female that doesn't fall for all the men swooning for her and goes out to rescue someone?
Been there done that.
Badass princess breaks the norms of society?
Been there done that.
"But Frozen is the first movie to do all that!" you might squee at me.
To that I say, "Actually those three ideas are seen in all three of those movies, but you want it more straight forward you just have to look at Mulan 2, which is almost an inverted plot of Little Mermaid mixed with Frozen" I retort in confidence.
"There was a Mulan 2" you ask in confusion.
"Yes", I say, "Yes there was."
Disney was the first to do unnecessary sequels, and then Shriek stole that too.
"But what about how Elsa tells Anna she can't fall in love with someone she just met?" you argue in a small voice quivering with confusion as your world crumbles around you.
"That's the entire plot to Beauty and the Beast, also Elsa and Kristoff kick it off pretty fast, almost faster than Aladdin and Jasmine" I say breaking another mental pillar of yours.
If you really want to see a love story that plays out, Tangled does it best. Granted it falls into the whole "isn't she kinda young" trap that a lot of other Disney movies used to fall into, and to that I point out that she turned 18 right as they kissed so she was legal. Barely. (I swear there's some sort of perverted term for that)
And then they got married a day later.
So I think what I'm trying to say is this.
Frozen is a good movie and it lives up to the standards of past Disney films. It just doesn't tread that far into new territory for the "princess genre" as they call it, and to me it doesn't stick out as much as the over movies made before it and doesn't seem to really deserve all praise that it gets from it's fans, other than there isn't much to compare it to in terms of newer princess films.
And I think that's because I had no friends growing up and I had a large collection of Disney VHS tapes to keep me company, so I probably remember the older films better than most in my age group.
"What's a VHS?" you ask with wonder.
It's like Netflix but you keep it in your house.
Still if you're talking most badass Disney princesses than I'd like to point out.
Once again, technicality.
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