Disney's newest movie FROZEN, loosely based on The Snow Queen

I'll have to ask my 5 year old a little more what he thought it's about. I think he mostly liked the snowman and the reindeer, and there was just enough "super powers" stuff. He dug how Elsa created the snow castle.

Yeah, that's what I mean. There's a lot to like and enjoy, but the sum is less than its parts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2hJYS6XNiw

I can relate.

I finally saw this and I loved it

The whole 'do you wanna build a snowman' thing reminded me a lot of growing up with my younger sister, who always wanted to play and I always wanted her to leave me alone

idk

I'm a sap but I loved the music, dug the story, enjoyed that the true love's kiss came from the sister and not the dude. the twist was a bit forced but overall I really really enjoyed it

oh and I really loved Kristen Bell as Anna, singing and speaking

every time i see images from this movie i can't get over how terrible the character modeling for the snowman is. it looks like it came from this:
http://axxomovies.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Sir-Billi-2012-Movie-Poster.jpg

I really enjoyed Frozen, but not as much as Tangled and Wreck It Ralph, and I'm intrigued how it's become such a massive, record-busting success in comparison. I guess part of the reason was that Tangled came after a series of relative flops (though the Amy Adams live-action crossover thing did pretty well IIRC), and part of Frozen's success can be traced back to Disney being "rehabilitated" in people's eyes by it and WiR?

every kid wants to sing the songs

girls

is the real answer

My five year old son is obsessed, but his best friends/playmates are girls, so maybe.

hey I bought the soundtrack as soon as I heard it so... um yeah what shakey said

GIRLS! :D

stay@home mommy bloggers?

Lool, Sir Billi is a huge standing joke in my household

Just need to register how bad this was on the relevant thread

i still maintain that hans being evil was not intrinsic to his character at all, but was instead a manifestation of lazy plotting. i have maintained this so firmly for so long that my sisters bought me a 12-inch-tall hans doll as a joke. when my young cousin comes over, we play a game where hans cordially greets her barbie dolls and then tries to murder them, which i realize now isn't supporting my argument.

lol

Lmbo

I think Disney's mastered the ol' fashioned whisper campaign as huge part of their marketing strategy; that the phrase 'frozen is the best disney film since X' wak just mysteriously everywhere during the initial run of this flick.

My girls (5 & 3) are obsessed and can now pretty much recite the script by heart. And a bunch of tweens at the park the other day were playing all the songs on their phones - reminded me of girls singing all the songs from Grease all summer of 1977 when I was a kid. I'm surprised how much I enjoy it. Much as I also like Tangled, that still felt like a quite traditional musical in many ways - the Gothel songs in particular. Frozen feels like the first post-Buffy OMWF Disney joint - didn't Christophe Beck do music for both?

My little girl is still wearing a winter glove* with a snowflake on it because of this movie. She calls it her Ice Glove.

*yeah, we lost the other one somehow.

This was kind of bad and it looked really ugly. IDGI. My two-year-old seemed into it though.

also how come all the women have huge-ass eyes and the men have normal sized, proportional eyes?

I used to think so too; I figured gayness had screwed my eyesight.

I dont even want to know what depravation might cause that, fr o'brien was right about ye

on Easter weekend, i was at a big family gathering, and some of the kids were playing in a room with the Frozen soundtrack in a CD player, some funny exchanges. one boy: "this is a girl song, I hate girl songs." a girl replies: "then why were you just singing along with it?"

I never truly realized how ubiquitous this film had become until a month ago when both a co-worker and my niece (just turned 5yo) separately asked me if I'd seen it yet

I was with my daughter in line to get her face painted at an Easter thing a few weeks ago with about 20 other young girls. "Let it Go" came on the radio and the whole room turned into a weird Manchurian Candidate moment when they all just glossed over and began singing in unison without missing a beat or even seemingly aware of each other.

Then I realized this is going to be their thing, like Grease or the Spice Girls or whatever. Funny to see it happen at such a young age.

There's still something very cheap looking about the cgi to me. It looks too glossy or something, and the people are too symmetrical and move too smoothly.

my son definitely sang along to "Let It Go" like he had never sang along to a song before, on like his 2nd viewing of the movie. that song has some kind of crazy grip on the young ones.

Funny, I've been thinking about this movie recently because of all the "OMG I CAN'T TAKE THESE FROZEN SONGS" from parents on my FB feed and elsewhere. I took my two sons (now 6 & 9) to it when it came out, and they really liked it but did not become obsessed with it (tho the youngest keeps asking to see it again). I thought it was not a very good movie -- felt sort of stapled together -- but I did think it was interesting. So dogged in its determination to flirt with and then invert the classic Disney princess tale -- the untelegraphed late-chapter evilness of Hans, the way Kristoff is set up to be the savior but then isn't. I'd like to think (wishfully, probably) that what draws girls in particular to it is that it is so much a girls' story. Even more than "Brave," which still revolved around the girl rebelling against being a proper princess. Anna and Elsa don't have any problem with being proper princesses, but they're also totally in charge. The men in the movie are all in supporting roles. The central conflict is between sisters -- and it's especially interesting that neither one is evil in the classic Disney style. Elsa is just afraid to be herself.

I don't know, the whole thing is clunky and problematic on a lot of fronts once you dig in a little. But it still seems like a significant phenomenon to me.

Thought that occurred:

http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140409032203/frozen/images/8/8e/Kristoff.PNG

It's styled modernly, but dude totally has James Spader 80s hair

Yeah, I appreciate all that stuff as the father of a daughter (xp) but at the same time I wish the female characters could do all that stuff while also not having grapefruit-sized eyes and stringbean-sized arms

The vid for the song has like 205M+ views on YT so far.

it just feels like there's still something very diminishing about the way the women are portrayed in these ostensibly modern strong-woman stories

tbf I could say the same thing about Girls (in a metaphorical sense - obvs they have normal sized eyes and arms)

i don't even have fully formed thoughts on this but something really bothers me about second-guessing why so many omg girls like this movie

like

i kind of want to just yell MAYBE IT ISN'T FOR YOU or something idk

it's kind of making me crazy but i can't really articulate any of it because I'm still feeling like a corny goob so

That is one of the odder things, like yeah, the plot and character designs are heading in completely opposite directions.

would have been an easier thread/stronger plot to maybe have focused more on elsa and make it a real inversion of the disney evil queen trope imo, as was we only got ten mins of her here and ten mins of her there and the rest was snapshots from other disney movies (oh look! that horse (again) oh look! quaint quasi-natives with a refreshingly detached outlook (again) oh look! our protagonist (gender irrelevant) has fallen in love in ten mins (again) BUT WAIT it was a TRICK oh look! tho it's ok she fell in love with another stranger instead, this time it took a whole night and he was a weird guy lived in the woods by himself oh well that's ok too i guess oh look! we've got conflict between siblings/friends that didn't make any sense but oh look! it got sorted there just before the end and we've all learned eh something.

My daughter's obsession with Frozen in general and Let It Go in particular led me to write something about it the other week:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/apr/10/frozen-let-it-go-disney-hit-adolescent-lgbt-anthem

Nice d/n resonance too

xp Well after spending a few days stuck together going through a whole lot of dramatic events it's not really that unusual for people to develop feelings and kiss (he even asked permission!), and they didn't get engaged this time. Don't know why the siblings/friends conflict doesn't make any sense to you. And the story's moral of 'hey maybe locking away and keeping in check whatever makes you special or not like others is not the greatest idea' seems obvious enough and that works pretty well for me.

Nice essay DL!

Elsa's journey is an interesting one. Scared of power leads to fuck you guys I got power which leads to I got power but lets not be a dick about it is a really strong and interesting moral and seems somehow more complex than the "be true to yourself" Shrekitudes I expected.

I had problems with her power. So, it's so powerful she can't control it, almost kills her sister, sends the village into eternal winter, OK. Never mind the fact that that seems like just the sort of thing you should lock away, when she finally snaps she seems to have no prob focusing her power enough to build a Fortress of Solitude and snow monster. Also, where did the power come from? Is she just a mutant? Deus ex trolls never quite explain. It's definitely more complex than "be yourself" because it's never quite explained. Is the problem not being able to control it? Is the problem suppressing it? Is the problem not loving her sister? Loving her too much? Suppressing her love so that she won't kill her?

I bet my daughter would have a great time watching Doc McStuffins with you guys.

i don't even have fully formed thoughts on this but something really bothers me about second-guessing why so many omg girls like this movie

I don't think I'm "second-guessing" anyone else's liking it so much as just saying I didn't like it?

I mean there's just my "I personally didn't like it" level of not liking it, and then there's the more abstracted level of imagining what kind of messages I would like my daughter to get about women from movies in the future. The latter isn't really a big deal when it comes to a single film -- people get lots of different messages from lots of different kinds of media, and one movie doesn't make much difference, but since it's being touted as being some kind of great leap forward in the portrayal of women in Disney movies I guess I am kind of questioning that. But I certainly wouldn't "second-guess" anyone for liking it -- not everything has to send the right message.

there are things are not very good and yet achieve massive popularity

there are also things which become culturally inescapable for a moment or two and then prove not to be epochal

there are also things which are really well marketed product which manage to incorporate their defense on nominally progressive grounds into their appeal as product

There's another new(-ish) Olaf retcon short on Disney+, called "Once Upon a Snowman." It's cute, but I only accept the Chris Buck / Jennifer Lee productions as Frozen canon.

It's so f'd up that Anna leaves Hans in charge (when Elsa flees) - they presumably have a palace full of lifelong advisors, one of them really should have put the kibosh on that.