Frozen’s back... but baffling plot may leave you cold
Frozen 2 ★★★✩✩
THE first Frozen movie raked in £1 billion at the box office in 2013, putting it among the highest-grossing films of all time. It also scooped two Oscars, for best animated feature and best original song for Let It Go – the tune that drove parents to despair.
The Disney franchise, which makes £776 million a year, also produced a stage version launched last year on Broadway. The show is due to come to Britain next year.
Inevitably, the film is being followed by a sequel – and no doubt another mountain of must-own merchandise.
Here the Mail’s critic Brian Viner gives his verdict...
FAIRY tales don’t often have sequels, and nor do musicals. Thunderously successful animated films, however, always do. With the boxoffice tills still ringing in Disney’s ears from 2013’s Frozen, it was only ever a matter of time before we got Frozen 2. That time has now come. It might not break records like the original, and it’s not as engaging, but they’ll still be counting the profits happily ever after.
Frozen became the highestgrossing animation in cinema history, a cultural behemoth that wrought magic off screen as well as on, not only turning Princess Elsa into the most powerful woman in the fair kingdom of Arendelle, but also turning writer-director Jennifer lee into one of the most powerful women in Hollywood.
She has scripted and directed this one, too. like the first film it is stupendously animated and based, though ever more tenuously, on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. They didn’t go in much for ‘origin stories’ in old Hans Christian’s day, but that’s what this is, whizzing back and forth in time to explain how Elsa (voiced as before by Idina Menzel) acquired her magical powers.
It begins with a flashback to Elsa’s childhood, with her and her little sister Anna (Kristen Bell) being told a bedtime story by their father, King Agnarr (Alfred Molina). The tale is of an enchanted forest, but Agnarr isn’t making it up. The forest exists, and is significant in all their lives, in a variety of labyrinthine ways.
I don’t use that word ‘labyrinthine’ loosely. One of the joys of the original was its simplicity; it had spells and trolls, but was easy enough to follow. This is a different kettle of frozen fish, with a plot that will befuddle most seven-year-olds and frankly, writing from experience, not a few 57year-olds. Maybe lee has calculated that all the young kids who loved the first film are six years older and wiser now, and ready for a more complex fantasy.
Whatever, you’ll recall from the 2013 film that Elsa’s parents died in a storm at sea. So what is the connection between them and a mystical faraway voice that lures her into the enchanted forest? It has something to do with the four spirits of air, fire, water and earth, and while there has been much internet speculation that Elsa might turn out to be gay in this picture, if there is a secret Disney agenda it’s more to do with climate change.
‘We only trust nature … when nature speaks, we listen,’ says yelana (Martha Plimpton), the leader of a forest tribe. Meanwhile, the good folk of Arendelle have been evacuated to higher ground. Those clever people at Disney didn’t know that their film would come out with fires raging in Australia and floods devastating Venice, not to mention South yorkshire, but they probably guessed that a film implying we shouldn’t muck about with nature might, to pluck an idiom from the air, go down a storm.
If all this makes Frozen 2 sound a bit heavy, well, there are some jaunty songs (though nothing as memorable as the power ballad let It Go from first time round) and high-quality comic relief in the cute form of Olaf the snowman (Josh Gad). He, by the way, has a fleeting post-credits scene that is only worth waiting for if you’ve got plenty of time on your parking ticket. It’s one thing watching the final credits roll to see the names of the voice cast, but by the time they detail all the people who worked on the film’s ‘Data and Pipeline Infrastructure’, you’ll be more than ready for the exit.
▪ Frozen 2 is out on November 22