Holy crap, Frozen suuuuuucks.

[Sanderpower]

I think the problem is that you're looking at this as just a simple animation movie. This isn't a Pixar film, this is a fairy tale. If you look at it from that perspective, you'll enjoy it a lot more.

 

[Kashrlyyk]

Snip.

You forgot to mention how the entire plot is completely contrived because the King and Queen are complete fucking morons.

The king knows enough to know about the trolls and respect their wisdom and knowledge on magical things. That's why he takes Anna to them when she gets a frosty facial. After curing Anna, the troll shaman then gives the parents some advice, saying specifically that Elsa's power can be a great and beautiful thing or it can be terrible and destructive. What can make it terrible and destructive? Fear. Quote: "Fear is the enemy."

And so how do the parents interpret the shaman's wise words? "Let's lock Elsa away from EVERYONE because she's so incredibly dangerous, thus ensuring that she'll grow up to be absolutely terrified of herself and her powers." Which, in turn, leads to the rest of the plot of the movie. Had the parents, you know, actually listened to the troll shaman they would have known that it was a bad idea to lock Elsa away and teach her to fear herself because she's a monster who must always "conceal, don't feel" lest she haul off and kill someone. Not just a bad idea, but the exact opposite of what the troll - the only authority on magic in the movie that we're shown - tells them to do.

Yep, that was what ruined the movie for me. The ENTIRE story is based on an "idiot plot decision".

Also:
Why is Anna not indifferent or even hatefull towards Elsa? Getting ignored for around 15 years and no hard feelings?

 

[Ieyke]

Frozen's great.
It's not perfect or the greatest thing ever, but it's great.

 

[Casual Shinji]

- The geography doesn't make a lick of sense.
- Rapunzels hair defies the laws of space and time on nearly every occasion when it isn't played for laughs.

Spoiler

- Why the fuck doesn't the dude let Rapunzel heal him before cutting off her hair?

Okay, I don't like the movie, I just wanted to add my own nitpicks.

Spoiler

Well, I would assume not to give Gothel any "window" of oppertunity to pull Rapunzel out of arm's length the second she was done healing. That's what I would do if I was Gothel.

I can nitpick the shit out of Tangled (just like any other film), but the movie still works for me because the themes generally come across just fine. With Frozen, I don't care how or why Elsa got frost powers or how they work. Those are just technicalities in a Fantasy film. What bothers me is that it completely bungles the message and theme it's trying to convey.

 

[faefrost]

Sounds like someone needs to build a snowman....



[HEADING=2][/HEADING]

I dunno, I liked the movie, but I also agree with pretty much every point you made. A lot of it doesn't make sense when you stop to look at it. Some of the songs were really unneeded and would've been just as good if they'd been cut.

I'm just biding my time until Tangled becomes popular again. Viva la Tangled!

If you want to be technical about it Frozen is a semi sequel to Tangled, in that it is set in the same world and you can roughly determine the points in time. Rapunzel and Eugene appear in Frozen at Elsa's coronation. The strong yet unsaid implication is that the coronation is roughly 3 years after the end scene of Tangled. And the King and Queens ship sank crossing the North Sea traveling to either Rapunzel's coronation or wedding.

Also some of the story elements make a little more sense once you realize that Elsa's powers are basically just a super magical stand in for dealing with mental illness such as Schizophrenia in the family.

Personally I think the movie is good and entertaining, with the best most consistent string of songs that Disney has put out in a single movie since Lion King. But the story itself is spotty and overrated. Tangled has a better story and better developed characters. Frozen is a good movie, but it does not come close to the true all around amazing perfection of something like Beauty and the Beast. Which is what I think a lot of latecomers were expecting after all the hype.

 

[Entitled]

this entire topic is so...edgy?...it's hilarious.

...just the fact it exists even...

XD

The only thing edgier than calling Frozen a piece of shit, is calling Frozen "obviously not the greatest movie ever, but otherwise pretty OK".

The double-edged sword of controversial opinions!

 

[ryan_cs]

Huge plot holes in this movie.

I mean, just look at this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtCXUFImZYE

How are they able to move so fast between rooms in the castle, the roof and some waterfall cave while still keeping the song in synch? Are they singing the song multiple times, or simply taking a break during each set piece only to continue when they get to the next scene?

And here, Let it go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moSFlvxnbgk

Where does the music come from? I didn't see any orchestras anywhere. Are they just living in the mountains?

Piece of shit movie. Makes no sense at all.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MusicalWorldHypotheses

It's either all in their heads or the songs are merely a dramatic reconstruction of what really happened.
Musicals do this a lot.

 

[chikusho]

Huge plot holes in this movie.

I mean, just look at this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtCXUFImZYE

How are they able to move so fast between rooms in the castle, the roof and some waterfall cave while still keeping the song in synch? Are they singing the song multiple times, or simply taking a break during each set piece only to continue when they get to the next scene?

And here, Let it go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moSFlvxnbgk

Where does the music come from? I didn't see any orchestras anywhere. Are they just living in the mountains?

Piece of shit movie. Makes no sense at all.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MusicalWorldHypotheses

It's either all in their heads or the songs are merely a dramatic reconstruction of what really happened.
Musicals do this a lot.

Yes, naturally. I was just trying to echo the level of nit-pickyness displayed in the OP.

 

[faefrost]

That said if they do make a sequel as they have been threatening I've been joking that they should get the rights from Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta's estate to rip off "Fire and Ice" let Elsa go full villain and fill the role of "Nekron" maybe even taking the name. If we're going to go with dumb ideas it would be worth it just to see her sister pump iron and abuse 'roids to get a proper Frazetta build for the final battle... oh yeah and then they can call Olaf's "story arc" foreshadowing when he's the one to open the volcano at the end.

Someone is supposedly making alive action Fire and Ice remake. I'm not sure how I feel about that?

 

[AetherWolf]

5. It's a film for small children, aimed at little girls. Remember the target audience of a film before you write a book about how you didn't like it next time.

Sorry, but it just really irks me when people use this argument to deflect criticisms towards a film. Remember that Foodfight! was also a film created made for and primarily marketed towards children. So was The Last Airbender and Doogal. I guess we should just be quiet and put up with all of their gigantic flaws because hey, it's for kids, right?

Why is it always Disney movies that get defended this way? Any lengthy critique on their trends, their content, or just one of their films will more often than not get responses that are variations of "It's for kids!" or "Hurr durr, if you don't like it don't watch it!"

 

[klaynexas3]

Now realize that the film was one of the highest grossing of all time, and that people thoroughly enjoyed it, while Ghibli films routinely bomb in the American box office. Which means that we're going to see a whole lot more of Frozen and its ilk.

Why is it that Ghibli is put on this pedestal? It's hardly any better than most of what Disney puts out, and some of their best stuff I'd say is no better than Frozen. Now, I haven't seen all of their movies, so I can't say for all of them, but for the ones I have seen, the characters lack any serious depth. For instance, in Princess Mononoke, the main character is a Mary Sue, and the villain starts out "oh kill all the animal gods, fuck them" until at the end where she just magically changes to "oh, I'll be good now" and everyone is perfectly fine with it. Spirited Away lacked any sort of main direction, mostly just jumping around from scene to scene with the only purpose of trying to show something that might look interesting, but from any stand point beyond looks, is anything but, I'd mostly just compare it to Labyrinth, but even Labyrinth had Bowie to spice that up a bit, and interesting puppets and sets are far more impressive than interesting drawing skills. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is not much better(I know it's not officially Ghibli, but it's Miyazaki), in that I'd say it is an awful lot like Mononoke with bland bland bland characters. Nausicaa's one moment of depth, in that while she is a professed pacifist, shows absolute rage when seeing her father dead and kills two men, is swept away in that they never ever refer to this moment again in the film, neither in characters speaking about it, or Nausicaa even showing this clear inner anger that she has.

The only Ghibli film I could say that I saw little to no major flaws in was Grave of the Fireflies. The characters were that, actual characters. They felt real and alive, which is more than what I can say about just about anyone else in the other Ghibli movies, and the only other one I've seen that I didn't mention was The Cat Returns, and that's just because I don't remember hardly anything about that one.

I can understand that people might not like Frozen, but Ghibli has its fair share of problems in even the films most people claim to be their better works.

 

[small]

i guess congratulations are in order for not being a 7 year old girl?

love it or hate it struck a cord with kids and in the end they are the demographic its aimed at, those are the true critics and they absolutely loved it. it frankly doesnt matter to little kids if something has plot holes or there is an issue with songs if they dont like it they will refuse to watch it and its perfect for them

 

[Fox12]

snip

There are a lot of Ghibli films of varying quality, and not all of them are good. However, for their more critically acclaimed films, there are several reason why people like them. Miyazaki's early works, while not bad, were fairly bland and simple. Nausicca and Castle in the Sky were fun adventures, but the they followed well worn archetypes that have been done before, and done better. His later filsm, however, tend to stray from this path. They are childrens films, but they don't talk down to children.

Mononoke has a rather complex set of characters, given that its a 2 hour film. It's not a story of good vs. evil, it's a story of people vs. people, which is inherently more interesting. The leader of the humans is simply trying to carve out a place for her followers to live. She looks after the rejects of society, including lepers and whores, and shows them another way to live. Technology isn't evil, it allows the poor to resist their oppressors and maintain a higher standard of living. However, in so doing they ruin the lives of the creatures of the forest, who are noble, but savage and violent. They simply want to protect their home. This is far more complex then Cinderella or Hercules, where the villains are simply evil for the sake of being evil. It's also far more complex then Fern Gully or Avatar. Most of his films are like this, at least in his later career. Spirited Away is more of a traditional fairy tale that manages to avoid the traditional act structure of Western story telling, to its benefit. It also has a cast of complex characters. Miyazaki also has FAR more complex female characters than Disney does, and I would much rather have my sister appreciate Ghibli's heroines to Disney's. Miyazaki simply writes better female characters.

However, is Ghibli inherently superior to Disney? Disney has much more to it, since Ghibli is only a studio, so I would argue that Ghibli maintains a higher standard of quality overall. However, if you compare the best works of both, I would say they are relatively even. Up, The Lion King, and Hunchback of Notre Dame deal with complex characters and motivations, and are surprisingly mature, given their target audience. Sometimes I grow tired of the silly sidekick characters, when their not important to the plot, but on the whole I would say that Up and Hunchback are just as good as Ghibli's best films.

How does Frozen fall into all of this, though? I would argue that it doesn't compare favorably to either Ghibli OR Disney. It can't hold a candle to Pixar, either. It's trying so hard to recapture the magic of the Disney Renaissance, but it fails in all regards. There are plot holes, poorly written characters, and bad music. This is what happens when Disney fires the staff that made them great in the 90's. The old masters are gone.

This is Frozen:

This is classic Disney:

There can be no comparison.

 

[Tsun Tzu]

This is Frozen:

This is classic Disney:

There can be no comparison.

I don't believe this is really 'fair' comparison, given that these two songs are not, at all, similar in tone.

The Frozen one is the comic relief, side character bit, and I suppose the closest approximation in Hunchback might be...


...And it's still miles better.

I really. Truly. Sincerely miss the animated films. They're just gorgeous and hold up ridiculously well.

 

[Fox12]

snip

Yes, I suppose you called me out on my bias there, haha. You're absolutely right, I was being rather unfair.

I do still think Hunchback and The Lion King made their music more story relevant, though, and thus were still better. Topsy Turvey introduced several major plot points and characters, and led into the next scene flawlessly. I Just Can't Wait to be King, from Lion King, was silly, but it was actually foreshadowing for what would happen later. Simbas view of power was infantile, and we see the consequences of that attitude when Scar takes over. The song actually becomes darker when we see the natural result of the abuse of power. We then understand that having power is about responsibility, not about serving ones own interests. Frozen lacked that subtlety, and many of its characters were superfluous.

 

[K12]

So basically the OP:

1) thinks Magic should be a branch of physics

2) Was really bitter about Hans betrayal because he's so totally dreamy

 

[klaynexas3]

snip

The villain is almost bipolar in Mononoke, she doesn't just want to protect her own, she wants to take what is others as well. Perhaps I'm being unfair in judging that film, and should give it another watch, but when it was anyone not within her town, she seemed callous and even just straight vindictive towards them. I'd say an apt comparison would be Hitler, she doesn't care about other forms of life, but will eagerly help out that of her own, and then the drastic quick shift in the end comes almost from nowhere. That's part of the problem, the ending is just so nice and neat and wrapped up in a bow despite all the problems and tensions.

Now, I can't remember everything from these movies, and I can think of a reason why I might have become more distracted when I was watching them, so perhaps I should give them another look.

And Pixar has gone down hill in recent years. Way down. I mean, Cars 2, Monster's University, they're making a Toy Story 4? They are really losing their touch. Hell, even Cars and Ratatouille weren't amazing, and Brave was only pretty good at best as well. And the Incredibles had a horrible underlying message that you can't even try to become something more than you are. Yes I realize the other message was don't try to be something you are not, but it basically also says you can't reach for anything more unless you were born that way.