A thread for those who don't think Frozen is all that and a bag of chips

[Natara]

Can I just say something crazy? (Cough cough, line from the movie, cough cough.) I thought Frozen was one of the worst best films ever.

And by that, I mean it has so, so, so many flaws, yet I still loved it and thought it was great!

Either way, I have a long list of things which bugged me about it. (I should mention -- SPOILERS AHEAD!!!) This list includes:

1. Poor character development. We get, what, three or four character traits for Anna -- one of the main characters -- during the whole movie? That's just sad.

What about Hans? Kristoff? What do we know about either of them? Next to nothing! And don't even get me started on Anna and Elsa's parents, whom we know zero about.

The only one with decent character development is Elsa. And they didn't even focus on her as much as they should've! So much of the movie was instead devoted to her far less interesting sister, the cliché that is Anna.

Anna's personality is the same cliché I've seen a thousand times in teenaged girl movies, books, and Disney films. She's the quirky, clumsy, sweet girl whose only real fault is her naïvety and klutziness. This is supposed to make her "likable" and "relatable," but instead it just makes her unattainable. Seriously, how many girls her age do you know with that type of personality? I'm around Anna's age, and I know zero.

I do, however, know some Elsa types. (Her character is so superior to Anna's and with so much more characterization and personality traits that she makes Anna look comparatively laughable, IMO.)

2. The trolls, aka the film's cheap deus ex machina. What is up with those trolls?! They had to have been some of the most agonizingly awful characters in a Disney film since... argh, I won't even get started.

They seemed to be thrown in there just for the sake of telling the characters what to do, how to fix things, et cetera, et cetera. And, of course, they were. Hence the deus ex machina nickname.

Also, those trolls were given the worst song in the entire movie: That horrendous "Fixer-Upper."

3. The fact that the film relied way too much on its songs. It seemed like, for at least the first half of the film, every other scene was a song! Now I'm not exactly complaining here, as I personally loved the songs (with a few exceptions...), but nevertheless...

4. Olaf, Sven, the trolls (yes, again), and others. So many characters in Frozen came off like they'd been tossed in just to appeal to children or for other, equally poor reasons. Take Olaf. What did he really do, besides go around and look cute? Not that much. They could've easily left his character out entirely.

Same thing with Sven, and the trolls. Rather than tossing in poorly constructed additional characters, why not just focus on actually developing your main cast?? Like, maybe, Kristoff or Anna or even Hans?

5. Pacing/flow. The pacing was a little off, and don't even get me started on the flow. (As others have noted, the transitions from action/dialogue to singing were lousy at best.)

6. Clichés. Hans is the stereotypical "bad guy" (with the exception of him coming off as a good guy at first, maybe), Olaf and Sven are the useless characters thrown in so the film could meet its "cute animal quota" (and it's pretty obvious), Anna is the cliché quirky girl, the cheesy "act of true love" thing, and don't even get me started on the "dead parents cliché"... seriously, Disney? What the heck?

7. The fact that the story was all over the place. I mean, in just one movie, Disney gave us a talking snowman, family estrangement (i.e., the estranged relationship between Anna and Elsa), a good guy romancing one of the main characters who later turns out to be a very forgettable villain (Hans), a dog-like reindeer, random trolls, memorable and not-so-memorable songs, a love interest (Kristoff) whose character development is so bad that he's easily the film's most lackluster character (worse, in my opinion, than the poorly-constructed throwaway character that is Olaf), random snow-making magic/powers, a bad guy/good guy all in one (Elsa), and a bunch of other weird and unnecessary stuff added in for the hell of it.

It's all over the place!

8. Elsa's powers are never explained. I didn't really expect for them to devote a huge portion of the film explaining Elsa's powers or anything like that, but would it have killed them to maybe give us some form of answer for them? Even just one or two lines mentioning how or why she has them? And why no one else seems to? They also left a lot of similar questions unanswered, which is frustrating to say the least.

In the time they spent giving us unnecessary characters and plot lines, they could've easily answered this (pretty important) question.

There's more issues, but I won't even get into the rest. It'll take too long.

The music is, mostly, terribly written, with horrid transitions. Everything wrong with modern broadway rolled into one painful score. (I'm more judgemental about the music than most due having a music degree and to my 20 years playing in orchestras and in mulitple musicals, etc.)

The lyrics are childish and mostly dumbed-down, moreso than any Disney film in history that I can recall.

Interesting take! I personally found the music to be one of Frozen's biggest virtues, but I admit that some weren't anywhere near as good as others ("Fixer-Upper" and "Let It Go" shouldn't even be compared).

they lose points for having a princess sing about being gassy. Seriously?

I agree here wholeheartedly. Some of the "crude" moments of Frozen (the gassy part of "For the First Time in Forever" and the nose-picking part later in the film both jump to mind) were unnecessary and gross. I miss the days when Disney films didn't have any of these crude, sad attempts at humor.

And the song with her and the prince declaring their undying love for each other (and sandwiches) is one of the worst songs I've ever suffered through. Until the troll song later in the film. Disney music hit a new low twice in the same movie!

I thought "Love is an Open Door" (the sandwich song ) was pretty good. "Fixer-Upper" (the troll song), on the other hand... just awful.

The movie is generally quite predictable and even some direct quotes we called before they were said out loud by the characters.

I also agree about the predictability. Just... argh.

I am just not a fan of all computer animation. Beauty and the Beast was great with traditional animation and computer animated backgrounds, but I think it is sad that traditional animation itself is a dying art. I do enjoy Toy Story and that doesn't bother me, but computer animated people just aren't the same for me. I was watching a Pixar show awhile ago and even the Pixar employees were talking about the loss of traditional animated films and how they never thought that computer animation would pretty much end traditional animation.
I may be old school, but just kind of sad to me. Doesn't have the same feel or something???????????? Characters just don't seem as real, yes, I know somebody is going to say something about that. Anyone with me?

I so agree with you! I yen for the days of hand drawn animation. So much prettier and more special than any of this awful CGI! I really wish Disney would go back to its original animation style and reserve CGI for only films that truly beg for it (Frozen, for example, with its complex snowy sceneries and such, was an appropriate choice for CG... other recent Disney films, however, including Tangled, could've been done in hand drawn just as well).

I didn't particularly enjoy Anna's character because Disney tried too hard to make her a likable character.

You have no idea how much I agree with this.

All in all, Frozen definitely wasn't Disney's best work, but it was cute and I definitely enjoyed watching it.

...and this, too.

That's basically how I feel about it. Although I probably like it even a bit more than that. Still, it was far from Disney's best.

I just tell them I liked it the first time I heard it when I saw Wicked and it was called "Defying Gravity".

It's funny because it's true.

I have both on my iPod, and I definitely noticed the similarities between the two! Of course, it doesn't help that they're both sung by the same person.

Sometimes I feel like Frozen is just an animated version of Wicked. It at least bears a stronger resemblance to Wicked than to The Snow Queen, which it's (supposedly) based on!

According to the Huffington Post, "CinemaSins has tallied the wrongdoings of a lot of films. Sticking mostly to the action-adventure genre, the channel's nitpicked at movies that are truly awful, and others that have been fan favorites, but it's all been in good fun..." With warnings for profanity and profound sarcasm, this "Everything Wrong With" is fun to watch if you have not imbibed too much of the Koolaid.

I already saw that on YouTube and thought it was hilarious! I absolutely adore the CinemaSins videos; I watch them semi-religiously.

Highly recommend it!