I think they should have yanked the totally useless trolls from the movie, they add nothing and their advice is borderline cryptic. Elsa’s parents not having a clue how to deal with her powers, and not making her hide but telling her to hide only her powers would make them sensible but not crazy, just unequipped.
Is there any deleted scenes explaining who was regent? Was it really just the girls and a maid or butler in the castle?
I think there was the bones of a very good movie here, but it needed work and script breaking. Incidentally on IMDB it says Elsa was originally the villain!
I would have been happy without the trolls or the stupid talking snowman. But then the sidekicks and comic relief have always been my least favorite parts of most Disney movies. I thought “Fixer Upper” was a totally cringeworthy song. That one killed me. If there’s one thing I don’t want my daughter internalizing, it’s that it’s up to her to accept a broken man as her husband and fix him through the power of Twoo Wuv. (And swap the genders for my son.) I got out of a marriage like that because I didn’t like the example it was setting for the kids.
Can we talk about the trolls kidnapping young Kristoff and baby Sven at the start too? Fair enough, those two wander off and follow the royal sled’s icy trail into the mountains, but it’s a female troll who decides to keep them, rather than return them to their ice-cutting human family!
Eh neither person was broken, the song was about stuff like being annoyed someone has a pet.(I thought it was weird the song had a lyric about a relationship against nature or something? I was like whoa he is closer to that reindeer than I thought!)
What was really annoying as hell was Anna falling in love with two guys in a day, the movie even mocked it with a few lines but then it is twu wuv with you know the none villainous one.:smack:
They don’t have a human family. At one point Kristoff says (about his life before he hooked up with the trolls) ‘Back then it was just me and Sven.’ He was an orphan.
(Why yes, I do have a five-year-old, and I have watched this movie too many times.)
On the Elsa thing, though - yeah, ‘conceal, don’t feel’ is a terrible motto, and cutting her off from her sister and keeping Anna in ignorance is a terrible idea. (Which I point out every time we watch the movie. Me: ‘If you have feelings that worry you, you work with people who love you on finding ways to deal with them in the real world, and if you have problems, you TALK TO YOUR SISTER IT’S WHY I BOTHERED MAKING TWO OF YOU.’ Widget: ‘SHHHH.’) The only thing is that the movie doesn’t endorse those decisions; on the contrary, it’s made clear that they were totally the wrong thing to do, made both sisters’ lives unnecessarily painful and ended up nearly killing the pair of them. What’s endorsed is the solution of accepting your feelings and powers and finding ways to cope with them in partnership with people who love you.
I can’t prove genetics, but at the start of the film he is clearly being trained by the ice-cutters during the song Frozen Heart (you see him with them here). Whether they are his family or not, he is obviously one of them until he gets separated - this is the point I assume he means it was just him and Sven, until the trolls take them in. And keep him
Yeah, but Anna thinking she had True Love with Hans was then turned into a delightful subversion of the love-at-first-sight trope when he showed his true colors. Anna and Kristoff are clearly headed into a relationship by the end of the movie, but she’s taking things much more slowly with him. I thought it was fantastically done, actually.
And yeah, the king and queen messed up BIG time. It was very human and done from the best of intentions, but they couldn’t have handled it in a worse way if they had been trying to. You could see how afraid they were for Elsa if people found out about her abilities and tried to hurt her, but they completely dropped the ball on the whole aspect of learning to deal with those abilities. Bah.
I saw a proposal today for a Halloween drinking game: have a drink every time an Elsa comes to the door. If I get kids this year (it varies wildly), I’d be hammered before sunset, I think.
Aside from “the patriarchy”, why are there no wicked stepfathers in fairy tales? (That I’m aware of.)
I just finished reading The Cambridge Medieval History, and there are plenty of real world examples of kings naming younger sons as their heir because the eldest son was unsuitable in one way or another. Charles the Conquerer named a younger son as his heir to the throne of England.
I think that role was filled by Hans. No, he wasn’t there while Anna was growing up. Instead, he pulled his stunt when she was an emotionally/hormonally available teenager.
I was a uniquely talented musician when I was a kid and teenager. (well, I still am). I dreamed of becoming a rock star. This was in the 1970s and '80s.
Instead of encouragement from my parents, I got lectures on how becoming a “rock star” was some kind of unattainable dream. I needed to think more “realistically” and “practically”. Like, become an accountant or something. After years of hearing about how “talented” and “smart” I was, the message suddenly changed to “You can’t succeed at that. Be realistic. Find yourself a reliable career.”
The problem is, when you’re a child (and this is one of the rare occasions where I will call a teenager a “child”), the people you trust and believe more than anybody are your parents. And when those people you trust more than anybody else tell you that you can’t succeed at the the thing you’re the best at, why would you ever believe that you could succeed at anything else?
So here I am, 48 years old, and work as a cook for $11.33/hour. Yeah, it’s steady, reliable work. But I’m also single, never been married, have fathered no children. Because I know I can’t support a family on what I make. Because I’m still afraid.
And that is why I relate to Elsa so well. I was the “good” son when I was a teenager, who did what was expected of me. Then I got into my 20s, and had my freedom, and I effed my life up.
This is actually one of the things I loved so much about “Tangled”. It had the traditional Disney animal sidekick … but that sidekick was subdued, unobtrusive, never said a thing, and had little impact upon the plot.
I believe that around the time and culture these fairly tales were developing it would have been much more difficult for a widow (or divorcee, but given the time probably a widow) to remarry, compared to men. What with all those hangups about chastity and whatnot.
There are, however, plenty of evil uncles. Hmm…I honestly have no idea why the evil female authorities figures are generally stepmothers, and the males uncles. Maybe something to do with ancient inheritance rules?
Can we think of any evil aunts, except Ursula the Sea Witch? (Her relationship to Ariel wasn’t really pointed out, but doesn’t she refer to Triton as her brother?)
ETA: I just thought of Hamlet. Not exactly a “fairy tale”, but an evil uncle…who’s also a stepfather. Icky. Do we think that Scar took Sarabi as a mate? If they were real lions, he would have.
Woah, that’s so weird. I don’t recall having ever read that, but I could have sworn she referred to him as “Brother” in their confrontation scene. But nope. I just went and watched it.
I must have read about that earlier script sometime in the last 25 years and completely forgotten it.
What I couldn’t figure out was, someone - a regent, presumably - had to be in charge from the time the parents died to the time Elsa came of age and could take the throne. Instead, it’s more or less an immaculate coronation.
That’s important in the plot because one has to assume that, once Elsa leaves, and Anna leaves to pursue her, that regent, whoever it was, would normally just continue running things in their absence, since the regent had been running things all along, and everyone would simply accept their continued rule until at least one of the princesses returned.
Anna leaving Hans in charge as she runs off after Elsa - well, the only reason that could happen were if there were no regent.
