Just watched it. Loved 99% of it. The animation, the music, the action set pieces. Wonderful stuff. I hope there’s a sequel.
I don’t want to talk about that 99% now.
The one nagging little thing that bothered me throughout the movie was the same exact thing that bothered me through Brave, This is a plot with a certain amount of morally ambiguous characters. But Pixar doesn’t do ambiguity. At all.
So we have what could have been a perfectly enjoyable story: Monarchs discover that their older daughter is cursed with superpowers. Scared, her parents lock the child away. The kid grows up alone and filled with hatred and creates a neverending winter. When the younger sister is old enough, travels to the ice palace to try and reason with her… then everything happens more or less the same way, with Elsa being redeemed, Anna sacrificing herself out of love and so on. Beautiful stuff.
But again: Pixar. Moral Ambiguity. Not mixing. Not happening. Villains are absolute, irredeemable evil. Protagonists are pure, wonderful goodness.
So they decided to do some extreme juggling with the plot. The parents are perfectly nice and only lock her in a room without telling Anna because some contrived accident that makes trolls erase her memories, or better said, leaving them changed for no reason, and she can’t find out about the powers or would fall into a coma, except that she doesn’t when she does find out, and one ridiculous forced plot contrivance after another.
Elsa acts like a villain… but she can’t, because she has to be pure good, so every villainous action becomes a nonsensical series of misunderstandings that make her look bad accidentally.
You don’t believe me? Hey, remember that scene when the giant snow monster grabs the rope with Anna and Kristoff and screams “DON’T COME BACK!”, and Anna just goes nuts and cuts the rope anyway, even when the monster was specifically telling them that he wanted them away, not hurt them? Clearly the original plan was for the monster to try and eat them, and Anna’s quick thinking supposed to save them both, instead of making her look like she reacts inappropriately for no reason.
But again. Elsa good. Moral ambiguity bad. The monster comes from Elsa, therefore none of his actions can be evil. Yet they wanted to keep the rope-cutting scene anyway, logic in the story be damned. I hated that. That really bothered me.