Reviewed by Kimberli Wong at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, 2020<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/lumiere-a.akamaihd.net\/v1\/images\/g_frozen2_06_18371_07a4447a.jpeg?region=0%2C0%2C1300%2C730\")
Frozen 2 starts off soon after the end of Disney\u2019s animated hit film, Frozen, featuring songs from the award-winning songwriting team of Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez. \u00a0While the first film was inspired by the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale, \u201cThe Snow Queen,\u201d the sequel reprises the key characters while narratively setting off into territory all its own.<\/p>\n
If anything, this, perhaps unfortunately, illustrates clearly just how difficult it is to come up with a good original story.<\/p>\n
Frozen 2 has its moments, the Golden Globe-nominated and Oscar-nominated song \u201cInto the Unknown\u201d sung by Idina Menzel being one of them. \u00a0The song seems to be written specifically for Menzel\u2019s strong emotional belting style, and her vocals soar beautifully through it. \u00a0While not as memorable as \u201cLet It Go\u201d from the first movie, \u201cInto the Unknown\u201d does a good job of capturing themes of taking risks, knowing where you are supposed to be and where you aren\u2019t, and following your heart.<\/p>\n
This seems to be the main take away from the film, which opens with an almost overly-sweet picture of life in Arendelle for Elsa, Anna, Olaf, Kristoff, and Sven. \u00a0After Elsa almost destroyed Arendelle and Anna almost died, the city and its people have recovered to a picturesque existence, where summer seems endless, the flowers bloom, and life is easy. \u00a0The five of them play charades at night and laugh their days away.<\/p>\n
But all is not as it appears, and Elsa begins to hear a strange, melodic voice calling her from far away. \u00a0Inwardly she is dissatisfied with her tame life and longs for adventure. \u00a0When a strong wind blows into Arendelle, drying up the fountains and causing the earth to shake, the citizens must evacuate and it is up to Elsa and her family to journey to the Enchanted Forest and find the cause.<\/p>\n
This is where the story begins to fall flat. \u00a0For the sequel, Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck made sure to inject plenty of Olaf (the immortal snowman) humor, some that was genuinely funny and a lot that seemed designed for an easy laugh from the audience. \u00a0This distracts from the absence of a really strong plot line or any new, strong character introductions. \u00a0Basically, Elsa has to go to the Enchanted Forest to find out why it is mad and she doesn\u2019t meet anyone particularly memorable or inspiring along the way, except for a really cute fire lizard and a really cool water horse (which, to be fair, is really cool). \u00a0The filmmakers attempt to create a compelling new world, where water has memory and the natural elements are imbued with consciousness, but it is mostly glossed over and leaves little impact on the viewer.<\/p>\n
Most importantly, the filmmakers neglect a strong transformative aspect in the main characters, Elsa and Anna, which is really what made the first film so powerful. \u00a0In this second go around, Elsa needs to be a little more wild and Anna doesn\u2019t actually go through much. \u00a0The song she sings when she believes Elsa to be dead, \u201cThe Next Right Thing,\u201d while a good song on its own, falls flat in the context of the film, because up until this point there really hasn\u2019t been much conflict between Elsa and Anna. \u00a0It\u2019s basically \u201cElsa stop doing everything on your own\u201d and… that\u2019s it.<\/p>\n
All in all Frozen 2 is an imbalanced film, with the new world needing to be much more awe-inspiring and the old characters needing to be much more moving. \u00a0Both of those elements were present in the first film, which is why I believe it made such an impact. \u00a0We hadn\u2019t seen anything like Frozen before. \u00a0We have seen Frozen 2, though, a thousand times, and we have seen it done better as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reviewed by Kimberli Wong at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, 2020 Frozen 2 starts off soon after the end of Disney\u2019s animated hit film, Frozen, featuring songs from the award-winning songwriting team of Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez. \u00a0While the first film was inspired by the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale, \u201cThe Snow Queen,\u201d the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":226246,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,404],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","category-santa-barbara-film-festival-2020"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/226246"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46710"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46974,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46710\/revisions\/46974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}