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Okay, I want to talk about Frozen II and none of you can physically stop me from doing so.
First off, I don’t know about the rest of you, but my little Kansas town managed to cram every single child in the tri-state area into our theater. A blonde child in a red scarf beaned me in the head with a bottle of Purel, which its mother then started searching for. This was in the middle of Sven’s (the main character and god-king reindeer) weird music video segment. I was too enchanted to do anything but hand her the bottle of hand sanitizer and lean left to keep my eyes on the mesmerization in front of me. Seriously, the minute that video hits Youtube, I am gonna upload a 10-hour cut of it, because I’m looossstt in the woooods.
Second – and I’m going to do my best to avoid spoilers – I am really glad to see different kinds of stories hitting the silver screen. Frozen II hits all the familiar beats we’ve come to expect in a movie (and at one point, a character literally points out what section of the Hero’s Journey they’re on) but manages to do it with a dreamlike disattachment from reality. The main character (Elsa, not Sven) has a cryptic motivation that can’t be understood except emotionally. Understanding why Elsa does as she does is the same kind of understanding of horror I have in a nightmare. When I wake up, I have no idea why I was afraid of a giant rubber chicken. But in sleep? In sleep, I grok that fear. And in the moment of the dream of watching, Elsa’s motivations make sense.
The other characters, who are specifically stated in the script as not being magical and (later, spoiler) belonging to a world Elsa doesn’t belong to, all have explicit motivations. Anna wants to save her town. Olaf wants to find himself. Kristof wants to get the girl. But Elsa is a magical being with the inscrutable and enigmatic motivations of a fey character. I literally muttered the word “phantasmagoria” while I was watching the movie, and caught an elbow for it.
Frozen II is definitely worth a watch. The Mouse isn’t holding a gun to my head. Well, not about this. The movie isn’t a cynical cash grab, and it manages to be a story completely on its own, carrying its own weight and its own fun weirdness. Go watch it.
But, like, try to catch a late showing, so that you don’t have three strange children climbing you like a tree as you watch.