In this post-Wicked era, we seem to be ashamed of our fairy tales. Everything has to be postmodern, postfeminist, postmillennial, postfun … and titles we used to know and love need to be replaced by edgy (and meaningless) adjectives.

For example, Rapunzel is now Tangled. Today, Snow White would be Pale or Cinderella would be Shoeless or Sleeping Beauty would be Snoozy. Hence, now The Snow Queen is called Frozen. And it’s a bore.

I really wanted to like this. I love Disney animated movies, and I love musicals … and I adore Disney animated musicals. But not this one.

With the pedigree that this film has – from the creators of The Book of Mormon and Avenue Q (which I admit does seem like a bit of a stretch for Disney) providing the music and Pixar’s John Lasseter producing – I had high hopes. I also think The Snow Queen is a fascinating (and weird) story to adapt. Plus, you have voice work from Broadway’s Idina Menzel, Jonathan Groff, and Josh Gad as well as TV star Kristen Bell.

Sadly, the film is dead on arrival. The musical numbers are forgettable – completely. And the storyline is so far afield from the familiar narrative, bolting on, yes, a Wicked-esque sisterly rivalry that adds little. And, I will admit it, I still miss hand-drawn animation. I know 2D is basically gone forever, but this computer-generated business where everyone looks like a glassy-eyed Bratz doll is for the birds.

There are folks out there who loved Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame with its singing and dancing gargoyles and creepy, oversexed, misogynistic clergy villain. I’m not one of them. And I kept thinking of that misfire while watching Frozen. The plot is similarly disjointed, and I just couldn’t get too geeked about musical numbers featuring rastafarian rock trolls and goony snowmen.

I wish I had more to say. I’m fresh out of clever. There’s an interesting twist in the film’s final act that helped me engage a bit, but at that point the movie had already lost me. There will be people who – on their Thanksgiving holiday high – will adore this, and they will likely tell me “you just didn’t get it” and “you are thinking about it too much.”

Well, I like thinking. And the Disney classics of old weren’t devoid of thought. In fact, they were rich with it. Frozen left me uninspired and bored to icy tears.