WARNING: Huge slimy betentacled spoilers follow. Also ranty bits. Proceed at your own risk.

I don’t want to write about Frozen. I mean, there’s nobody in the room holding a gun to my head forcing me to write about it or anything, I’m just saying I had it in my head that I was going to write about something else, anything else really.

“So write about something else.”

But I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s bouncing around in my head like a pinball in a blender and I’ve just got to get it out, you know?

“So let ‘er rip.”

Okay. Fine. By the way, I don’t think I caught your name.

“You can call me the Straw Man.”

Sounds like a monster in a bad horror movie.

“I’m the guy people call when they want to win an argument with an imaginary version of the person they’re arguing with. I spout stuff you’ve already thought of, giving you the opportunity to knock down those arguments and look like a genius. In this blog post I’ll be standing in for somebody or other at Disney.”

Woah. Meta.

“It pays the bills. So, you didn’t like Frozen?”

That’s not it at all. I liked it quite a bit. Maybe not as much as I was expecting to like it, but I certainly didn’t leave the theatre disappointed.

“What’s the issue then?”

Two words: missed opportunities.

“Elaborate.”

Well, for instance, there’s this anecdote I read recently about the writing process surrounding the song, Let it Go.

“Isn’t that song the best?”

I know right? I’m basically listening to it non-stop at this point. It’s just such a powerful- Hey stop trying to get me off track!

“Sorry. You were saying?”

Okay, so the story goes that the song was originally supposed to be the moment that Elsa becomes the film’s antagonist

“Right.”

So what happened?

“Well the thought process was, ‘Hey, wait a minute, this song makes us feel empathy for this character. We can’t have that. We can’t have someone in our movie doing bad things for good reasons! Villains have to have giant red arrows pointing to them, and they have to laugh in an evil way and act generally douchey!'”

Wait…really?

“How would I know? I’m just the stand-in for your thoughts. Try and keep up.”

Right. So you made Elsa a good guy. You know what? Great. Fine. I can see it. I mean she’s the most interesting person in the movie anyway, so why not make the film about her?

“But we didn’t-”

I KNOW YOU DIDN’T! That was a rhetorical device, genius.

“You have a problem with Anna?”

Seriously? You’re asking me if I have a problem with the character who gets engaged to a guy within five minutes of meeting him, then leaves that guy in charge of her whole country five minutes later when she runs off without any kind of supplies or preparation or anything after her big sister randomly turned into an ice witch and froze the whole country?

“Actually we don’t use the term witch for-”

Don’t try to change the subject. Anna is dumb. I mean she’s super dumb. So why make her the main protagonist of the movie?

“…”

It was because you already had a script isn’t it? I mean you have this big epiphany that Elsa makes a better protagonist, but you don’t want to go through the work of actually doing anything about it, so you shoehorn a random love interest into the beginning, wedge a boring moral about falling in love too quickly in with him, and then turn him evil without warning with fifteen minutes left in the movie.

“You didn’t like the fact that we subverted the Disney standard trope of love at first site?”

But you didn’t subvert it. Literally the very next eligible man Anna meets she falls in love with. You didn’t change didly. And it’s even worse because Kristoff serves less purpose plotwise than Elsa. His only reason to exist in the story is to shuttle Anna from place to place. At least Elsa gives Anna a reason to go off and have her journey that, incidentally, doesn’t change her in the slightest.

“What do you mean Anna doesn’t change?”

I think you heard me the first time.

“But she repairs her relationship with her sister.”

That’s not her changing. That’s Elsa changing. You remember Elsa, the most interesting character in the movie? The one who you decided should never do anything more proactive than run away from things? That Elsa? She changes. Anna? No.

“I’m sensing you’re pretty worked about about this.”

It’s just…okay, you do all these things that LOOK like subversions. Like the love at first sight thing? It’s not a bad message to send to little girls. But you didn’t send it. In this movie that on the surface seems to be very much about girl-power (except for the fact that you didn’t make it about the actual girl with the actual power) you give the main character a male counterpart who serves no purpose in the story other than to be her boyfriend at the end? You could literally replace him with a magic flying carpet and nothing would change. No, wait, I’ll go you one better. You could replace the guy with his own reindeer. He’s only there because DEAR GOD WE CAN’T HAVE GIRLS THINKING THEY CAN BE HAPPY AND FULFILLED WITHOUT A MAN. HOW IS THIS PROGRESS?

“You…you did say you liked this movie, right?”

Yeah. Yeah I did. It’s just….missed opportunities man. Well, that and the dissonance between my expectations and what I saw.

“Listen, you’re not hurting my feelings. We made bank on this thing.”

Can I say just one more thing?

“If it’ll make you feel better. Why not?”

That thing with Hans turning out to be evil. I’m not going to yell anymore, but…it felt forced, you know? Like you said earlier, giant blinking arrow pointing at the villain and all. I know most people thought that it was great as a twist, but I sort of feel like maybe it would have been more powerful story-wise if the audience had known ahead of time. I mean, putting aside the fact that anyone with a brain should have figured out he was going to be the bad guy anyway, it seems like there would have been some powerful narrative irony going on, if we knew Hans didn’t love Anna as she was riding off to extract her “true love’s kiss” from him. There’s always something great about seeing a character walking into a situation that the audience knows she should avoid.

“Point taken. That Olaf sure was funny though, right?”

Dude, I know right? I cannot stop saying, “Let’s go kiss Hans! Who IS this Hans?”

“And here were some pretty great songs too.”

Yeah there were. Dang it! Now I want to go watch it again.

“Cha. Ching.”