A very appropriately-titled movie

Rating: 4/10 (22 May 2014)

I loved the teaser trailer for Frozen, where Olaf the snowman and Sven the reindeer compete for the snowman's lost carrot nose. That trailer, which was barely a minute long, was both beautiful and hilarious, and the two characters bounced off each other very well. Which is why the end result of the film Frozen is so baffling, and its Guinness Book of Records worthy level of overratedness is such a slap in my face.
Frozen is pretty, I'll give it that. The winter landscapes and the character designs - apart from the wolves - is top-notch. The plot is a whole different story. The story isn't just bad - with characters exhibiting no common sense or the story reaching any sort of conclusion that's logical within its universe - it's downright offensive at parts. The trolls attempting to force Anna to marry Kristoff? Anna and Elsa's parents scared by the troll to keep Elsa's powers locked up, instead of teaching her to harness them? The idea that "love" is the solution to Elsa's accidental winter curse? Just vile.
Anna is hardly even a character; she is airheaded and lacks any sense of reason, to the point that it becomes downright uncomfortable to watch her scenes. The director stated that Anna and Elsa would have goals beyond Cinderella's. Um, wasn't Cinderella's goal to be free of her abusive relatives? Anna, on the other hand, is only interested in finding a man, yet finds the time somewhere in there to be worried about Elsa too. The whole song "Love is an Open Door" is almost parody-like in its awfulness (a couple two rows down from me in the movie theatre exchanged glances at its conclusion and muttered "What the f***?"). Don't even get me started on the wolf attack scene, as if those poor animals don't have it hard enough already.
Which brings us back to Olaf and Sven, shining like beacons through it all. The two are fantastic characters – funny, charming and lovable – who deserved to be in a much better story than this. Like, say, one starring them. Like in the teaser trailer. Apparently the story went through development hell and they had no idea what to do with it, and it certainly feels like it when watching Frozen. The songs aren't even great, and they're way too showing-off and sing-songy instead of rising from the story ("Let it Go" made me especially feel like this).
I cannot even fathom how people can praise Frozen as the best Disney film in 20 years, when it's far more mediocre than Tangled, Wreck-It-Ralph and The Princess and the Frog, all of which are well-realized and magical movies with both beauty and heart. Frozen, on the other hand, feels cold, almost parody-like in its one-dimensionality. Don't believe the hype, what you have here is only an average movie.