An eighty minute long contrivance, but it's a fun 80 minutes.

Rating: 6/10 (23 January 2014)

The first half hour of Frozen had several moments that had me rolling my eyes and groaning out loud. (ex. Anna:"What's that smell?" Elsa: "Smells like..." Both: "CHOCOLATE!" Ugh.) It's like Disney forgot how to make a family film that doesn't annoy the parents who've taken their kids to see it.
But about that contrivance. Here's the thing, and here's where the spoilers begin: Elsa has the supreme powers of an almighty deity. Without ever receiving any training or guidance at all, or even any practice, she can perfectly and effortlessly: freeze any object, create ice out of nothing, telepathically control the ice she creates, telepathically control wood and coal, control the wind, transform her dress into a completely different dress made from completely different material and of a completely different style, create sentient life out of inanimate objects, and bring people back from the dead. Oh, but she can't thaw out the stuff she's frozen. Well she can, technically, but, for some reason the movie leaves entirely unexplained, this minor detail isn't as effortlessly intuitive to her as every single other aspect of her power is. The trolls who heal Anna at the beginning know exactly how Elsa's power works. They explain to her that fear will cause her to lose control of her power and, several years later, they tell Anna that only love can thaw a frozen heart, meaning love allows Elsa to undo what her powers do. WHY DIDN'T THEY TELL ELSA THAT WHEN SHE WAS A KID?!? Because then there'd have been no movie, that's why.
So Elsa spends the next decade locked away in her room because her parents are too stupid to understand that you can't learn to control something unless you're actually allowed to use it. What follows is a story that, while entertaining, has been so shoehorned into place that you can't help but feel a little cheated. Especially at the end, when Elsa's expression of "true love" brings Anna back from the dead. Her love thaws Anna's frozen heart. Except that the emotion she was expressing was grief. You know, the same emotion that didn't heal Anna at all when Elsa iced her at the beginning of the movie. But somehow, this little revelation is all Elsa needed to instantly master the aspect of her power that until then had completely eluded her for her entire life.
The snowman was funny though, and the songs were good. That's three stars each.