I have been anxiously waiting to see Frozen for at least three months, but as I have trouble getting to the theater, I was forced to wait for the DVD. I saw glowing reviews, my five-year-old’s friends at school couldn’t stop talking about it, the whole family was psyched. This weekend, it was even available in a Redbox! (At least when we reserved it early enough on a Friday morning.) The whole family sat down to watch and as we did, I had one fleeting concern: Had all this hype set my expectations too high?
Yes.
There are a lot of good things I could say about this movie. In particular, I have to applaud the strong underlying moral (“What do you mean you’ve known him less than a day?”) and the fact that true love does not boil down to a kiss. In fact, for a princess movie to break the mold on these two things alone takes a lot of courage and has me applauding, both as a parent and a a rational human being.
But … and maybe there was no way this movie ever could have met my over-inflated expectations … but I thought the beginning got off to a slow, clunky start. I did not think that Elsa was nearly as well developed a character as she could and should have been in order to pull the ending together (I also thought she was by far the more interesting sister, even though she got much less screen time), and I found the musical aspect of this story annoying. Actually, I’ll just go ahead and say it — I’m sick of Disney musicals. Some of the songs are better than others (of course), none of them are familiar (and for some reason with music, it takes some repetition to truly enjoy a song), and I felt like the songs were being used in lieu of true plot or character development instead of as a way to accompany those things.
My five-year-old thought the movie was okay. I could tell she was thrown because like everyone else in the family, all her little friends at school have been talking about this movie and she wanted to love it with them. In the end, I had to have a talk with her about how it’s okay to form your own opinion. You don’t have to love something just because everyone else does, and if you like it you don’t have to like it as much as everyone else does.
A lesson that even us adults sometimes have trouble with. 🙂
Bottom line: I didn’t love it. It was good, but I’m not joining the Frozen fan club.