I’d heard so many good things about Disney’s “Frozen” over the last few months that I finally decided to check it out. I’m generally not a fan of musicals (I prefer the Pixar brand of animated movies without scenes of dancing candles and lobsters), but I’m a sucker for hype, and I figured I could fast-forward through the musical numbers if necessary (it was only necessary a few times).
Overall, I thought it was a solid movie, but nowhere close to the Pixar quality of charm or storytelling. It had some unique aspects to it, particularly regarding the lessons about sisterhood and romanticized love, but the movie spent way too much time on unnecessarily plot and way too little time on the things that could have made it epic.
The defining moment of the movie was what I perceive to be a scene–or series of scenes–that was left on the editing room floor, and I think the move suffers greatly from it. This is something that happens in the first 20 minutes of the movie, so it’s not a big spoiler.
There is a moment when the ice-magic sister can’t contain her magic anymore, and she runs across the lake, freezing it with every step. When she reaches the far shore, the cold expands exponentially, driving the sunny kingdom into what my Netflix DVD sleeve described as an “eternal winter.”
Then, in the very next scene, the other sister gets on her horse and sets out on an epic journey to bring back her sister and save the kingdom. Off she goes!
I literally had to stop the DVD and rewind to see if I had missed a scene. Where was this “eternal winter?” Only a few minutes passed between the ice-magic sister’s departure and the beginning of the other sister’s epic quest. That’s not an eternal winter–that’s a 5-minute snowfall! People would be dancing in the streets at the miraculous break from the summer sun!
I’m honestly really confused by this. The entire movie is driven by the idea that the “eternal winter” is (a) eternal and (b) a problem. The rest of the movie spans a single day! That’s the shortest winter ever!
No writing team could possibly be that lazy, so I’m chalking this up to a deleted scene that adds a decent amount of time between the ice-magic sister’s departure and the beginning of the other sister’s quest. That’s the only way this possibly makes sense. I can’t say that I’ll be looking out for the extended edition DVD, but if you get it and see a scene wedged in there, I’d love to know about it.