f13.net

It's a sweet film with two lead female characters who both have reasonable motivations, the snowman comedy sidekick isn't on-screen enough to get annoying and some of the snow / ice animations are spectactular. The songs are pretty unmemorable, except for Olaf's (the Snowman) and his love of seeing a summer and Elsa's breaking free song.

There's a little bit of darkness it in, but not enough that most young children should be fine to see it.

Let It Go is my favorite Disney song in years and years.

As for the movie... I didn't like parts of it, other parts were decent to good.  The rest of my family thought it was good, so YMMV.

I had "Do You want to build a Snowman" stuck in my head for about 2 weeks after this thing opened.  Kept having to go into the theatre around when that song was playing.

I enjoyed it a lot, but I still think Wreck It Ralph and Tangled were both superior movies.

It seems a bit tacked on because we are people who have felt that emotion before.  When you consider someone who has been isolated from everyone their entire life it's not too much a stretch.  They established her powers are mentally controlled, you could just substitute love for inner peace and it's the same result.  The movie is actually one big comic book if you think of it as being in the xmen universe.

I'm taking the boys to see this tomorrow, it'll be the first movie theater movie for them so am looking forward to it.

Brave man.

Frozen was okay. Much better than I expected, given that the marketing push was rather muted for the quality that it was. I assumed it was a toss away movie.

It far too treacly sweet and princess-y for my tastes, but my kids loved it.

noobie.

It teaches kids to be pragmatic in their choices and that love isn't just romantic.  I dunno, for a disney princess movie those are awfully good lessons for kids.

I'm always amazed to hear statements like that.  We were taking our kids to the theater from about 2-3 months old onward.  We'd just take turns leaving the theater if they started fussing or crying.

I tend to cite this as the reason they're able to sit still for 2-3 hours unlike most other kids we encounter.

The boys already sit for full movies at least once a week, so I'm not overly worried about it. I just haven't taken them to a theater for one yet.

I'm jealous.  The kid hasn't ever gotten past the 40 minute mark in a movie at home.  Doesn't help that anything remotely scary calls for immediate cessation.

Last birthday he really wanted Monster's Inc for some reason.  His aunt got it for him.  He watched 5 minutes of it and realized that there's monsters in it.  :facepalm:

Kids are so dumb, amirite?

How old are they?  My 4 year old does the same at home so I figured I would give it a shot. There's about 30 minutes of Monsters Inc 2 I still haven't seen in 5 random spots.

I liked it, but the songs were extremely forgettable by Disney standards and the snowman would have been much better without the buck teeth.

There is a tiny bit of foreshadowing that's the solution earlier in the film. But it's tiny and really easy to miss.


The only song I liked was the FUCK EVERYTHING Elsa song, but overall, I really, really enjoyed this movie. If I had daughters, I would hope these were the Disney princesses they wanted to be like. :P


edit: I hear a lot of comparisons to Tangled when this movie comes up, I suppose I should actually see it!

Sadly I had a discussion about this but Elsa isn't a disney princess, she had a coronation so she's technically a queen.

Even better!  :why_so_serious:

I must admit Tangled is awesome, always end up watching it when my daughter is.

 :heart:

You should.  Disney appears to have heard the bitching and is revamping the princess image in a big way.  Some would say Mulan was the start but it really came out in Frog Princess and in Tangled.

It's funny because there haven't been "traditional" disney princess movies for decades but they keep trotting out the merchandise people forget the little mermaid was 20+ years ago.

I was actually wondering that myself.  Would this be the first Disney movie that actually added TWO Disney Princesses to the roster?

Yep.  I also feel bad for the little girls who want to *be* those types of princesses but are told it's bad to want that now.  It's almost as if you can't win no matter what you do because people are different!

Boys were awesome at this, no issues with them wearing the 3D glasses all movie either.

I asked them what their favorite part was afterwards and it was unanimous that the Snow Monster was the best.

Did you stick around till the very end of the credits?

Disney gives unrealistic expectations for girls hoping to grow up to be a snow monster princess.

Not bad, not as good as Tangled.

Mind you my daughter is now watching songs from the movie on endless loop on the Ipad right now.

$1 billion in take (and still rising) plus two Oscars. Persistence does pay off in the end.
(Disney started planning a version of "The Snow Queen" in the 50s. The person, not the company).

Your kids are better behaved in movies than I am. 60 minutes of those godawful glasses is as much as I can stand.

Well deserved.

This was a great movie. It had the schlock for sure, but not Beauty and the Beast like (which we loved, including the Broadway rendition). It had a good female empowerment angle what with the whole first love/married-right-away thing and that basically it was the women that started and solved all the issues.

Good for a father of two daughters  :oh_i_see:

I welled up at Do You Want to Build a Snowman (love and sadness and loss to maturity) and Let it Go (growing, unshackling society's expectations). But only the movie versions. All the re-recorded shit can bite me. But then it's been like that for me since Beauty and the Beast. I don't want whatever forgetable star decides to put their shit on the radio. I want the one from the movie, and will rip it from the video if I gotta.

Because I'm all rebel like that  :awesome_for_real:

Glad I'm not alone. I made it bout an hour into LEGO and had to start taking them off every couple minutes. I wasn't getting a headache, but my eyes felt...itchy? Dunno. Maybe I had just stopped blinking. More studies will have to be done.

Yea I really don't do 3D movies. The best ones are the ones that are the least obvious about it, so therefore, what's the point?  :grin:

And it's out on video. I have a feeling it's gonna be watched a lot at our house.

3.2 mil blu-ray/dvd sales in the first day.

Characters in Frozen basically stayed awake for four days straight. (http://imgur.com/a/k1Pvz)

This is a super fast to video release for Disney. Movie was still in theaters (still is?) like a few weeks ago.

Oh good. I thought I just had a super senior moment about how long ago it was out. It's not just me.

Not as fast as you think when you realize the movie was released on thanksgiving. 

Not just you, I was also like, "Jeez, already? Wasn't it still out a few weeks ago?" I mean, I know it was released last year (I didn't remember it was all the way back at Thanksgiving, though), but I was still surprised.

I might buy it. Hmm.

Frozen is still in theaters.

It sort of makes sense if you consider that the schedule was set up weeks/months ago for "generic movie" rather than "most successful Disney film in two decades".

Iwhen you consider the oscar winning end if December movies already came out a week or two before it's a perfectly normal release schedule for a thanksgiving movie, even a good one. 

I finally saw this last night (Amazon digital rental).  It was the third viewing for the kids.  It lacked any charm for me.  I thought Tangled was superior as a parent/child combined experience.  Still, the kids loved it.  My 10 year old daughter can sing all the songs a cappella by heart.

I saw this on the plane and was kinda underwhelmed after all the praise it's been getting.  It's probably just that I'm way past the point of being too old for this stuff, but the snowman sidekick was grating, the story was paper-thin, and the songs all sounded like they'd been cranked out of a machine that manufactures bland Broadway musicals.  I liked Tangled better, maybe because the focus on two characters made those characters more interesting.

Coincidentally...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/frozen-musical-is-headed-broadway-670651

Most of the songs were bleh, and it's easily my biggest issue with the movie. That said, I also found most of Tangled's songs bleh, and I like the story of Frozen a lot more, in part because it was ... well ... different. The Problem Solving Love was sisterly love, and as a big sister, it was wonderful to see that being acknowledged as just as valid and important a love as  romantic love.

Of course, I fucking hated the end of Tangled.

rant ahoy:


Mother Knows Best was a great bad guy song, though!

That sorta over thinking reminds me of the conversation my wife and I had about Anna and Elsa's parents and the absolutely GODAWFUL job of parenting they did dealing with Elsa's powers. Seriously wear gloves and cut yourself off from almost all human contact? Yeah that'll work!

Yeah her parents taking that approach was pretty "gosh I can't imagine how that managed to backfire."

It's a really old superhero/villain trope.  See:Every X-man comic ever.

If you think of her as a mutant in the comics it makes a lot more sense. 

"Let it go" is mind cocaine.  The damn thing just won't get out of my head. 

I think the whole locking herself in her room thing was Elsa's idea, not theirs.  In their little montage thing, mom and dad try to approach her, she freaks out because she thinks she might hurt them, she recoils from them.  I never got the impression that their cunning plan involved her living in her room for the rest of her life.  They just kept people away so word wouldn't get out that she's a mutant, which is a fairly sensible step one, the only place they failed was in not having a professor X handy to work on step two.

Whoa.   :ye_gods:

Pfft, that's why they're parents. Don't let the kids run the asylum. Hrrrm room is covered in frost, maybe the whole 'wearing gloves and locking yourself in your room away from almost all human contact' isn't the best plan. Maybe we shouldn't run a huge guilt trip on you for shooting your sister in the head with a bolt of magic ice so that you feel this way. But then we wouldn't have awesome songs and tiara loving snowmen so whatever.

Oh and Sjofn if you want to be angry at Tangled, lets not forget the fact that Anna and Elsa's parent were most likely traveling to Rapunzel and Flynn's wedding when their ship sunk!!


Where are my pills.

We live in a world where comic books are a real thing, where the idea of being able to control your powers is a given.  It's really not all that cut and dry in the frozen universe and if you substitute ice powers with "highly contagious deadly disease" girl in the plastic bubble makes a lot of sense.

I've seen people condemn the parents going so far as to say it was child abuse and it just doesn't make sense for two reasons.  First off Elsa seems as interested in keeping herself away from others as anyone and secondly we are all watching with the knowledge that this is a disney movie and of COURSE she can control her powers and not instantly freeze the city and kill everyone accidentally which to those people was likely a real concern.

Call me crazy but if one of my kids started demonstrating superhero-like powers, I would want them to practice practice practice, not become hermits.

Practice, practice, practice while living like a hermit on the mountain sounds better to me.  Which is more or less what she ends up doing.

I am reminded of Wolverine skewering that Mutant that couldn't control his 'burn the flesh off human bones' power.

I think Dillon did the art.

It's like I was saying, we live in a world where the idea of "practice using your powers" equals control.  From what little we know of their world, there is no way to assume practicing would help in any way or be better than the idea of control by suppression that they tried.   

We knew they were wrong, the movie proved them wrong but there was no indication they should have known better.

Hmmm. I'm pretty sure the locking her away thing was so you know, she didn't get burned as a witch or some such.

Hard to burn a master of ICE MAGIC!

Ice powers or not, telling your child to suppress and conceal all emotions except for fear (especially after the troll grandpa says "fear is your enemy") is just plain bad parenting.

There's no way that shit will help, regardless of the outcome of "can I control this or not".

Yeah, that was the part that bugged me the most.  Almost immediately after the troll says 'the absolute WORST thing you could do is be afraid,' the World's Greatest Dad decides to drench his daughter in every kind of fear he can throw at her.

Anyone calling Elsa's parents abusive are woefully ignorant of actual child abuse.  Which I guess is a good thing, as it means they didn't grow up being abused?  But yeah, mom and dad fucked up, and their bad call damaged Elsa, but it was a very understandable mistake for them to make after she almost killed her sister with no more effort than flicking over a domino.  The whole fear is the enemy thing is writ large through the plot; their fear and Elsa's fear led to Elsa's isolation and made everything worse; Anna's fearlessness broke through it and made everything better.

Which is a perfectly fine theme to explore, and a perfectly understandable reaction by the parents... except for the whole part with Grampa Troll being VERY specific and VERY emphatic about fear being a really bad idea, and then smash cut to the parents deciding that the best thing to do was use every fear-based tactic they could think of to try to control the situation.

It's almost like that's how fairy tales work.

I never know how to react to the frequently expressed view on these boards that many stories would have been much better if they ended five minutes after they started because everyone in them behaved like a paragon of moral reason and emotional wisdom.

Shake your head, move on. They don't affect you, only themselves.

Never said it would be better! Just that yep, that sure was a crappy way to deal with the problem. I am perfectly aware that to tell a story about how sometimes people screw up and stuff happens ... people have to screw up for stuff to happen. Pretty sure most people who say "man, it was silly for <screw up> to be <screwed up>" are aware of that. It's still funny when it's a particularly obvious-seeming screw up, though.

By the way, it's now the biggest-grossing animated film of all time: http://insidemovies.ew.com/2014/03/30/frozen-highest-grossing-animated-film/

So...Princess & the Frog, Tangled, Wreck-it Ralph and now Frozen. Third renaissance of Disney?

(Meanwhile Pixar put out a bunch of sequels and a mediocre copy of Brother Bear. Some rather pointed questions to be asked there, I feel).

Pixar is effectively running Disney Animation now. That is why they are doing better. John Lasseter is Chief Creative Officer of both studios and Ed Catmull is President of both studios. Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, explicitly gave them the task of turning around Disney Animation Studios, which they have done.

Yeah, they pretty much gutted Pixar of the talent once they acquired it and it shows.

I don't know, they've had a lot of good movies come out since they were aquired.  Granted, the last real good movie was Toy Story 3 in 2010, but I don't think the sky is falling just yet.

Like.....

They're working on Planes 2, and Cars 3.

Pixar is out of ideas.

Don't forget Finding Dory.

Because she will.

Will what?

 :awesome_for_real:

Pixar ran the gamut of their stored ideas and expanded one of them (Cars) into a new franchise.  They were a small, scrappy studio willing to take risks early on, but now that they have properties and are beholden to the Mouse and stockholders they're afraid of risk.  Just like the rest of Hollywood.

I wonder how many Hollywood vet execs are on staff making decisions now, since they're acting like every other studio. "Don't try that new idea. Here's one that made money 5, 10, 20 years ago. Remake/ sequel it.  It's a proven property."

To be honest, I'm not the guy to talk about this anyway;  perusing the Wiki, I realize I haven't liked anything Pixar has done since Wall-E.

So there's that.

I didn't like UP that much but it was very ambitious for what it was and I can respect that.

UP would have been more enjoyable if it weren't for the end of the first act turning it into DOWN.  It still wasn't bad, when looking at the individual pieces, but it couldn't be enjoyable after that.

You must hate Shakespeare.

That's not fair.

I think the beginning of UP was ballsy and I actually like that it existed but they probably could have paced it better, perhaps by introducing parts of Carl's backstory throughout the movie.  I like that Pixar was not afraid to get heavy like that and unfortunately they do seem to shy away from it lately.

Why the fuck does the weakest Pixar movie (Cars) get 2 fucking sequels. I will watch just about any Pixar film at any time but I will not even take in a minute of either of those piles of steaming dog crap.

selffail.

Planes is not a Pixar movie.

Money.  Lots of it.   The same reason Cars2 felt like it was rewritten to include Mater's story as the central part after he became so damn popular.


Cars 3 is in development. I assume that's what he meant.

The Incredibles 2 was also announced alongside Cars 3 which Soulflame conveniently left out.

Cars sold a shit ton of merchandise. That's why it gets sequels and spin-offs.

NASCAR fans are dumb. Water is wet. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3 all came out after the acquisition.  All three of which I think are wonderful movies.  You may disagree with that, but you'd be wrong.   :awesome_for_real:

Also, everybody here seems to be leaving out the fact that they're working on two original new films along with all those sequels.  The Good Dinosaur, and Inside out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Out_(2015_film)) which seems like a pretty damned original and brave project.

Again, I'll give them a few more films before I start to panic.

So Inside Out is Herman's Head with a 5 year old girl. Ok.

Inside Out

Lewis Black as Anger

Ok, so I'm on board with this project.

The whole cast for that looks excellent.

So, your assertion is that the announcement of Incredibles 2 invalidates my "Pixar is out of ideas" statement?

Fascinating.  I had no idea a sequel was proof of new ideas.

Its also incredibly poplar with 4-8 year old boys.  And parents are grateful to have something not-power rangers to drop in the DVD player.

I did find it difficult to appreciate him during school because they picked his most boring plays and over-analyzed it to the point of ridiculousness.

But it's not that so much as they "killed off" the character I loved and left me with a bunch of ones I just didn't care about.  For me it would have been a much more poignant movie if they had more of their relationship and the very end of it was Walter doing his trip without the adventure.  They made me care too much about Ellie.  As two separate movies I think it could have worked either way.  Just not as they did it.

At least for me.

Eh, Cars was just Doc Hollywood with cars instead of people. If it works, don't fix it.

Also, Cars is popular with kids for a ton of reasons and none of it is because "nascar fans are dumb". As was pointed out you can go into any store in the US that has a toy department and it will have an isle of Cars merchandise that has been there and selling since the movie came out while most other movie related toy lines are in the markdown bin in less than a year.

If they had interspersed the flashbacks throughout the movie and made Ellie and by proxy the house a real character for the whole film it would have been much better and the sadness even more poignant.

The first cars had almost jack all to do with nascar, much the same way batman has to do with billionaire playboys.

Yeah, that would have worked as well.

How It Should Have Ended for Frozen:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ThvBNZdGcQ

It pretty much echoes a lot of what has been said in the thread, but I enjoyed it all the same. 

It may be Poplar with the young but what about with Alder kids?

Forgive me.  :awesome_for_real:

These days Pixar is not really that operationally distinct from Disney. That's why it's a little funny for people to say "Planes isn't a Pixar movie." Pixar and Disney are basically merged at this point.

While that's true Planes was made by the studio that makes their direct-to-video animated movies, DisneyToon Studios. Not really in the same category as Pixar or Disney Animation Studios.

(https://31.media.tumblr.com/f028147f9d7f27a527a6d36f7ceac23c/tumblr_n4ezl2Dpk41ru5b08o1_500.jpg)

Whoa.  Elsa is a Suicune.  Who knew?!

Oh Man, what is this SHIT.

I'm only 10 minutes in and ffs.

You were warned, repeatedly, that you would not like it.  At all.  In the slightest.

For myself, the movie turned around a bit during the Let It Go number, but I still did not like the movie very much.

I do like how they played with tropes a bit at the end.

You're the future, Elsa, not them.  War is coming Charles.

Yes.  And you were all right.  Elena is in a childgasm of joy at seeing it again, but FUCK ME, has Lasseter lost his way about teaching kids what's right and wrong.  Even at the end, there's Horrible Horrible fucking lessons that I'm just not comfy Elena is OK with.

Yes, I preferred Tangled.  Hugely.

I wish I hadn't watched that.  And Sam was entirely right about the broadway music generator.  Awful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ThvBNZdGcQ

Broadway Wolverine best Wolverine.  :why_so_serious:

Yes.  That pretty much sums it up for me.  Thanks for the giggle.

Eh.

Elsa's parents were fallible. That's every parent that has ever existed since forever. That is exactly what Elsa's parents did. They had no idea what they were dealing with but had no choice but to figure it out.

They did the best they could.

If you have kids, you know this is the daily truth. If you don't have kids, you won't. That sounds condescending but it's not meant to be. Kids are like any sea change. You can analyze the shit out of anything but it really only matters when emotion enters the equation.

That's utter horseshit.

They weren't concerned about Elsa though, they were concerned about people "finding out".

It was like, here's some horribad parents, I mean real fucking idiots.  Here's them making stupid decisions that'll fuck the child forever.  Now here's them getting punished for it.  Yeah, we just killed them.  Because, you know, fuck bad parents.

It was a very, very fucking odd film, terrible in almost every respect, except for catchy tunes which are real ear worms.

Okay, explain how it was a bad film.

NB: Not "Not to your taste" (because it's pretty clear you have odd taste when it comes to popular culture) but a technically bad film.

 :oh_i_see:

How about it was boring, to begin with?