My favorite part of Frozen II arrives about fifty minutes into the movie. It involves imaginary singing reindeer. It’s a bit catchy. And it means absolutely nothing. It’s a small part of this unfortunately misguided film and yet it’s the most telling piece of all. The best songs in the Frozen franchise tell us what the characters are feeling and flow powerfully with the story being told. But “Lost in the Woods’’ isn’t just a song for Kristoff. This might as well be a song from the filmmakers to the audience.
It starts off innocently, with Kristoff singing “You had to go, and of course it’s always fine/ I probably could catch up with you tomorrow”. This may be the most accurate line in the whole movie. Because of course, Disney will never complain about the $1.5 billion it made at the box office with this sequel. And since it dropped it on Disney+, you, the fortunate subscriber, could pick it back up and watch it tomorrow or any other time. It suggests a casual relationship with its audience. So far, so sweet.
Then it hits with “But is this what it feels like to be growing apart?/When did I become the one who’s always chasing your heart?” You may not realize this, but the first Frozen came out in 2013, a whole SEVEN YEARS AGO. That’s a long time. And especially when your biggest fans were young girls (and boys) who, in the interim, probably moved on to more mature things like Tik Tok and Snapchat filters or maybe even college, that’s quite the jump. What passed for enjoyable in 2013 may not ring as true in 2020, althought nostalgia is a powerful drug. Maybe Olaf isn’t as cute; maybe he’s just an annoying snowman who spits out random facts about farting turtles and water having memory.
The most telling line, however, is this: “Up till now the next step was a question of how/I never thought it was a question of whether”. There’s no point in getting into what these lines mean to Kristoff because nothing the movie shows support it. But from a filmmaker perspective, they could very well be referring to something every creative project runs into: the moment of being lost in the woods. Sometimes we call it being ‘lost in the dark’. Sometimes we call it ‘the point of no return’. But it all feels the same. That dark, murky, icky moment where nothing seems to be working and where you look up, sweaty and confused, wondering just how the hell you got there. You see, maybe the Frozen II team spent years chasing a good story and how to put it together. But at some point along the way they had to ask, ‘Was this even a good idea to begin with?’
Trust the Brain Trust
Anyone who’s worked on any creative project conveniently forgets the more arduous steps of the process whenever they’ve completed something. That’s how we keep making things, after all. There’s the excitement. Then the doubting. Then the complete WTF am I actually doing. A lot of people freeze up and stop there. But they forget that it’s a necessary part of the process. No matter what you do, you’re always going to hit that middle portion where you’re lost in the woods. The key thing is to not give up. To not act out of fear. But to ride it out. To push through. To listen to others and get a new perspective. To then look ahead and say, ‘Onward’.
Pixar has had an unparalleled span of success since its first film in 1995 with Toy Story. But what made them so successful wasn’t the technology or the innovation or their beloved characters. It started further behind the scenes. It started with the Brain Trust. When it looked like Toy Story 2 was going to be a straight-to-DVD disaster, the Brain Trust pulled it from the brink. When director Andrew Stanton pitched his idea of Wall-E starting the first 1/3 of the movie with no dialogue, it was the Brain Trust the helped him work through his doubts. The Brain Trust, originally five storytelling experts within the company (John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Joe Ranft) blossomed to a team of 20 for Pete Docter’s masterpiece Inside Out. Ed Catmull, one of the Pixar co-founders, wrote in his book, Creativity, Inc.:
“Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, ‘from suck to not-suck,’”Catmull writes. “Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process–reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its through line or a hollow character finds its soul.”
I highlight that last part because it shows the biggest difference between Frozen II and Pixar’s latest, Onward. I couldn’t really tell you the through-line of Frozen II. There are things they do and places they go, but it has so little meaning. The real story it’s seemingly trying to tell is withheld from us until the very end. All the characters make bewildering decisions based on things we don’t know. Once full-dimensional characters like Elsa and Anna unfortunately become empty plot pawns. By the third or fourth time Anna and Elsa argued about whether to head different ways or not, I gave up on them. When Olaf dies (spoiler: he survives! because, of course!) a fairly random inconsequential death, disappearing into bits in a way that’s eerily reminiscent of Bing Bong’s actually devastating death in Inside Out (spoiler: he did not survive), that’s when I knew this film had no interest in taking chances. It didn’t seek out candid feedback to reconfigure what wasn’t working. It wanted everyone to be happy and everyone to look pretty and maybe even weirdly make a swing at colonialism and reparations without upsetting too many people – all in pursuit of a story that wasn’t actually one to begin with. It was just all plot with no meaning.
Making an animated movie is really, really hard work. These things take forever to make. They go through tons of rewriting processes before they ever commit actual art to celluloid. It’s laborious and exhausting and many, many moving parts. I just wish, in the 7 years it took for this sequel to arrive that they bothered to really run this story by their own kind of Brain Trust before committing. They all live under the Mouse House! They could have helped each other out somehow. But I suspect Disney Animation acted the way we do when we suspect our idea isn’t quite there – we shield it from others and commit as hard as possible. There are some things to enjoy about this sequel – a weirdly fiery yet completely adorable salamander and some gorgeous visual imagery – but has no meaning embedded within it.
It’s rather telling that in 2019, Disney released two big-budget sequels to popular films with leading female characters in Frozen II and Rise of the Skywalker and completely, utterly stranded them. Both films end with our heroines staring into the sunset. It’s meant to be hopeful. But with ROTS, we see Rey – who’s spent the last three Star Wars looking for a family – left alone with a tiny robot while all her friends celebrate on another planet. And with Frozen II, we see Elsa riding her magical ice horse headlong into the sun towards a castle where she can be…alone? If the first Frozen was about the power of sisterhood, I guess Disney wanted to show sisterhood could still exist no matter how far apart you randomly choose to live.
A Step in the Right Direction
Whenever you’re lost in the woods or deep in the weeds or at a point of no return, there’s a word that works very well that we creatives all like to use: onward. So of course! There’s another movie that’s hit Disney+ today that has a pair of siblings who go on a quest. It’s called Onward. And just about everything Frozen II does bewilderingly wrong, Onward does passionately right. Frozen II has no clear conflicts, wants, or needs. Onward has two brothers with a clear desire to see their father again. Every single step of the journey is informed by that desire, and their wants give way to their needs – Ian’s desperate need to be recognized and liked for who he is, and Barley’s desperate need to be believed in despite how much of a screwup people think he is. There’s the conflict of time – they’re running out of it. There’s the conflict of believing in each other. And there’s even the conflict on which path to take that’s defined by Ian’s desire to keep things safe and predictable and Barley’s desire to veer off the beaten path and take the unexpected route.
Several times throughout Frozen II, characters break into tears. They’re feeling so emotional! And yet not once did I ever feel a single thing. Because nothing made sense in this movie. Nothing was clear. Conflict was not established. I cannot feel any describable thing for a couple’s upcoming engagement if the biggest conflict in their poorly-informed relationship is bad timing. I cannot feel catharsis for Elsa or Anna if they’re not even acting like actual, feeling human beings.
But Onward? I felt a deep ache in my chest nearly the entire time. I understood how badly Ian and Barley wanted to see their father. I understood just how every breakdown and inconvenience threatened to deprive them of that one thing they wanted the most. And big, wet, warm tears slid down my face in the final minutes when everything beautifully revealed itself. The way Scanlon and his crew take the ending you think you’re gonna get and pull the rug out under you for something far richer is just a beaming testament to the power of well-crafted movies. Producer Emma Rogers mentioned how, even four years out from the film’s release, they had their ending figured out. They knew it all along. And it was simply a matter of rearranging the story to best support that ending.
Bridging the Gap
But here’s the thing: there are few movies I can think of better suited to our new reality. Social distancing is a real thing. And part of that social distancing is that we can spend an awful lot of time thinking about the people we want to be spending more time with while forgetting the good fortune of those who are currently there alongside us. The way Onward turns into this realization, from the quiet, building desperation of the impossible to the satisfying, goddamn emotional beauty of the truth, well: it’s the first movie I’ve literally cried at in a good ten years or so. Literal, warm, streaking tears. I haven’t felt like this since 2015’s Inside Out, where you can just feel those story geniuses at Pixar having cracked the code of maximum emotional manipulation. But it’s never cheap; it’s always earned. They build their story from the core outwards, and nowhere is that more true than with Onward. At times, there’s a lot of noise around the core, things that don’t quite work and such. But the story of brothers Ian and Barley is going to sit with you for a while.
It’s going to remind us in this time of separation and distancing just how close we truly are to the people we sometimes take for granted. It’s a lesson we all could use. And it’s right there, ready for us to view from the safety and comfort of our own home.
