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Frozen 2

I mean, people do have every right to avoid having to confront the overwhelming superiority of disco. :p
 
So for those who saw the movie, was it as final fantasy flavored as the trailers hinted?
 
Wow, so uh this movie was kinda bad? And like frozen 1 is my fav disney movie so I have no idea how it happened
 
Jcogginsa said:
I liked it, and the reception seems generally popular. I'm not sure what issues Rog had with it
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It just kind of left me cold? The character arcs werent as strong or clear, some of the pacing and plotting seemed haphazard and the songs just weren't that good (and I'm easy to please when it comes to.musical songs)
 
Yeah, I was kind of left cold as well.
The dam was a stupid-ass central conflict point. The fact that none of the forest-landers or any of their spirits could apparently say "Thanks but no thanks." at any point during the dam's obviously-elaborate construction raises a lot of questions. We never see it actually impact anything in the woods itself, so it has no symbolic resonance other than a thing that got put up.

On the other hand, the music was decent, the animation was fine, and most of the conflicts were reasonable (save for the framing one, which really needed another few passes), so not terrible, but, well...better-than-average Disney sequel, in my final verdict.
 
Robert Liguori said:
Yeah, I was kind of left cold as well.
The dam was a stupid-ass central conflict point. The fact that none of the forest-landers or any of their spirits could apparently say "Thanks but no thanks." at any point during the dam's obviously-elaborate construction raises a lot of questions. We never see it actually impact anything in the woods itself, so it has no symbolic resonance other than a thing that got put up.

On the other hand, the music was decent, the animation was fine, and most of the conflicts were reasonable (save for the framing one, which really needed another few passes), so not terrible, but, well...better-than-average Disney sequel, in my final verdict.
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the northuldra initially saw the dams with a gift to unite the two peoples later, when the northuldra leader began to suspect that something was wrong, he went to talk to King Runeard.

King Runeard did not like magic because of this, he deceived the northuldra by saying that the dam would bring several benefits, but in fact what he really wanted was to force the northuldra to be dependent on arendelle.

When the leader of the northuldra went to ask the king why the dams were not bringing any promised benefits, he was assassinated by the king, which eventually resulted in the fight between the arendelle soldiers and the northuldra.

the king's lies and the fight between the soldiers of arendelle and the northuldra angered the spirits, so they decided that no one enters or leaves the forest.

The dam served as a symbol of past mistakes when Anna decided to sacrifice herself to destroy the dam that made the spirits trust Arendelle again.
 
Robert Liguori said:
Yeah, I was kind of left cold as well.
The dam was a stupid-ass central conflict point. The fact that none of the forest-landers or any of their spirits could apparently say "Thanks but no thanks." at any point during the dam's obviously-elaborate construction raises a lot of questions. We never see it actually impact anything in the woods itself, so it has no symbolic resonance other than a thing that got put up.

On the other hand, the music was decent, the animation was fine, and most of the conflicts were reasonable (save for the framing one, which really needed another few passes), so not terrible, but, well...better-than-average Disney sequel, in my final verdict.
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The dam serves as a honking big symbol of Arendellean colonialism that can be physically destroyed, unlike industrialization and unequal treaties harming their traditional way of life. The dam plotline also actually seems to be based on real history (or at least draws historical parallels)- though much more recent than Frozen's early Victorian setting. From Wikipedia, Alta controversy:
The background for the controversy was a published plan by the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) that called for the construction of a dam and hydroelectric power plant that would create an artificial lake and inundate the Sami village of Máze. After the initial plan met political resistance, a less ambitious project was proposed that would cause less displacement of Sami residents and less disruption for reindeer migration and wild salmon fishing.

On July 12, 1978, the popular movement against development of the Alta-Kautokeino waterway (Folkeaksjonen mot utbygging av Alta-Kautokeinovassdraget) was founded, creating an organizational platform for first opposing and then resisting construction work.[13] This group and others filed for an injunction in Norwegian courts against the Norwegian government to prevent construction from beginning.
In the fall of 1979, as construction was ready to start, protesters performed two acts of civil disobedience: at the construction site itself at Stilla, activists sat down on the ground and blocked the machines, and at the same time, Sami activists began a hunger strike outside the Norwegian parliament.

Documents that have since been declassified, show that the government planned to use military forces as logistical support for police authorities in their efforts to stop the protests.
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Tripledot said:
The dam serves as a honking big symbol of Arendellean colonialism that can be physically destroyed, unlike industrialization and unequal treaties harming their traditional way of life. The dam plotline also actually seems to be based on real history (or at least draws historical parallels)- though much more recent than Frozen's early Victorian setting. From Wikipedia, Alta controversy:
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It's a stupid-ass symbol. If it was meant to alter the character of the northlands other than making the spirits extremely pissy, it demonstrobably failed to do that. And the spirit hissy-fit did not start until after the dam had been up. Arendell got no benefit from the dam other than maybe some protection against flash floods when Water Horse was feeling unusually homicidal.

Actually, the spirits were a big-ass problem with the movie. Either they were supposed to be animal-like and completely subsentient, which means that they had no idea that their destroy-the-dam plan wouldn't have drowned the kingdom below, or Elsa was accurate in describing them as having judgement, at which point they trapped two innocent groups of people in a woods and tormented them with evil elemental magic for three and a half decades instead of just waving their rock-manipulation powers and making the problem go away themselves on Day 2 of construction.

I think this is kind of an X-men situation here. By handing the northlanders their spirit population with no actual explanation for "Actually, what happens when Salamander-Spirit does cheerfully burn down a village full of people out of either blind indifference if nonsentient or demonstrated callousness if not.", and by establishing that the spirits can and do fuck with Arendell instead of, you know, making the water on the other side of the dam go down, shaking it apart, and declaring it Elemental Miller Time, they are providing justification for King Asshole's pre-emptive anti-being-colonized-by-malicious-spirit-influences plan. You can't tell a story about oppressed subaltern people with a monopoly on world-shaking superpowers without taking the people in reality who blame those people for everything and ascribe to them dark and malicious influences, and making them right.
 
Robert Liguori said:
It's a stupid-ass symbol. If it was meant to alter the character of the northlands other than making the spirits extremely pissy, it demonstrobably failed to do that. And the spirit hissy-fit did not start until after the dam had been up. Arendell got no benefit from the dam other than maybe some protection against flash floods when Water Horse was feeling unusually homicidal.

Actually, the spirits were a big-ass problem with the movie. Either they were supposed to be animal-like and completely subsentient, which means that they had no idea that their destroy-the-dam plan wouldn't have drowned the kingdom below, or Elsa was accurate in describing them as having judgement, at which point they trapped two innocent groups of people in a woods and tormented them with evil elemental magic for three and a half decades instead of just waving their rock-manipulation powers and making the problem go away themselves on Day 2 of construction.

I think this is kind of an X-men situation here. By handing the northlanders their spirit population with no actual explanation for "Actually, what happens when Salamander-Spirit does cheerfully burn down a village full of people out of either blind indifference if nonsentient or demonstrated callousness if not.", and by establishing that the spirits can and do fuck with Arendell instead of, you know, making the water on the other side of the dam go down, shaking it apart, and declaring it Elemental Miller Time, they are providing justification for King Asshole's pre-emptive anti-being-colonized-by-malicious-spirit-influences plan. You can't tell a story about oppressed subaltern people with a monopoly on world-shaking superpowers without taking the people in reality who blame those people for everything and ascribe to them dark and malicious influences, and making them right.
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Wait
so the gecko really was a fire spirit?
 
Robert Liguori said:
It's a stupid-ass symbol. If it was meant to alter the character of the northlands other than making the spirits extremely pissy, it demonstrobably failed to do that. And the spirit hissy-fit did not start until after the dam had been up. Arendell got no benefit from the dam other than maybe some protection against flash floods when Water Horse was feeling unusually homicidal.

Actually, the spirits were a big-ass problem with the movie. Either they were supposed to be animal-like and completely subsentient, which means that they had no idea that their destroy-the-dam plan wouldn't have drowned the kingdom below, or Elsa was accurate in describing them as having judgement, at which point they trapped two innocent groups of people in a woods and tormented them with evil elemental magic for three and a half decades instead of just waving their rock-manipulation powers and making the problem go away themselves on Day 2 of construction.

I think this is kind of an X-men situation here. By handing the northlanders their spirit population with no actual explanation for "Actually, what happens when Salamander-Spirit does cheerfully burn down a village full of people out of either blind indifference if nonsentient or demonstrated callousness if not.", and by establishing that the spirits can and do fuck with Arendell instead of, you know, making the water on the other side of the dam go down, shaking it apart, and declaring it Elemental Miller Time, they are providing justification for King Asshole's pre-emptive anti-being-colonized-by-malicious-spirit-influences plan. You can't tell a story about oppressed subaltern people with a monopoly on world-shaking superpowers without taking the people in reality who blame those people for everything and ascribe to them dark and malicious influences, and making them right.
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It's something called... metaphor? A dam in real life isn't going to cause the nature spirits to go out of balance, but it can have negative ecological effects on the surrounding communities, something which actually happened to the Sami in real life. I don't understand how you can see this as being a "stupid-ass symbol" when it's directly applicable to the actual experiences of the people the Northuldra were based on. Also, how does it not make sense from an in-universe perspective? The elementals are forces of nature, nature whose balance has been disrupted by the construction of the dam. The reason Elsa can tame them is stated in the film itself- she's the fifth elemental and the bridge between the spirits and humanity; ordinary humans can't order them around. Asking why the elementals didn't "solve the problem" by stopping the dam from being made is like asking why hurricanes don't go after oil drilling operations to stop global warming.
 
Robert Liguori said:
It's a stupid-ass symbol. If it was meant to alter the character of the northlands other than making the spirits extremely pissy, it demonstrobably failed to do that. And the spirit hissy-fit did not start until after the dam had been up. Arendell got no benefit from the dam other than maybe some protection against flash floods when Water Horse was feeling unusually homicidal.

Actually, the spirits were a big-ass problem with the movie. Either they were supposed to be animal-like and completely subsentient, which means that they had no idea that their destroy-the-dam plan wouldn't have drowned the kingdom below, or Elsa was accurate in describing them as having judgement, at which point they trapped two innocent groups of people in a woods and tormented them with evil elemental magic for three and a half decades instead of just waving their rock-manipulation powers and making the problem go away themselves on Day 2 of construction.

I think this is kind of an X-men situation here. By handing the northlanders their spirit population with no actual explanation for "Actually, what happens when Salamander-Spirit does cheerfully burn down a village full of people out of either blind indifference if nonsentient or demonstrated callousness if not.", and by establishing that the spirits can and do fuck with Arendell instead of, you know, making the water on the other side of the dam go down, shaking it apart, and declaring it Elemental Miller Time, they are providing justification for King Asshole's pre-emptive anti-being-colonized-by-malicious-spirit-influences plan. You can't tell a story about oppressed subaltern people with a monopoly on world-shaking superpowers without taking the people in reality who blame those people for everything and ascribe to them dark and malicious influences, and making them right.
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I'll admit, "Frozen 2 will increase the desire to oppress other people" is not a thought I would've anticipated seeing today.
 
Tripledot said:
It's something called... metaphor? A dam in real life isn't going to cause the nature spirits to go out of balance, but it can have negative ecological effects on the surrounding communities, something which actually happened to the Sami in real life. I don't understand how you can see this as being a "stupid-ass symbol" when it's directly applicable to the actual experiences of the people the Northuldra were based on. Also, how does it not make sense from an in-universe perspective? The elementals are forces of nature, nature whose balance has been disrupted by the construction of the dam. The reason Elsa can tame them is stated in the film itself- she's the fifth elemental and the bridge between the spirits and humanity; ordinary humans can't order them around. Asking why the elementals didn't "solve the problem" by stopping the dam from being made is like asking why hurricanes don't go after oil drilling operations to stop global warming.
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Yes, and as I said, it's a stupid metaphor. Arendell is not a colonizing power. They are demonstrably far weaker than the Northuldra insomuch as the Northuldra have the ability to exist in symbiosis with the spirits. If you tried to tell a story about the historic incident you mentioned where Norway had no technology greater then horses and crossbows, and the Sami had friendly earthmovers who wandered around and did them favors, you'd need to change a whole hell lot about the story to make things work.

Again, you can tell stories about real-world oppressed minorities, or about people with world-shaking superpowers, but not both.

We don't ever actually see the dam disrupt any form of balance. We don't see Elsa herself going out of balance throughout the movie, and we don't get any indication that the elementals won't decide tomorrow "Actually, cooking-fires are also a violation of the balance. Everyone gets trapped again until all fires get put out."

Actually, yeah. That's kind of the point here. With the exception of the one attack by Grampa King (which his forces demonstrably lost, based on the relative numbers of survivors we saw), 100% of the colonialist-esque oppression was perpetrated by the spirits themselves. The shit that was being done by the spirits was not portrayed as nature itself acting up as you'd expect in a slow-burn ecological catastrophe; it was the capricious whims of cruel and indiscriminate tyrants. Literally nothing in the forest changes between it going up and it coming down that isn't the spirits themselves deciding to stop imprisoning people that we see.

I mean, I think you are right about the intended symbolism, but like I say, it's a really bad stand-in for what it's trying to represent, because of the spirits themselves.
 
So I have a longer post I'm going to write up in spoilers, but my basic issue with the story is I couldn't really follow anyone's character arcs? Like it feels like events just sort of happened, and nobody changed or grew over the course of those events.

Like, I have no idea why Anna is suddenly queen of Arendelle at the end? It's not like she suddenly became more mature or anything. I mean I guess there were like, little hints that Elsa wasn't happy as queen but that kinda walks back what she learned from the first movie and like they werent very good hints
 
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