My sister and I went to go see Frozen together when it came out in theaters. We had not rushed to see it when it first came out, so we were latecomers to the Frozen train, but everyone had told us about how it was a great story about the closeness of sisters. My sister and I shared a look when we heard that, and decided to check out this sisterly phenomena of a movie. (My sister and I are renowned for our closeness; we’re like the female non-twin version of the Weasley twins.) Despite our incredulity, both my sister and I were impressed when we came out of the theater.
Arguably, Frozen is one of the better Disney movies to come out in recent years, but then again, Disney has been releasing success after success lately. Big Hero Six, Zootopia, and Moana have all been wildly successful films. I can honestly say, hand to heart, that I love all of those movies. I know I’m no longer a young whippersnapper, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a good animated Disney movie. Seriously, just because I sound like a cat wailing in an alley when I try to sing “Let It Go,” doesn’t mean I won’t try. (I’m not the only one, am I right?)
However, just because a movie is utterly fantastic and thoroughly enjoyable, doesn’t mean it’s without it flaws. In that regard, Frozen is just like every other movie out there. Read on if you want to laugh along with me over the things that make absolutely no sense in one of our favorite Disney movies.
25 Anna Isolation
The major problem that plagues sisters Elsa and Anna is the rift that opens between them. Elsa is terrified about harming Anna with her powers, so she stops hanging out with her, leaving Anna to wallow in her newfound loneliness. So rises the dark age between the two of them. That’s the whole point of the song called “Do You Want To Build a Snowman?” Anna’s sliding around empty halls all by herself, bemoaning her lack of company. But did Anna really have to be lonely? Elsa was instructed to isolate herself from the world just in case she accidentally hurt someone. But Anna is a completely ordinary human being. She presented no danger to anyone. (Unless her innate clumsiness got someone into trouble.)
Couldn’t she have gone out of the castle by herself to hang out with other kids if she wanted to? Her parents weren’t confining her too, were they? I mean, regardless of what I think of their parenting decisions when it comes to Elsa’s isolation, I understand their reasoning. Elsa was potentially dangerous. However, Anna is a whole other story. One child messed up by mandatory solitary confinement should have been enough. It makes no sense to keep Anna away from society when she’s a normal girl. When Elsa and Anna got into that fight and Elsa told Anna she could just leave if she was so unhappy, a large part of me felt like slapping my forehead and saying, “Duh!”
24 Such An Ice Dressmaker
“Let It Go” was such a moving song to the average moviegoer. When Frozen first came out, you couldn’t walk five feet without hearing it playing from some hidden speaker somewhere. It was a song about accepting yourself and rejecting the troubles of the past. Who wouldn’t like that kind of soulful message? But while you were all caught up admiring Elsa’s moment in the sun/snow, you may have missed a pretty questionable moment in the movie. As she belts out those high notes, Elsa ditches her old queenly trappings and dons a brand new, ice-blue dress. (You know the one I’m talking about.) It looks great and all, but…where did it come from?
Do Elsa’s ice powers extend to creating fabric out of thin air? I don’t think so. And don’t try to tell me that Elsa’s shimmering dress is made of ice. Ice is stiff, brittle, and solid. It does not fold and cling to a woman’s body the way Elsa’s infamous dress did. That’s the thing with super powers in movies. Despite being super, they should have understandable limits. You tell me that Elsa was born with magical ice powers? I can get behind that. You tell me that Elsa’s ice powers can transform her drab, royal garb into a slinky new outfit with a simple gesture? Yeah, I’m going to have to pause and question that.
23 It’s True Love
Frozen was different from other Disney princess movies in that some prince did not stroll along and save the princess. The princesses save themselves. The movie even makes fun of the fact that prior Disney princess movies had the princess falling in love with the prince in a single day. (It’s that alien concept of “true love.”) This happens all too frequently in cartoon fantasies. Anna falls in love with Prince Hans of the Southern Isles during the course of a single evening, and she is properly made fun of by Kristoff later on. Good for you, Disney. Go ahead and break that trope.
Unfortunately, Frozen doesn’t follow through on what would otherwise be a memorable change of pace. Anna and Kristoff then fall in love with each other in a day as well, two days at most. Kristoff clearly underestimated the power of the vaunted “true love” and did not listen to what logic previously told him. And Anna did not learn her lesson about finding love in under twenty-four hours after her nearly fatal encounter with Hans at the end of the movie. It’s like Frozen was on a roll, smashing expectations left and right, and then it decided to allow all of that nonsensical romance through the gates anyways. What was even the point of poking fun at daylong courtships in the first place?
22 In The Beginning…
Every Disney cartoon needs a character specifically designated to be the comic relief. A bunch of deep, serious stuff could be happening on the screen, but as long as you have that one funny character, you have the ability to instantly lighten the mood. Mushu from Mulan, Genie from Aladdin, and Hei Hei from Moana are all examples of these kinds of characters. In Frozen, the comedic relief character is obviously Olaf. He’s a talking snowman for crying out loud.
However, his goofy nature almost masks his unbelievable origin.
If you’re paying attention during Elsa’s “Let It Go,” you can see her whisk Olaf up from the snow collected on the ground. It’s only later that we see little Olaf walking and talking when he meets Kristoff and Anna. It’s a kids movie, so we don’t really examine Olaf’s creation. But seriously, think about the implications of this. Elsa made a snowman, and it later speaks and thinks like a human being. That’s no ordinary snowman. Elsa just created sentient life, and that is remarkable downplayed. If she can do something like that, who cares if she has ice powers? Even the snow monster she eventually makes to protect her ice castle is an example of her creating life. The people of Arendelle should care more about that particular power of hers than a little snow.
21 A Strange Environment To Be Raised In
I’m not a parent myself, so I can’t even begin to truly comprehend Elsa and Anna’s parents’ struggles. Their young daughter, Elsa, is clearly in possession of a dangerous ability, and when Anna got hurt because of it, of course her parents feel they have to do something about the problem. But could they have done a worse job of helping their daughters? Anna loses time with her best friend and becomes starved for attention, so much so that she jumps into the arms of the first guy who crushes on her. Poor Elsa ends up being a hermit during the formative years of her life. If I recall, the old troll the family went to for advice told Elsa and her parents that fear was a bad thing.
So why on earth would Elsa’s parents raise her in an environment of fear?
They kept her from interacting with anyone outside of the castle just in case she hurt someone. Of course Elsa grew up fearing her powers. Her own parents doubted her ability to control them. That’s what their confinement of her means. If her parents wanted Elsa to learn how to comfortably use her powers, they should have encouraged her, shown confidence in her handling of her abilities. Then again, I can’t completely blame them. They were scared too. For future reference though, if you’re going to try and prevent your daughter from succumbing to fear, try not locking her up in her room away from all human contact.
20 I Think I Know You
At the beginning of Frozen, we get to see young Kristoff, Sven, Elsa, and Anna. It was nice to get a glimpse of the youngsters that our main characters were before we spent a lot of time with their adult selves. We got to see how they changed. We also got to see that Kristoff had encountered Elsa and Anna when they were kids. The royal family rushes to the domain of the trolls, seeking aid for Anna’s illness and Elsa’s plight. Kristoff witnesses their headlong rush and decides to follow them on Sven. The two then see the Grand Pabbie troll cure Anna of a chilled head.
When Kristoff and Anna meet later as adults, he shows no sign of recognizing her. Can’t fault him for that. He looked like a total toddler back when he first caught sight of her. But when Anna’s heart gets frozen, Kristoff mentions that he knows someone who can help her and that he’s seen him do this process before. Wait, what? So he does remember Anna? Or does he remember a little girl getting cured and is just fuzzy about her identity? Could he maybe add two and two together, connect the dots, and realize that they’re one and the same person? And when Gran Pabbie saw Anna, he showed no sign of recognizing her either. Is no one going to acknowledge that this isn’t the first time Anna has visited the trolls?
19 Just Goes Right Through Me
The way I see it, regular ice powers can be very dangerous by themselves. If you take a look at Elsa’s magical, vague, and inconsistent ice powers, you can easily see how so much more dangerous they can be. There’s an unpredictability to Elsa’s powers that make them no joke. Perhaps the worst thing about her powers is how strangely they appear at different moments of the story. I always viewed ice powers as just dealing with the creation and manipulation of frozen water. But occasionally, especially when Anna is involved, Elsa’s powers take on a less solid form.
Elsa sends a blast of icy power towards Anna twice, but instead of getting hit with a face-full of snow at the very beginning of the movie when Elsa and Anna are kids or getting stabbed with a hefty ice spear during the argument they have in Elsa’s castle later on, blue light shines through Anna’s body and chills her head and her heart. How is this a proper ice power? That’s definitely not ice that passed through Anna’s body when Elsa, distraught at the news that she had caused an eternal winter, shoved a bunch of blue ice everywhere. If it had been ice, admittedly, Anna might not have survived, and the movie would have been a whole lot shorter than it was. Again, Elsa’s broad collection of powers defies limits and definitions.
18 Every Little Thing Is Gonna Be All Right
We see Frozen from Elsa and Anna’s perspectives. That means that we understand the turmoil they suffer through, and we can observe how kind and good-hearted the two of them are. But let’s take a peek at how events must have looked like for the citizens of Arendelle. Their young queen has hidden away from them her whole life, and during her coronation, she randomly uses her ice powers to halt the festivities and then runs away, causing an unexpected climate change. A massive ice storm rolls over the town, disappearing only when their queen returns and makes it go away. And now, finally returned, Arendelle’s queen is in full command of these ice powers that the citizens never knew existed.
Given that heady complication of events, don’t you find it odd that everyone is so happy at the end with Elsa being their queen? When Elsa ran away from the coronation party, a lot of the people there looked frightened at the display of her abilities, however minuscule they were. That subsequent winter could not have been fun for them either. Up until that ice skating rink, Elsa had never shown them that she could be a benevolent ice queen. So shouldn’t a couple of the citizens of Arendelle sported dubious or fearful expressions?
17 Flurry Protection
While this list is about things that don’t make sense about Frozen, even I think that Olaf’s dream of experiencing summer is hilarious. Do we have any clue as to where he heard about summer during his short beginnings of existence? No, but that’s okay! He might have been created with full knowledge of the seasons. That knowledge did not include awareness of how snow behaves in summer, sadly. Still, it was so adorable to witness Olaf’s obsession with the heat-filled days of summer and the numerous activities he could participate in during the brightness of high temperatures. When Elsa reversed the winter she had inadvertently spread across Arendelle, Olaf almost perished from this brief dip into the summer experience.
Luckily for him, Elsa conjured a small, floating cloud that hovers over Olaf’s head and constantly snows on him. I can stomach Olaf’s awareness and odd desire to experience summer, but I must question how a single cloud allows him to exist in summer environments. It seems to me that even if a cloud is shading Olaf and snowing on him, it wouldn’t provide sufficient protection from the warm climate that is all around him. It would be like wrapping an ice cube in a cool compress, but then taking both items outside in the middle of a summer day. Things are still going to end up dripping wet.
16 Can We Build It?
I have several friends who are in college studying architecture. We rarely talk school when we hang out, but I still get the sense that if we ever did decide to discuss the work they are doing, the mathematical operations of constructing a building would just completely go over my head. I can’t even begin to comprehend what it would take to construct a shack, let alone an ornate palace. Elsa doesn’t seem to have that problem. While she’s experiencing the satisfaction of “letting it go,” she just raises her hands, swooshes her dress around, and lifts her arms in fancy circles until this glacial majesty of an ice castle just rises from the snow piled on the north mountain.
Is it really all that simple to make a castle?
Have I been puzzling over the mysteries of architecture too much, when all I really needed to do to understand it is “let it go?” Perhaps Elsa, during her time in isolation, studied up on how to create sound structural integrity when building an ice castle, and that’s why it seems like second nature to her when she’s making ice stairs, ice doors, ice chandeliers, and ice balconies for her castle. I mean, there’s no other logical reason for complex architecture to spring from Elsa’s fingertips as easily as a snap can spring from the average person’s.
15 Peer Review
When Anna was rushed into the castle at Arendelle, hair completely white and body cold to the touch, she asked to be taken directly to Hans, the man who she thought was her true love. As Grand Pabbie, the old troll in the forest, had told her, only an act of true love could thaw her rapidly freezing heart. Anna thought a single kiss from Hans would cure her. Hans ended up being less chivalrous than we thought he was. He doesn’t kiss Anna, he confesses he only wanted to marry her to get the throne, and then he locks her in a room so that she can freeze completely. Anna’s too weak at this point, so she can’t stop him.
Next thing we know, Hans has put on a boo-hoo sad-face for the other nobles of Arendelle. The little jerk then pretends to be distraught, sobbing that Anna has passed away, but not before they said their wedding vows, all of which means that Hans is now next in line to the throne after Elsa. Things get resolved when Elsa and Anna meet up, and Hans’ treachery is revealed. But Elsa should seriously consider getting new nobles for Arendelle. Those guys did not even bother corroborating what Hans had claimed. No one thought to check on Anna’s “body” or to verify that someone had officiated the wedding vows between Anna and Hans. They just swallowed every lie Hans fed them.
14 Nobody Knows
I live in a place with a very arid climate. As such, moss is practically nonexistent where I live. I think the only time I’ve actually seen moss is when I’ve gone hiking at national parks or when I’ve gone to lakes and seen moss collecting on some stones on the shore. Because I don’t see much of it, my interest is inanely piqued whenever I encounter it. The moss-covered trolls in Frozen similarly appealed to my tastes. They’re adorable. I don’t mind their inclusion in the story at all. (I know there are some people who think that the trolls were a weird inclusion. I’m not one of them.)
What I find more odd than the trolls’ existence is everyone else’s lack of knowledge about it. They seem really friendly and approachable, so why does no one else know of them? Kristoff and Sven are adopted by the trolls, so there do not appear to be any rules against trolls interacting with humans. And seriously, those trolls are welcoming as heck. They had just met Anna and they were so ecstatic to see her. They treated her as one of their own and were all set to marry her to Kristoff. So why are these trolls only something that appear in old texts in the royal library (such as when Elsa and Anna’s dad researched a way to help Elsa with her ice curse)?
13 Large And In Charge
I’m of the opinion that Anna behaved unreasonably during Elsa’s coronation. No matter if you believe in true love or not, you just don’t get engaged to a man you just met if you are a potential heir to the throne of a kingdom. You have responsibilities to that kingdom, whether you appear to be aware of them or not. Elsa was right to dismiss Anna’s supposed engagement, and Anna was foolishly emotional when she made a scene about it during the party. It kind of was Anna’s fault that Elsa’s powers were revealed to the assembled people and she ended up running away to the mountains.
So when Anna claimed responsibility for the events and pledged to retrieve her sister, I wanted to cheer her on for stepping up and acting like a princess should. But then she had to go and ruin it all by naming Hans in charge of Arendelle while she was gone. Surely there were some native nobles of Arendelle who had more experience running the place than Hans, who was not even from around there, that Anna could have placed in charge instead. The same reason you don’t marry a guy you’ve just met are the same reasons you don’t put a guy you’ve just met in charge of your kingdom. I would have been happier if she had named one of the housekeepers or the butlers in her palace in charge instead of Hans of the Southern freaking Isles.
12 Finders Keepers
Frozen starts off with these gruff, bearded men harmonizing together as they sing about the wonders of ice. Kristoff and Sven stand out among them because they’re the only children in the group of people collecting ice blocks. The men are too busy singing to notice or care that a young boy and reindeer are trying to do a man’s job of collecting ice. When I first saw the movie, I just assumed that Kristoff’s father, or some other relative, was there in that group of men, and that’s why Kristoff was hanging around them. Later on though, when Kristoff and Sven trailed after the royal family when they went to the mountain trolls for aid, one of the trolls just decides to keep them.
We find out that Kristoff and Sven were raised by the trolls, and that they both consider the trolls to be family. Wait, what? So were Sven and Kristoff just orphans? Or did they have a family that the trolls stole them from? I can’t get it out of my head now, this scenario of Kristoff having a home he belonged to, and one day, he just never came back to it. What if his family thought he was missing for his whole life? They might have assumed he met an unfortunate accident while he was out collecting ice with Sven, never suspecting that a group of trolls in the mountains chose to adopt him as one of their own.
11 The Undo Button
Anna’s big plan to save Arendelle from a premature winter is to find her sister, bring her back to the castle, and have her reverse whatever it was she did to the land when she went away. A big upset in Anna’s plan occurs when she makes it to Elsa in the mountains and finds out that Elsa has no idea how to stop the icy weather that is now gripping the entire country. When Elsa ran away from Arendelle, it didn’t look like she purposefully set the winter up. So it was believable that she had no clue about reversing the process she had unintentionally set in motion. At the end, once Anna’s chilled heart is finally thawed by an act of love, Elsa realizes that love is the answer to reversing the winter.
Then she does some magical waving of the arms, and fwoosh! The winter disappears, replaced with the bright summer that was previously around. Figuring out that “love” is the way to reverse the winter is all well and good, but what does that even mean? Did that mean that all Elsa had to do was feel loved in order to reverse the wintertime? Or did that mean she had to love someone else to do it? Or maybe she just had to love herself and her abilities in order to control them properly? Again, there’s so much that is unexplained about Elsa’s powers. It would make a little more sense if we just knew what some of the rules regarding her abilities were.
10 Ice, Paper, Sword
Ice can be hard to chew. Have you ever finished off an iced beverage, only to have the ice cubes left at the bottom of your glass? Have you ever decided to chew those ice cubes? I occasionally decide to do so, and let me tell you, it’s not always easy to bite down on those chunks of frozen water.
However, while ice might resist the power of your jaw and teeth combined, but I don’t think ice would hold up well against, let’s say, a sword. In a contest between ice and a metal sword, the metal sword is going to win. Unless you live in the Frozen universe. Anna, in the midst of becoming frozen solid, interposes her body between Elsa’s unaware, crouched form and Hans’ sword. (See, Anna, this is why you don’t get engaged to guys you just met. They may end up trying to dethrone your older sister.)
Anna gets in between them just in time. Hans’ sword reaches the end of its arc and strikes Anna’s upraised, frozen hand. I seriously thought that Frozen was going to end a tragedy, with Anna shattered and Elsa devastated when she found out what had happened. Instead, Hans’ metal sword broke against Anna’s iced hand, splintering into tiny metal pieces. The force of its shattering threw Hans backwards and we could see a small puff of air escape Anna’s mouth. Ice can be tough and difficult to break; I’ve experienced this myself. But I’m fairly certain a sword could break (or at least chip) any block of ice set in front of it.
9 Quick Thinking And An Easy Solution
If someone I knew suddenly found themselves with ice powers at their disposal, I don’t know who I could direct them to to help them solve their problem. (And by “solve their problem,” I don’t mean “get rid of their powers.” I just mean “learn how to control their powers.”) In a world where magic doesn’t exist, there isn’t exactly an expert who can help someone who suddenly finds themselves super-powered. Elsa’s dad decided to take his daughter to some trolls who could, he hoped, help her out. But how did he find out about them? In the beginning, after Anna gets hurt by Elsa accidentally, their dad rushes to the library and pulls out a book detailing where to find these trolls.
How did he know what book to pull out from the many book shelves in his library? Had he researched the subject of magic mountain trolls before that night, so he knew exactly which book to pull out? And if the king knew that there were beings that could help Elsa learn about her powers, why did he wait for an accident to occur before rushing off to find them? With a daughter born with ice powers, the king is understandably more likely to believe legends about magic mountain trolls, but, you have to admit, that rock trolls in the mountains still hardly seem like a credible source for aid.
8 The Interim Queen
The only movie that has ever made me cry so quickly after it has started was Up. Frozen made a pretty good showing in the feels department when they showed the ship that Elsa and Anna’s parents were on get consumed by a massive wave in the middle of the ocean. The image was terrifying to observe, and the music was timed perfectly for you to feel what a loss it was to the two girls. However, after the king and queen’s funeral, the movie almost immediately cuts to coronation day, the day that Elsa gets crowned official queen of Arendelle. Since Anna is in such high spirits at hearing that coronation day has arrived, I assumed that quite some time had passed since her parents’ demise. But if that’s the case, who was the ruler of Arendelle between then and now?
Was Elsa ruling as a princess even though she wasn’t yet queen?
Or was there another person, a council of people even, who had charge of Arendelle until Elsa came of age? I don’t know enough about the governance of Arendelle to make an educated guess as to what went on during the intervening period between Elsa’s parents’ ship going under and Elsa’s coronation day. But it is intriguing to note that no one else in Arendelle had seen either of the princesses until the coronation. Is it possible to rule without anyone really knowing what you look like?
7 Global Cooling
When Elsa flees from Arendelle’s castle, she creates winter clouds where there were previously clear, summer skies. Anna elects to go after her, but she has to contend with the sudden onrush of winter hazards that she was unprepared for. She loses the horse she was riding on, falls into a freezing stream, and she has to buy a new winter wardrobe so she can brave the cold perils of the north mountain. It’s tough going for Anna, but consider at least that she is able, with the help of money, to adjust to the new wintry conditions. What about the poor summer critters that had no warning that a freeze was going to sweep the land? Normally, animals have internal workings that let them know when the seasons are going to change. They have time to head south, gain a winter coat, or gather food for hibernation.
This is not the case for the animals around Arendelle.
Winter occurred as suddenly as the snap of the fingers. It may not be commented on in the movie, but we should all be aware that a bunch of animals probably did not survive the suddenly harsh conditions. I’m quite surprised that when Elsa did bring back the summer, a bunch of deceased animals did not just turn up beneath the disappearing snowdrifts. No one in the movie seems to notice their passing, so the least we can do is mourn the little critters on our own.
6 A Donner Party Situation
Elsa’s ice castle is blatantly impressive. When the sun was rising, it hit the castle’s surfaces just right, making the walls glow with a light blue and pink light. Kristoff, since he has an ice business, is thoroughly in love with the place when he first sets eyes on it. Anna is also enchanted with the place. It looked gorgeous and it was a demonstration of how beautiful Elsa’s powers could be. However, no one seemed to consider the fact that Elsa intended to live in this castle. There were no soft beds that I could see. Where would Elsa sleep? And perhaps more pressing than a bed, I couldn’t see where Elsa would get a steady supply of food. Everyone, even a person with extraordinary ice powers, needs to eat.
So unless Elsa can survive on nothing but ice, she would need some more hearty sustenance available nearby in order to live out her days in her ice castle. Did she even eat during the two days she was there? As far as I can tell, she did not leave her castle to explore the surrounding woods around the mountain to find something like berries. So did she starve herself while in her castle? (She looks skinny enough for that to have been the case.) It makes no sense that Elsa could have subsisted on nothing but air while she was there. (That’s not really a good message to send to children.)
