Man, I still cannot get over how mature Frozen 2 was. Like, sure, it’s still ostensibly a family film that all ages can enjoy, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen a Disney animated movie that was willing to target the adults in its audience more than the kids. The songs are far less traditional catchy Disney sing-along fare, more classic musical theater storytelling character pieces with weird and experimental tonal choices. It abandons the use of fairy tale language and symbols that the first movie used (no mention of true love’s kiss, royal balls, princess-y stuff) in favor of something far more akin to a mythology-inspired RPG adventure. A massive chunk of the storytelling and themes is communicated in subtext and metaphor, especially with Elsa’s big song in the third act. And so much of the drama revolves around feelings that are… far more difficult, complex, and adult-oriented than kids’ movies usually tackle. Self-actualization by way of coming to terms with your past trauma, siblings who love each other yet find their lives drawn in different directions, struggling to do the right thing when you don’t even know what the right thing is anymore, heck, even Olaf’s comic existential crisis; these aren’t the kinds of emotional struggles kids can relate to as easily as teenagers and grown-ups can.
And that’s entirely intentional. Because in case Olaf’s blatant fourth-wall break in his and Anna’s opening song didn’t tip you off (”And you’ve gotten older too,” he says, speaking directly to the audience), Frozen 2 isn’t really for the kids of today that saw the first film after the fact. It’s for the kids of six years ago who first fell in love Anna and Elsa. Or, more accurately, it’s for the teenagers and young adults those kids grew up into. It takes us back to the site of one of our favorite childhood memories and dares to let those memories, ironically, unfreeze. Anna, Elsa, Kristoff, and all the rest have grown up right along with us, and just as our worries and concerns have changed from when we first saw Frozen as kids, their struggles have grown in scope and complexity as well. If the first Frozen was about as perfect a fairy tale for kids as you could get, then Frozen 2 is about exploring what happens after the fairy tale is over and the lessons you learned from it are no longer enough to contend with an increasingly complicated world. So it’s able to be bolder, and less constrained, and go in more sprawling, yet also more intimate directions, and the songs get to do cooler musical things that aren’t as immediately hummable but are so freaking emotionally powerful, and the emotional journeys everyone goes through are able to speak to the grown-ups we’re slowly becoming instead of just the kids we once were, and cripes, can you imagine anything like “Show Yourself” in the first movie? There’s no way! That song is just too, well, adult in its vision of self-acceptance and discovering meaning to work in a fairy tale context. That song could only make sense once the fairy tale started to grow up.
I could honestly go on and on about how much I flipping love this, but I’ve rambled on long enough. TLDR, Frozen 2 matures the themes of the first movie in truly fascinating ways, and it makes for the first Disney Princess movie I’ve seen that might be better at speaking to adults than kids. Feel free to add any of your own insights to this post; I’d love to know what parts of Frozen 2 really touched you in this way!
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