Actually dead while being solid ice on Frozen and Frozen II?
For those who don’t remember, on Frozen and Frozen II, both Elsa and Anna turned on solid ice.
We understood that as, basically, being dead, but it’s not as simple as that.
First, if you die, your soul departs your body. But that’s not what happens in here. They both came back.
Conclusion: they didn’t die. You could say that they were dead at practical effects, specially if the happening that brought them back wouldn’t have happened, so they would have stayed like that forever (insert goosebumps here), but they weren’t dead, they were turned into solid ice. Frozen.
So, that state was another thing, something that would cut off or restrain your essence (everything Elsa did melted), like being in a coma. In a coma, you can be adressed as basically dead, since you can’t say when that person is going to wake up, but if you happen wake up, you would be back.
But is more alike to being turned into stone by a spell. Almost everytime in fiction when they talk about being turned into a stone statue, they say you could come back, but mostly of those times that you could come back it’s something difficult or even nearly impossible.
Now, next question about this state: are you concious?
There is no data about the matter in the movies, and the similes above suggest that you're not. In the case of Elsa, she clearly saw what was happening to her, while Anna was frozen in less than a seccond, but it appears she knew what happened to her; they were both aware of what happened to their bodies when it was happening one of them fainted when released, but that’s out of the stuff we are discussing right now. But while they were solid ice? Not a clue.
But the book of “Forest of Shadows”, which tells a tale between the two movies, tells another thing.
It clearly says that Anna was aware of every seccond of being a ice statue, and what happened around her, and would explain that she wasn’t like “what just happened to me?” when she came back, instead she was in relief.
Which would mean that Elsa was conscious while frozen too. That would make her reaction of fainting after being released have more sense, because she spent like that hours and then all of sudden she wasn’t, and she didn’t believe it at first but then she fainted by the impression.
It’s still not canon, tecnically, but the information fits.