Frozen: Top 10 Reasons I’m Over it

Disney’s Frozen, which has grossed over $1.2 billion dollars worldwide, decisively proved that millions of mothers worldwide can be cajoled into shelling out fistfuls of dollars to satisfy their daughter’s insatiable appetite for princess-themed entertainment.  This is a well Disney has been going to for decades — our entire lives, ladies — and we keep lining up to hand them our purses.  Don’t worry, the next goddess in Disney’s princess pantheon won’t hit the big screen until 2018, and you know what that means: they’ve got 4 more years to squeeze all the blood from the Frozen turnip.   I honestly don’t know how we’re going to survive it, because we’re nine months in and I would rather pluck every last one of my nose hairs than watch this movie ever again.

Here are, in no particular order, ten reasons why:

10. The Easter eggs:

I wouldn’t know they existed if not for this cadre of pedantic fuck-wits ($0.25) combing through every frame of this movie in search of, not hidden meaning and subtext, but unclever inside jokes.  Who are you people and where do you get all this spare time?  If you’ve got nothing better to do, I’ve got enough yard-work and laundry to keep everyone busy.

9. The recurrence of rosemaling in modern fashion:

Dear Ugly Dress: Get Off My Bah-day.

I’ll admit, I don’t get fashion.  But this pattern has not been fashionably appropriate since the Austro-Prussian War.  In the modern era it belongs in only two places: (1) antique Scandinavian china or (2) a trivet you picked up for eighty cents at a flea market.  So I’d better not actually see this show up in a GAP ad any time soon.  It works in 19th century Norway.  It does not work as a summer dress.

8.  Team Anna vs. Team Elsa

Why does Elsa get all the love, anyway?  I always liked Anna’s character better.  She’s socially clumsy and awkward, but adorable, and she’s the main character with whom we’re supposed to sympathize.  She effectively lost her sister and best friend as a child and never understood why, and then her parents died and now she’s basically a shut-in talking to suits of armor and slowly going crazy.  We get to see her grow into herself and mature and make an emotional connection with Kristoff without an overt romance. That’s a great story!  But even though she’s the more psychologically interesting character, she never makes with the sexy time like Elsa so no one gives a shit ($0.25) about her.  Not to get all soapbox-y on you, but this should tell you a lot about what our society values in women.

7. The constant talk of how much effort it took to animate Elsa’s hair:

There’s a scene in Ratatouille where the critic Anton Ego tries to order the “perspective”, observes that the restaurant is all out and proceeds to provide it.  That’s what I’m doing here.  They actually developed new computer graphics rendering techniques just to animate Elsa’s more than 400,000-plus strands of — are you kidding me?  It’s hair in a movie.  We’re not curing cancer or putting a satellite into orbit.  And I think the effort was basically wasted — not once when watching this movie did I think, wow, they did a nice job with her hair.

6. The many thousands of versions of Let It Go.

The covers.  The parodies.  The variations.  The remixes. This is officially out of control. The Mom Parody.  Let It Go in a myriad of Disney and Pixar character voices.  Look, Let It Go is a great song.  It’s beautiful, captivating, powerful, and technically difficult, showing off Idina Menzel’s phenomenal talent.  But you, ma’am, are no Idina Menzel, and Let it Burn is not an improvement.  You people are ruining the world with this shit ($0.25).

5. Daily regret over a dress:

My girls’ near-constant begging for an Elsa dress compels me to check the Disney Princess aisle every time I go to Target on the off chance that there will be an Elsa dress hanging there.  Every single time it’s the same scenario: I round the corner to see a big stack of Anna dresses and not one Elsa dress.  Every day I regret not buying two of everything before this movie took over the planet.  Oh wait!  Amazon has dresses.  Phew! But they cost three times as much and I need two of them.  Fuck! ($0.25)  I can’t help but think that the merchandise shortage is manufactured.  Surely, if they can make a new Frozen film short, they can keep up with the dress, doll and wig demands in the marketplace.

4. Constant speculation about a sequel:

People, when has Disney ever done a theater release sequel for a princess movie?  I can’t think of one.  Not Snow White back in the 1930s, not Cinderella, nor Ariel, Jasmine, Belle, Aurora, Tiana, Merida, Rapunzel, nada.  At best, there’s a crappy straight-to-DVD release and, once you see it, you know exactly why it didn’t go to the theaters (Little Mermaid 3: Ariel’s Beginning … really?).  Plus, the next princess movie is already in the works and Disney isn’t going to compete with itself.  And even if there is a sequel coming, why would they release anything before they’ve sponged every last cent from you on the current movie?  The legacy of Frozen is still moving products off the shelves, so, no, there’s still lots of avenues to pursue that will make the kiddies go bananas and force you to fork out more money just to shut them up so you can kiss that sequel sayonara.

3. Grown men and women using Frozen-related hashtags on Twitter:

This might be more of a statement about hashtag misuse generally, but who in the hell is searching Twitter for hashtags like #ilikewarmhugs and #doyouwanttobuildasnowman? You get 140 characters and you’re blowing 30 of them on #thecoldneverbotheredmeanyway?  Looking at Twitter, this hashtag is used for basically two purposes: tagging your ice bucket challenge Vine, or complaining that you’re cold.  Ladies, I already know you’re cold.  You have a vagine (pronounced vah-jeen).  We’re always cold.

2.  Merchandising the bejesus out of everything:

Everything in Frozen has been merchandised to death, with the possible exception of Olaf and this guy:

Olaf is about the only thing that I’m not sick of yet because he’s just so cute and likable. But world, you’re on notice: Olaf on T-shirts in Justice?  It’s starting to wear thin.  Can we please just preserve this one wonderful fun thing and not ruin it by merchandising the ever-loving crap out of it?  As it is, my daughter draws at least one Olaf a day, leaves them all over the house and insists we keep them all.

Not bad, for a 6-year old.

And finally …

1. The Facebook quiz:

I’m so fucking ($0.25) tired of the daily onslaught of mindless Facebook quizzes, and when you combine stupid Facebook quizzes with Frozen, you get a magical concoction of ignorant.  Which Frozen Character Are You?  There is no penetrating psychoanalysis behind this.  These quizzes ask generic questions and offer overtly transparent multiple choice answers, like:

How Would You Spend Your Perfect Saturday Night?

a)  Conjuring a crystal ice palace from thin air

b) Sleeping in a barn with a caribou

c) Pining for summer even though you’re made of snow

d) Being locked in your dead parents’ castle with an emotionally distant relative

Gee, I wonder which Frozen character I am??  BETTER TAKE THE QUIZ AND FIND OUT.

Bonus!

NEW CEREAL from Kellogg’s! Frosty Kingdom — now made with no GMOs and fortified with 9 essential vitamins and minerals!

There is a corner of the Internet that is frenzied over the possibility of a love connection between Elsa and – you guessed it – Jack Frost.  I’m going to assume that these people run their own Warcraft guilds and write a lot of Fan-fiction.  Adults fantasizing that two fictional cartoon characters are going get-it-on?  The line between this and creepy Japanese anime tentacle sex is distressingly thin.

Total owed to the swear jar for this post: $1.25

If you like this post, you’ll probably also like the one about why Frozen is causing my daughters to throw down in fisticuffs …