Seven years ago, on November 22, 2013, a lone voice, crying in the wilderness, issued a proclamation that would enthrall a planet’s children with its honeyed tongue. “Let it go,” urged the voice. “Let it go! Can’t hold it back anymore! Let it go! Let it go-o-o! Turn away and slam the door!”

“I don’t care,” the voice continued, “what they’re going to say. Let the storm rage on. The cold never bothered me anyway!”

That voice, later identified as Princess Elsa, one of the dual heroes of the Disney animated feature film Frozen, returned with the new doctrine of Frozen II on November 22, 2019 (yes, right down to the day). In this chronicle, Elsa and her sister Anna issued further proclamations the children of the world took to heart. Also, Elsa got a super rad water horse.

I have never quite understood the appeal of the Frozen franchise. I like the movies, but I find them to feature overstuffed plotting and considerable failures of nerve. Both Frozen films come so close to upending the Disney template before ultimately chickening out; as someone who enjoys the Disney template but also doesn’t mind subverting it, I find them to be failures of potential. And that’s before we get to all of the ways the movies want to have their cake and eat it too (Elsa being vaguely coded as a queer character without being textually queer).

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