Wish, the new movie from Walt Disney Animation Studios, is purportedly coming out to celebrate the parent company’s 100th anniversary. Though Disney hasn’t been making animated features for that full century, the tradition that began with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 86 years ago remains a defining part of the company’s legacy – not least because everything else the company positions as its current pillars (Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm) are sub-divisions that represent cases of purchased valor. While Disney Animation has a longevity that none of those other brands can boast, it also has a far spottier track record – financially, anyway. Oh, The Marvels just bombed and Solo underperformed and The Good Dinosaur fell short? Ha! Sleeping Beauty was an expensive boondoggle more than half a century ago! The Black Cauldron nearly killed Disney Animation for good! Home on the Range crossed its hooves for a blockbuster featuring singing cows! Which is all a way of saying that Wish may be an emblem meant to represent 100 years of Disney, but in some ways it feels more like it should be celebrating the 10 years since Frozen emerged to turn Disney Animation into a modern-day powerhouse.
Granted, Disney Animation was doing fine before Frozen, fresh off the success of Wreck-It Ralph and Tangled. Yet the fact that Disney actively wanted a princess-style musical to commemorate its centennial is probably owed in part to the Frozen phenomenon. Much of the early ad campaign for the movie consisted of a trailer heavily featuring Olaf (Josh Gad), the walking and talking snowman, rather than the dual-princess actual story of Anna (Kristen Bell) and Elsa (Idina Menzel), who are separated by Elsa’s development of ice-related superpowers. Removed from Anna’s memory and kept a secret from the kingdom at large, Elsa’s powers are a source of shame and fear that, when revealed at her coronation, cause her subjects to worry that she’s some kind of evil queen – which in turn has Elsa flee into the wilderness, wondering if she should finally embrace her abilities and cut herself off from society. It’s a fairy tale (the movie was originally based on The Snow Queen) by way of the X-Men, with some script-flipping riffs on the idea of what constitutes “true love” giving it an extra kick.
This was also not the original plan for Frozen, which went through the usual animation twists, turns and hurdles on its way to the big screen, only with more of those upheavals its final year than usual. (This may account for those early trailers not saying anything about the story: As little as eight months before the movie was released, it was apparently still being substantially reworked.) Some of the cracks remain visible in the final film. Miraculously, it’s one of those cases where those cracks, from a distance, look like part of the movie’s intricate design – and even when more closely examined, they tend to make the movie more interesting, rather than less.
Chief among these are the villainy, or lack thereof, in Elsa, who in earlier versions of the story was the outright bad guy of the piece (and not Anna’s slightly aloof, responsibility-freighted sister). On its face, the idea that most of the movie is Anna’s quest to find and talk to her sister appears defanged, and ideas like the gigantic snow monster and the “eternal winter” Elsa brings upon her former home feel like remnants of earlier versions. (Apparently Olaf began as a hench-snowman, not a cuddly sidekick.) Elsa’s unexplained powers; the trolls’ magic and vaguely worded, easily misinterpreted advice; bits and pieces of introductory exposition; put together, it all feels like maybe the movie is making up its rules as it goes along (a major feat for an animated feature in production for literally years).
That’s also exactly what lends “Let It Go” its power, pulling a bunch of disparate elements together (or maybe dismissing them from immediate concern) so that Elsa of Arendelle can become an icon to millions of 3-to-12-year-olds watching in awe. It has to be the most consequential song in Disney animation since “Part of Your World,” maybe ever. Rewatching Frozen in a movie theater this year during a Disney100 rerelease, despite nerves dulled over the course of the 10 or 20 times I saw it at home with my daughter when she was between the ages of 3 and 5, “Let It Go” lost none of its power, flipping the standard “I want” song around into a “fuck it” anthem that manages to both embrace and mask its inner pain. In these few minutes, Frozen embraces its own slightly jagged quality, and no matter how dodgy things get in the last hour of the movie (for one thing, the movie, having frontloaded most of its best songs, forgets to be a musical for long stretches), there’s an electric chill to Elsa’s isolation and Anna’s desperation to free her from it. Though Anna is really the film’s primary protagonist (and she’s a good one, plucky and funny with her own deep-seated needs), it’s Elsa who threatens the throw the film off-balance: Part superhero origin story, part allegory for queerness or bodies of difference, part pop star off in her own fantastic yet barren universe, it’s no wonder she can holds such a primal power to transfix so many kids (and fic-happy Disney Adults). Compared to Cinderella or Snow White, or later attempts at semi-progressive princess figures like Belle or Jasmine, she’s a force of glorious instability. The rest of Frozen has plenty of emotional and musical hooks, but “Let It Go” serves as the announcement that to some degree, the movie refuses to be tamed.
There have been great Disney cartoons, and songs, since Frozen. I’d say Moana, for one, is an even better movie with an even better song score and way better animation, and Encanto isn’t far behind on any of those counts. But it’s hard to imagine Disney feeling at peace with something quite so spiky as “Let It Go,” despite having experienced its runaway success. Even Frozen II, which has some showtune bangers and emotional crescendos, can’t recapture that same magic – and indeed, might suggest that Disney managed to learn the wrong lessons from its blockbuster predecessor. A making-of Frozen II series on Disney+ is admirably upfront about the creative growing pains that production experienced in its own final year, but the show is plagued by the nagging assumption that it’s essentially normal, if inconvenient, to have major aspects of the story not just subject to revision (which is pretty normal on all kinds of big-budget movies, especially animation) but entirely unknown as little as half a year before release. This may be why despite a surfeit of greater material in Frozen II, the film doesn’t revise itself into a state of surprising emotional rawness the way the first movie does. It feels more like the first movie should have felt, by all rights, after its hasty rewrites: Entertaining, yet hastily and frequently rewritten, and sometimes hard to follow as a result.
Regardless of the first movie’s triumph, it’s still kind of mind-boggling that the full front-to-back story of Frozen II wasn’t fully cracked until a hard-to-move release date was breathing down the filmmakers’ necks. (It also explains why so many Frozen II picture books and the like seem to elide any mention of the film’s final half-hour or so.) That’s all behind-the-scenes jockeying that ultimately doesn’t have to do with whether my then-four-year-old had the time of her life watching Frozen II in 2019 (or, for that matter, whether my wife kicked off a spontaneous round of applause for Kristof’s power ballad “Lost in the Woods”), and will scarcely affect the number of children who will grow up with the Frozen movies whether or not the sort-of-announced third and fourth movies actually materialize, or are any good. (You can announce a Frozen movie all you want, but apparently its story simply refuses to be locked with more than six months’ lead time.) It is worth considering, however, how Frozen has altered the trajectory of Disney Animation.
It’s not as if the decade of Disney cartoons since Frozen has been littered with attempts to recreate that phenom. First, these projects theoretically require too much lead time, at least theoretically; and second, that job was quickly designated to Frozen II (the rare upside of Disney going franchise-crazy). It’s arguable that Frozen culminates a full princess reimagining that began with The Princess and the Frog and continued with Tangled, with Moana, Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto taking more of an adventures-around-the-globe, EPCOT-friendly approach to their heroines. The common ground Frozen shares with the weaker recent Disney Animation productions is the faint sound of chattering story trusts, the squeak of white-board brainstorming, audible during the movie itself. It’s there in Frozen II before the making-of confirms it, and it’s taken to more strategic, less heartfelt ends in Wish. Disney’s new musical has a lot to like, including strong voiceover performances from Ariana DeBose as the de facto princess Asha and Chris Pine as the power-drunk King Magnifico, who purports to grant wishes for his subjects while mostly extracting those dreams from their consciousness. The movie has also been designed to celebrate 100 years of Disney, and those designs, while sometimes clever, threaten to dominate the actual story, which is itself self-referential but not self-interrogating about Disney’s dream-is-a-wish-your-heart-makes sentimentalism. Even its lush visual style — a more conservative version of recent DreamWorks experiments in making computer animation look less, well-computer-y — feels a little calculated. Its digital brush strokes are nicer-looking than Frozen, and will probably age better to boot. The movie also looks self-conscious and oddly hemmed-in.
It’s hard not to assume that Frozen helped give the filmmakers (who include Frozen directors Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck) a boost of confidence in their attempts to engage more directly with the studio’s legacy beyond simply repeating formulas, and consolation over the rocky road that must be traveled to get there. Frozen emerged from years of development like an ice-phoenix – and helped turn Disney Animation back into a powerhouse brand that might conceivably produce some of the biggest movies of the year. With that kind of corporate power comes corporate responsibility, and so Wish applies its experimentation, its merest hints of invention or unruliness, as a tribute to the parent company – an ungainly spawn of Frozen’s causes and its effects. In other words, it’s the type of massive success that may make it harder than ever to let go.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.