"Frozen 2" (dir. Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2019)

Frozen (2013) was fun, wasn't it? I mean, it was an oddly broken-backed piece of storytelling that sacrificed larger satisfactions of structure and narrative for a barely logical ‘aha!’ gotcha story-twist, and it was extraordinarily White—the Whitest Disney since Tangled, and that film's all-Aryan cast of Rapunzelly goodies, its fetishization of blonde hair and its witchy Jewess villain (all, I'm sure, both fine and dandy. It's not as if resurgent Nazi ideology or anti-Semitism are still real-life political issues nowadays, after all). Then again, the Nordic racial purity of Frozen was at least leavened by a Christina-Rossetti-y sisters-don't-need-men agendum it was easy to like. The movie also had some nicely-judged humour, and, most of all, it had a raft of absolutely sterling songs. People will be karaoke-ing ‘Let It Go’ for a very long time, no question. It cost Disney $150 million to make and it earned them $1.3 billion, which is a quantity of beans that guarantees a sequel.

So here's Frozen 2, whose makers have thought long if not hard about how to build on so financially-fecund a base. What they've opted for is, mostly, more-of-the-same: artfully-rendered Scandinavian landscapes, sisters doing it for themselves, ice-magic and Olaf goofing about. They've also decided, narratively speaking, to carry forward Frozen's daft aha! reveal, in which the man you thought was good turns out, in an undermotivated and arbitrary way, to be evil (in this case, it's the handsome grandfather rather than the handsome fiancé, but same difference).

The snow-Whiteness of the first film has been addressed by making the sequel a story of our Nordic heroines making friends with a kind-of Sámi population of folk trapped in a magical forest up north. So there's your ethnic diversity. Although, like flower-arrangers stepping back from what they've done and deciding it's not quite there yet, the film-makers have also added an extra, token character: Matthias, the heroic Captain of the Arendellean Guards and a man of African heritage. Happy now? To be fair, they've also made the through-line of the story about recovering the buried truth of colonial oppression. You see: back in the backstory, King Runeard of Arendelle, all smiles, brokered a treaty with the indigenous folk of Northuldra, building a mighty dam in their homeland as a goodwill gesture. But Runeard is actually evil. The point of the dam was to block the Northuldra's waters which would, in some manner that remained obscure to me, cause them harm, because Runeard hated them and wished to subject them to his rule.

The dam seems to me an awfully roundabout way of doing this, I must say. The more usual Colonisation strategy, surely, is: march your army in and kill lots of people. And, indeed, Runeard does then provoke a fight with the Northuldrans in order to justify his armed response, something which hardly needed a pretext. I suppose, actually, that the dam is there as a rebus not for colonisation as such so much as for the skein-thin justifications colonising nations bring forward: ‘yes we stole all your wealth and killed many of your people, but we did at least build some infrastructure, look.’

Nonetheless it's hard to see what the notional justification for a dam might be, in terms of the movie's worldbuilding. It's certainly not there to generate hydroelectric power, since the street- and houselights in Arendelle are powered not by electricity, nor even gas, but by elemental sprites of fire. We know this because, angered by the dam, the Four magical Elements of Fire, Water, Earth and Air manifest their displeasure by withdrawing from the human world, respectively: turning off the city lights; trapping everyone in the Enchanted Forest with a wall of impenetrable mist; shaking the paving stones of Arendelle's streets such that everyone has to evacuate the city; and—eh—withdrawing all air? such that the resulting vacuum, uh, asphixiates the entire cast? Is it?

Not that last one, obviously.

The ‘four elements’ archaism of the Frozen universe is on a par with the trademark inverted-Phlogiston physics of Elsa's ice-magic; so it ought not to have surprised me that the story in Frozen 2 would be moved-along by naked homeopathy. But here we are: surprised I was. Water, we are told not once but several times, possesses a magical memory, and Elsa's ice-sculpture actualise the hidden history of her grandfather's badness. It's deemed the damn dam must be dismantled even though the resulting downwash will destroy dainty Arendelle. Which is to say, the historical realities of imperialism stifled by official narratives of spreading missionary civilisation, must be undammed in today's discourse, even though the resulting downwash will engulf narratives of White exceptionalism. That seems clear enough, commendable even, although the story's denouement actually pulls this punch, with Elsa riding a magic horse made of water down the downwash and magicking away the destructive consequences of Arendelle's historic actions. It's a kind of Black Lives Matter But Only Insofar As White Lives Avoid Karma kind of deal I suppose.

Otherwise the plotting is rather arbitrarily episodic and unsatisfying. Characters are killed off only to be brought back again by scriptwriter's fiat. The humour more often than not misfires, the new characters are wire-frames rather than fully-realised figures, and the songs aren't nearly so good as the first film's. The one exception to this is ‘Into The Unknown’, another Idina Menzel belter that attempts to catch ‘Let It Go’s lightning in a second bottle. It doesn't manage this, quite, hamstrung as it is by its belatedness. Still, I can't deny it's a pretty stirring piece of songwriting: Norwegian singer Aurora's minor-key oo-oo-ing works hauntingly in the background as Menzel slams out another full-throated paean to .. what? Well, looking at the lyrics you'd have to assume: the yearning of an only-outwardly-happy suburban housewife tempted by a thrilling extra-marital affair. I mean, the song kind-of fits the logic of Frozen 2's story, that Elsa is chafeing at the comfort of living in Arendelle and longs to explore the unexplored north. Kind of. But, really, its heart-thudding yearning makes more sense in a sexual context, I'd say.

Anyway, here we are: a movie that blends precisely calibrated quanta of sameitude, new-in-a-familiar-way and minimal self-criticism to produce, I thought, a dud.

Dud, did I say? Oh no. It seems I am very wrong. Like Frozen, Frozen 2 cost about $150 million to make, but it has already, despite the latter end of its cinema run being curtailed by Lockdown, earned more than its predecessor. People love it.  Ah well.