Frozen 2 and the lack of new Disney villains

The start of the year has been busy, which means I'm late with my blogging. At least I'm spoilt for choice when it comes to subject matter, having watched both Frozen 2 and The Rise Of Skywalker at the cinema. I'll stick mainly with Frozen 2 for this post, though touching briefly on Rise Of Skywalker towards the end.

I realise that Frozen 2 could have been a great deal worse, and it didn't annoy me the way Wreck It Ralph 2 did. It was visually stunning, the songs were good and the characters still likeable. However, the story was a mess. Story elements were thrown in and then not expanded upon or made intelligible, new characters were introduced who then had very little to do, and the end of the film - though happy - is somehow unsatisfying. To be more precise, I'll have to go into spoilers, though there is precious little to spoil, as there are no big twists in the story.

So, firstly, the whole idea of magic in this universe being tied to the four elements and Elsa being the "fifth element" which ties the other four together is very confusing. Elsa's powers include creating snow and ice. That should make her magic part of the water element, no? Why on earth should her undefined fifth element status require her to take up residence in an enchanted forest (not the Enchanted Forest, regrettably) while Anna is made Queen? Who thought separating these devoted sisters (though it's made clear that they meet often) was a good idea? Frozen was partly about Elsa being able to connect with the world around her by coming to terms with her magic powers. At the end of Frozen 2, she is on her own again, though she does have the company of the pretty anonymous Northuldra tribe and a fire salamander. She might almost as well have stayed in her "ice palace for one".

When it comes to the characters, I was pretty relieved we didn't see more of the leader of the Northuldra tribe, as she seemed to be the kind of "nature good, civilisation bad" character that tends to irritate me. But Lieutenant Mattias had wasted potential - his reactions when hearing the girls' history as retold by Olaf, mirroring as they did the audience's reactions when first seeing Frozen (Olaf as Hans: "You're not worth it! Guess what, I'm the bad guy" Mattias: "What?!") were sweet and funny, and I liked his exchange with Anna about his old flame back in Arendelle. When told that she never married, he sighs "Now, why doesn't that make me feel happier?". But his impact on the story? Practically zero. And what happened to the Northuldra guy who talks to reindeer in the same way as Kristoff does? You think that this is the start of a beautiful friendship, but it's never followed through. Not to mention Honeymaren, a Northuldra girl who's introduced by name but not given any character or anything to do at all. Some of the regular characters are marking time as well: Kristoff's story arc is about trying to propose to Anna, while events keep getting in the way. But this is years after the first Frozen: surely Kristoff and Anna should have been married ages ago!

Somewhat perversely, seeing as I didn't much approve of the Frozen arc in Once Upon a Time, I was bummed that Once's version of what happened after (and before) Frozen was not only ignored but actively negated in Frozen 2. My beef with the Frozen arc in Once is that it was poorly integrated in the main story, and Anna and Elsa were strangely one-dimensional in their interactions with the Storybrooke/Enchanted Forest crowd. The story itself actually functioned well if seen merely as a sequel to Frozen, and contained cool elements such as a villainous Snow Queen more in keeping with H C Andersen's than Elsa and a magic mirror (similar to the one mentioned in Andersen's story) which makes people turn against their nearest and dearest. I know Once isn't Disney canon, but that's because it usually takes great liberties with its source material. In the case of Frozen, it primly toed the line and didn't go against anything described in the film, which had a curtailing effect on the script-writers' creative freedom - and it all turns out to have been for nothing. Ah well.

What's a great deal worse is that yet again, Disney fails to deliver on the villain front. Elsa sees what you could call ice flashbacks of her grandfather, King Runeard, behaving badly, which sparks a conflict between Arendelle and the Northuldra and isolates the Northuldra's forest in a magic mist for thirty odd years (whatever the point of that was - care to explain, magic elements?). However, as well as coming as no surprise whatsoever - what, you didn't think the oh-so-wise-and-close-to-nature Northuldra started the quarrel, did you? - these brief flashbacks give us no insight into Runeard's reasons or character. We can only assume that it was the Northuldra's use of magic that spooked him, as he must otherwise have been a pretty tolerant king with a generous immigration policy (Mattias is from immigrant stock). An ice statue grandfather does not count as a villain, and so, after Wreck It Ralph 2 and Toy Story 4, we have another Disney/Pixar villain no-show.

It may be that Disney is trying to be "mature" and show that life can be complicated enough without colourful antagonists. But who wants an animated Disney film to be true to life to the detriment of the story? It's as if the Disney people have twigged that people have grown tired of the twist villains but don't have a clue what to replace them with. It's been so long since they had an upfront baddie in the Jafar mould that they've somehow lost the knack of creating them. There are several trends when it comes to Disney's output that leave me concerned, but this is perhaps the most worrying. Can it be that the company's unending quest for worthiness has made them forget just how satisfying a really good villain can be? 

The Rise Of Skywalker seems to point in the direction of a company struggling to come up with something new villain-wise. Snoke having been unceremoniously killed off in The Last Jedi, the powers that be felt obliged to reintroduce Emperor Palpatine as the Big Bad, in spite of him being very, very dead at the end of The Return Of The Jedi. Now, I don't object to a spot of Palps - I admit I'm one of the fans who squeed delightedly when hearing his trademark cackle in the trailer, instead of going: "Oh no! Doesn't this make the heroes' victory in The Return Of The Jedi worthless?" (though I understand that argument). But reintroducing a tried-and-tested baddie in this way doesn't exactly show a lot of imagination.

As it happens, they wouldn't even have had to come up with anything new for Frozen 2. I can't be the only one who hoped for the reintroduction of and a redemption arc for Hans, can I?