5 / 10
Official trailer
Frozen 2 is the sequel to the 2013 Walt Disney Animation Studios film that became the highest-grossing animated film of all time. Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee co-directed. Lee wrote. Kristen Bell returns as Anna. Idina Menzel returns as Elsa. Jonathan Groff voices Kristoff. Josh Gad voices Olaf. Sterling K. Brown voices Lieutenant Mattias, an Arendellian soldier trapped in the enchanted forest. Evan Rachel Wood voices Queen Iduna, Elsa and Anna’s mother.
The plot follows Elsa hearing a mysterious voice calling her north, the sisters traveling into the enchanted forest, and the revelation that their grandfather King Runeard committed an atrocity against the Northuldra people that’s cursed the region.
I have mixed feelings about Frozen 2. It sounds gorgeous, it looks gorgeous, and “Into the Unknown” is a knockout. Then the story shows up with its homework, and a cartoon spends the back half lecturing me about a dam.
The film made approximately one billion four hundred and fifty million dollars worldwide on a one hundred and fifty million dollar budget.
The commercial performance was strong. The critical reception was mixed compared to the universally acclaimed first film. The film is included on the Woke Disasters list because its narrative content represented Disney’s clearest commitment to applying indigenous-reparations structures to its core princess properties.
What Made It a Woke Disaster
The film’s central revelation is that Anna and Elsa’s grandfather, King Runeard of Arendelle, committed a colonial atrocity against the indigenous Northuldra people. Runeard had built a dam in the Northuldra forest under the framing of a goodwill gift. The dam was intended to suppress the Northuldra’s spiritual connection to the elemental forces of nature.
When the Northuldra leader challenged Runeard about the dam, Runeard killed him. The action triggered the curse that trapped soldiers and Northuldra together in the magical forest for thirty years.
The third-act resolution is that Anna must destroy the dam to free the Northuldra and lift the curse. Destroying the dam will flood and destroy Arendelle.
Elsa intervenes at the last moment to save the kingdom, but the moral logic is unambiguous. The dam is Arendelle’s wrongful claim to Northuldra land. Its destruction is the necessary reparation. Anna, the kingdom’s reigning monarch, makes the choice to flood her own civilization to make right what her grandfather did wrong.
The structure is indigenous reparations applied to animated fantasy.
The Northuldra are the displaced people, the Arendellians are the settlers, and the dam is the infrastructure of colonization. My objection is that the film offers this as the only moral answer, the one that lifts the curse and wins the happy ending. A Disney film with a conscience is fine by me, but asking me to cheer while the heroine floods her own kingdom is where I get off the boat.
For Writers
A film that asks the audience to celebrate the destruction of the civilization it’s spent the previous installment loving has structured a moral argument the audience can’t easily accept. Frozen 2 spent two films building Arendelle into a beloved fictional kingdom. The sequel argues that the kingdom must be flooded. The audience reads the contradiction. The lesson is that established sympathy for fictional settings creates obligations for sequels.
If you intend to argue against the setting, you have to do the work of moving the audience’s loyalty before you ask them to accept the setting’s collapse. Frozen 2 didn’t do that work.
The Elsa Retreat
The other major narrative choice has Elsa abandon her queenship to live with the Northuldra in the enchanted forest. Anna is left as queen of Arendelle. The structural argument is that Elsa belongs with the indigenous people because her magical nature is connected to theirs. The rational, civic, governance-focused role belongs to Anna. The mystical, nature-connected, spiritually authentic role belongs to Elsa with the Northuldra.
The structure positions civilization as the world of the unmagical and indigenous wilderness as the world of true spiritual authenticity.
Elsa’s true self requires leaving the kingdom and joining the indigenous. The film depicts the civilization as the place where she can’t be fully herself. The wilderness is where her real nature lives. The Noble Savage structure, which had been criticized in academic and political contexts for decades, returns here as Disney’s resolution to its protagonist’s identity arc.
Handing Elsa’s real self to the forest and the crown to Anna feels to me like the film giving up on the idea that she could be both. I think it’s a lazy resolution for the character, and it’s built on a trope that was tired long before 2019.
For Writers
Romantic primitivism in fiction reads as politically progressive to writers and as patronizing to the groups being romanticized. Frozen 2 codes the Northuldra as spiritually purer than the Arendellians. The framing is meant to be respectful, but it’s also the Noble Savage trope dressed in 2019 Disney costume. The lesson is that idealizing a fictional indigenous group isn’t the same as respecting them. Both Disney and its critics have struggled with this for decades. The 2019 film didn’t break new ground in either direction.
The Music
“Into the Unknown” is the film’s most successful individual element. Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, the team behind “Let It Go,” wrote the song. Idina Menzel’s vocal performance is the production’s strongest individual moment. The song was a major commercial success, charting in multiple international markets. The sequence is the film’s most-quoted and most-replayed passage.
“Into the Unknown” is the best thing in the movie, full stop, and Menzel sells every note of it. If the whole film had that song’s nerve, I’d be rating it a lot higher.
The other songs don’t match it. “Show Yourself” feels like a sequel trying to rebuild “Let It Go” from spare parts. “Lost in the Woods” is staged as a joke, and I found that deflating, since Kristoff finally gets a big number and the film won’t let him have it. “The Next Right Thing” is the second-strongest piece and still less memorable than the first film’s “Do You Want to Build a Snowman.”
For Writers
Sequel songs face an impossible bar when the original produced an all-time standout. Frozen 2’s “Into the Unknown” is strong, but it’s compared to “Let It Go,” which is a defining song of 2010s animation. The lesson is that sequels inherit their predecessors’ high points as expectations. The audience doesn’t grade the sequel against typical work. They grade it against the predecessor’s best moments. Plan for this. Either find a new tone or accept that the comparison will be unflattering.
Craft Note
The sequence in which Elsa rides the water spirit Nokk across the Dark Sea is the film’s strongest individual visual passage and one of Walt Disney Animation Studios’s strongest action sequences of the decade. The animation team designed Nokk as a horse made of water, with the kelpie’s translucent body responding to Elsa’s movements and the surrounding waves. The Dark Sea sequence shows the technical capability of the production and the design team’s commitment to specific creature work.
The sequence is what the film looks like when its craft serves a moment of pure adventure instead of ideological argument.
Is Frozen 2 worth watching?
5/10. Half of this film is lovely and half of it is a lecture, and the number splits the difference. “Into the Unknown” is excellent and the Nokk ride across the Dark Sea is some of the best action Disney animation did that decade, but the dam and Elsa’s retreat into the forest drag the film down for me. Watch the first Frozen instead, and save this one for when your child has demanded it.
