Previously on 12 Months of Frozen:
I'm not going to lie: this idea came out on the spur of the moment, as part of an instinctive reaction of "You want Anna to be the main character? Fine, I'll GIVE you Anna as the main character, and it'll STILL have more Anna&Elsa interaction. Because I can."
Just so you know where this is coming from.
As mentioned previously: Anna and Elsa are still ladies of color. Just in case you forgot. Also, for the sake of having some variety between the Disney princesses, I'm going to go ahead and say that they're both short and have waists larger than an inch.
(Also you should go check out this redesign of them as Inuit, because it's really cute.)
Because this is now officially Anna's Movie, we don't see Elsa at the beginning — instead it's like the beginning of, say, How To Train Your Dragon, where we frontload some of the important info right off the bat in a voiceover or song. Key points: Anna's parents died a few years ago, her sister was lost, and their land was cursed with perpetual ice and snow, which understandably has been not so great for things like inter-kingdom trade. Not that we're really going to get into how the import/export business suffers when your major travel routes are prone to avalanches, but we get the idea that Arendelle, which used to be a thriving hub of people, has suddenly been thrust into a forced, and painful, isolation.
The song/voiceover is Anna's way of making all this into a sort of story, something she could be telling to one of the paintings — a form of abstraction to help her think about it without breaking down. Not a fairytale, because she's ambivalent about fairytales, but a history, because she loves history.
Key character points to set up:
- Anna is super lonely and isolated, because:
- She doesn't feel entirely comfortable with the kids in the village. She used to! They used to have to drag her back to the castle, where she'd tell her older sister Elsa all about the adventures she had that day. Buuuuuut...
- Now that Elsa's gone, Anna is the heir apparent. She feels weird, because she feels like she should be princess-ing and helping her country instead of playing, and they feel weird, because she's the orphaned heir.
- (On a sidenote, it would be great if Anna's clothes weren't particularly nicer than the other kids', because everything inside of me rebels against the idea of princesses having really nice clothes when their subjects are probably straining to survive life in Arendelle: Sudden Winter Hellscape. Or at least, to specify that she helped make her fancy clothes herself, possibly out of her old, pre-curse dresses, because she was so bored. Is it a little thing that nobody will notice? Yes. Do I care? No.)
- Do I think too much about monarchy and depictions of class in princess movies? Possibly.
- Also, and most obviously, it feels like a kick in the heart every time she sees them go back to their parents.
- Anna really, really wants to be a good princess and help her kingdom, she just has no idea how.
- The royal councillors and stewards think she's sweet, and they know she's trying, but they never really treat her like a grown-up — or even just a kid who could be helpful — because:
- She is a kid. She's 17; she's not even as old as Elsa was when she — well, you know.
- Elsa was supposed to be the heir, and 3-4 years isn't enough for them to start seeing Anna as the future queen instead of the cute younger sister who blew off her lessons. They try not to mention Elsa too much, but — well, it slips out.
- And moreover, the councillors obviously really respected Elsa; Anna studies history and folklore, but Elsa was the one who dedicated herself to government and politics and diplomacy and trade agreements, even if she was away like half the year.
- (Elsa was as serious and dedicated as she was for a variety of reasons, which include wanting to distract herself and also the paralyzing fear of failure, but we don't learn any of this yet. I just wanted to let you know, in case you were curious.)
(...PUNS.)
Anna's "desire" song, then, the one where we really get a sense of what's driving her, is all about wanting someone who'll be there for her no matter what, who'll understand her drive for adventure, who'll want to help Arendelle as much as she does, and who'll see how helpful she can be.
Enter Hans, the Wandering Hero.
Like, straight out of the Wandering Hero archetype. Sword! Nice hair! Bit of a swagger! He struggled his way across the treacherous mountain passes, in order to end the curse that has plunged Arendelle into icy misery!
Think some unholy combination of Gaston, Flynn Rider, and original-Hans. He's proud, but he doesn't come off as a pompous brute the same way that Gaston does; he talks about the amazing things he's done, but he's also charming as hell. And he's like Anna, a little; he felt like there was no place for him at home, so he went in search of adventure. He likes saving people.
And Anna, at first, thinks he might be the answer to all her problems. He listens to her, and he's gone to all these awesome places, and he wants to save her kingdom from what he calls the Curse of the Snow Queen...
...which sends Anna into something of a scholarly tizzy, because as previously mentioned, she is a MASSIVE HISTORY AND FOLKLORE NERD. And not only that, but she's spent the past few years studying absolutely all the books in their library about snow-based curses and weather patterns, in the hopes that she'll be able to find some way to stop the curse. (Admittedly, this is harder when you don't have any sort of reliable Inter-Library Loan system.) There are legends of wintery figures, but she hasn't heard anything about a Snow Queen, even though according to Hans it's pretty much common knowledge.
So Anna goes into a flurry of researching, in between dropping all her accumulated research on Hans and idly daydreaming about them saving the kingdom and then settling down for a long life of being the best rulers ever and never being lonely again.
Unfortunately for Anna's budding interest, she quickly starts getting frustrated with the fact that Hans is enjoying his royal reception too much to leave. Sure, he plans to do it eventually, but why throw himself back into the snow immediately when he's got people willing to make him endless mugs of hot chocolate? Which is additionally obnoxious because Anna wants to go out and do ALL THE THINGS and people keep treating her like she can't, and here Hans is being treated like a hero for something he's too lazy to do.
She's not giving up on her daydreams entirely. She just takes the most useful bits of her research back and then leaves the castle in the middle of the night.
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| Night Snow, Utagawa Hiroshige |
The morning after, Hans realizes that he has to leave the castle because he can't take the chance that Anna will succeed before him (which he spins as wanting to make sure that she's okay after setting out without enough prior preparation), but Anna is already on her way, trying to follow her jumbled maps of weather patterns.
Except, of course, she has no idea how to find the Snow Queen, which is how she ends up in her snowshoes in the middle of the forest, asking nobody in particular, "Well, if I were a powerful Snow Queen, where would I be?" She sighs. "Well, I'd be on a beach somewhere. Would a snow queen even like the beach? Would she melt?"
Enter the Snowgirl, who asks, "Anna? Princess Anna?!" in tones of vast surprise and alarm.
Also, for the record, this should be the coolest character entrance in the entire film. THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES. We could see snow falling off a branch, and then the drifting flakes build themselves back up into a mirror image of Anna! Or she starts off as a few snowballs rolling themselves together, and then keeps shaping herself throughout their conversation, or she looks like a tree and Anna walks straight into her...
The important thing is that she eventually winds up more person-shaped than, you know, Olaf-shaped. Which is totally possible, because snow is amazing, and magical snow is presumably even more so.
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| photographed by Naptu; built by... someone. |
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| Reuters, from the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival |
But, also because she's made of snow, she doesn't have to stay girl-shaped permanently! At various points throughout the movie she can turn into pretty much whatever she wants — much like Olaf can get disassembled without serious consequences. Snow is flexible.
She's surprised to see Anna, but Anna is equally surprised to meet a — "Snowman?! Snowgirl. Snowwoman? Snowperson?" "Snowgirl." — who both talks and knows Anna's name. (Anna's the princess, the snowgirl explains. Of course everyone knows who she is.)
Eventually, the chatter circles around to why Anna is searching for the Snow Queen, and she explains that she's trying to break the curse on Arendelle. The snowgirl seems less sure about it, but she agrees to come along on Anna's quest. It's a dangerous mountain, for someone on their own.
They do at one point have a brief conversation about the snowgirl's name, because she doesn't have one but Anna thinks she needs one. But, of course, they both blank on options. Anna eventually mentions that she was named after her great-grandmother, as sort of a remembrance of where she came from; the snowgirl says that she came from nowhere, but Anna points out that that's not quite true, is it? She's made of snow, so she came from water, and air, and the sky. So they name her Sky.
Did this scene occur to me purely because repeatedly typing "the snowgirl" is annoying? Yes.
So Sky and Anna set off, but Sky is noticeably ambivalent about the idea of finding the Snow Queen. Still, she doesn't want to leave Anna; she's nervous, and anxious, but she and Anna are developing a really good back-and-forth rapport as they talk about various things, like Anna's life and all her research (Sky is very intrigued by Anna's research), and what being a snowperson is like (cold, mostly), and what the Snow Queen might be like.
Note that, of course, all Sky's comments about the Snow Queen tend to focus on how dangerous she is or how she might just want to be left alone, or how breaking the curse might not be as easy as simply talking to or fighting the Snow Queen. Sky has a lot of feelings about both these things.
She also has a few pieces of very sound advice for Anna on how to be heir to the throne. And she's been subtly turning them in the wrong directions this whole time.
Eventually Anna sighs and admits that she's completely lost, and Sky takes one last vain attempt to convince her to go home. But this is Anna; she doesn't want to be protected, and she hates feeling like her new friend thinks she's just as useless as all the councillors do. So there's a bit of a, "Well, you don't have to come with me!" tiff — but not for long, because Hans shows up!
Hans thinks Anna should go home, and Sky thinks Anna should go home, but Hans is upsetting Anna and so Sky doesn't like Hans. Hans and Anna have a short argument where Anna finally yells at him a little about how he doesn't care about Arendelle like she does, and it's making her unhappy because part of her still kind of likes him even as she acknowledges that he's kind of an ass.
Sky, meanwhile, is getting increasingly upset about how unhappy Anna is, and all this talk of how awful the Snow Queen is for the people of Arendelle, and... wouldn't you know it, suddenly a blizzard is upon them. I have absolutely no idea where that could've come from.
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| Christopher Martin Photography. |
When the wind dies down, they both collapse back onto the snow, and they have a quiet conversation about why Anna wants to end the curse — she wants to be able to do something, for her people/country and for herself. And Sky, quietly, admits that she understands not wanting to feel helpless.
So she levers herself upright and says, "Come on, then," and offers a hand to help Anna up.
Anna stares at it. "What?"
"It's this way," Sky says, but she doesn't seem particularly happy so much as just... resigned. It's time.
She leads Anna to a small palace of ice that's as intimidating as it is beautiful; it looks almost like it used to be a regular house, made of wood, until it exploded and the ice palace was built on the remains. There are spiralling towers that go in the wrong direction, and beautiful colors in the ice, and spikes of ice everywhere, and Anna wanders gingerly through until she finds the center of it all, where, in the midst of the ice spikes and what looks like a frozen blizzard, a girl is curled up inside a large block of ice.
Anna takes a step closer, her eyes widening. "That's my sister," she whispers.
Sky, tired and sad, responds, "I know. It's me."
The story comes out: their parents were still shitty, but not as shitty as they were in the actual movie of Frozen. Elsa was scared of her powers, but she had a slightly better handle on them, which is why Anna and the councillors remembered her as more than a recluse. Still, though, like I mentioned earlier, she was still repressing like hell and absolutely terrified of failing at anything, be it controlling her powers or studying government, because she thought that would mean that she wasn't worth any of it. That she should just go and spare her parents the worrying. And she spent summers in this cabin on the mountain, practicing her powers where there was nobody to notice the unseasonal snowfall.
But then their ship capsized when the king and queen were trying to bring her to a magic specialist in another country, someone they thought might help; Elsa was knocked out, but she ended up floating ashore on a raft of ice. When she made her way to the town square, she saw that everyone was in mourning for the king and queen — and her. Horrified by the fact that she'd survived when her parents hadn't, because of the powers that were the reason that her parents were on the ship in the first place, she fled to the mountain. As it began to snow harder and harder, she began to lose herself more and more, until the only thing she could do by the time she reached her old cabin was curl up and cry. The ice just sort of... happened around her. It was just easier, after that, to stay in the ice; to become the snow, and not be herself for a while.
But when she saw Anna, she just couldn't stay away. She'd missed her so much.
Snow-Elsa thinks that it's time for her to do what she should've always done, except that it turns out she and Anna have entirely different ideas of what that is. Anna thinks that Snow-Elsa should go back to her body and come rule Arendelle, and Snow-Elsa thinks she should go drag her ice cube self to the frozen tundra in the hopes that leaving will mean Arendelle is no longer stuck in perpetual Winter Hellscape mode.
Both of them think the other is frigging out of their wits. Snow-Elsa insists she won't be able to control her powers if she stays, and she wants to make sure Anna is safe and happy; Anna is understandably upset about the thought of losing her sister just after she's got her back.
While they're arguing, Hans shows up with a torch and a sword! He sees Elsa the Ice Cube and quickly susses out the situation. Anna tries to keep him from approaching, and he parries by trying to remind her of how similar they are. They both want to save people, don't they?
But Anna, correctly, counters that Hans only cares about about himself. He saves people to look good, aaaaand also because you get really nice rewards for saving a kingdom. A DIRECT HIT, but Hans, frustrated, shoves Anna out of the way. Then it is SNOW-ELSA TO THE RESCUE as she turns into either the snow golem or a snow animal, trying to drive Hans away — but Hans has the torch, and he shoves it through her and shoves her into a nearby chasm in the ground. Or maybe an ice spike, or something. The point is, Snow-Elsa collapses into a million particles of water, and falls. Anna screams and wildly starts to fight back, even though Hans has a sword. He doesn't want to hurt her, because she's still the heir to the kingdom, but he wants her to get out of the way, and so he maybe ends up waving the sword at her a little, and it's all very tense and horrifying —
— and then BAM, a spear of ice knocks his sword out of his hand, and the ice is shattering around ActualElsa, and the sun may even be coming out a little. Not much, but a little.
Cue the second half of the fight scene.
They manage to subdue Hans, but Elsa is still skittish — wary of letting Anna get too close, wary of staying, and she keeps trying to keep the icicles away but they keep popping up when Anna talks about how now Elsa can come back and be queen. She's not sure she can handle that when she couldn't handle their parents' deaths, but Anna points out that Elsa has been handling this entire adventure and it's been fine. Then we get to the crux of Anna's argument: Elsa won't have to do it alone, and she won't have to handle the council of regents alone. Anna will be with her every step of the way. (And they agree to talk and figure out some sort of system so that they can tell when Elsa needs to be alone, or when Anna needs some support.)
And so we have a scene of them lying on the snow, trying to work on melting some of the snow, and Anna keeps making her laugh. It takes a while and it's not too action-filled, but they talk about that, too: how sometimes, things take time. It's not as fast or as easy as slaying the witch, or true love's kiss, but that doesn't mean it's not important.
Elsa manages to melt an icicle, and Anna grins and helps Elsa to her feet.
So Elsa and Anna get crowned co-queens, and Elsa deals with the governing and economics while Anna is all about political history and hanging with the people of the country to see what's important to them. Winter gradually ends in Arendelle, and they become a thriving, busy country again, and sometimes its queens will run around in the middle of summer making snowmen. (Hans gets sentenced to do some actual hard work for a change — cleaning up some of the mess, maybe.)
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| More Reuters stuff from the Harbin Festival in China. |
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