I can't help but feel like the poetic way in which the sisters' stories are told in the second half of Frozen II is seriously master class stuff, especially since it's all done without the movie ever drawing attention to itself and what it's doing. The movie makes the claim that both Anna and Elsa are two sides of the same bridge, and that's certainly shown in the ways in which their journeys play out and parallel one another, working in opposite manners towards the same endgoal:
• Anna consoles Elsa, who's crying tears of sadness, and hugs her. Then they part.
• Anna is sent against her will into a body of water, a river, where she's met by one of the elemental spirits (the earth giants). But she avoids confrontation, leading her into a cavern, where she then removes her outer layer of clothing after having gotten wet, and she starts from the bottom and has to climb her way back out out.
• Elsa removes her outer layer of clothing to prevent it from getting wet, then purposefully makes her way into a body of water, an ocean, where she's met by one of the elemental spirits (the water nokk). She directly confronts it, riding it to Ahtohallan, and enters into a cavern where she starts at the top and gradually makes her way further and further down.
• Elsa sings a song of pure joy in a scene that's filled with magic and spectacle, and undergoes a critical transformation. Elsa hops down to the deepest depths of Ahtohallan and finds the answer she's looking for, sacrificing her life in the process, and giving up everything to deliver her message to Anna.
• Anna receives the message, and in turn loses everything with the death of her sister, as well as Olaf dying in her arms.
• Anna sings a song of pure grief in a scene that's grim and grounded, and undergoes a critical transformation, as she climbs out of the cavern into the sunlight, standing tall enough to see the entire enchanted forest beneath her.
• Anna engages with the spirits she encountered earlier, using them to destroy the dam and break the curse. This causes a tidal wave barreling straight for Arendelle.
• Newly revived, Elsa is aided by the spirit she encountered earlier, who helps her back to Arendelle, where she creates a dam of ice to stop the tidal wave from destroying Arendelle.
• Elsa and Anna reunite, and Elsa consoles Anna, who's crying tears of happiness, as they embrace once more with a hug.
And the movie does all of this in a way that doesn’t draw attention away from the story they’re telling, or the journey that our characters are going on. It keeps the spotlight on the characters, but the poetry is still there all the same for those who may want to dive in deeper and appreciate the storytelling on another level.
I have seen some people claim, as a result of watching the documentary Into the Unknown: Making Frozen II, that this movie was somehow rushed or poorly plotted out. But I didn’t see that to be the case at all. The documentary shows that the filmmakers knew the story they were trying to tell, they were just having trouble figuring out how to quite pull the whole thing together. And it just so happened that it was late in the game that they came across their “Aha!” moment, that being the inclusion of the reprisal of All Is Found in the middle of the Show Yourself sequence.
This, however, is no different from the first movie. They were similarly having a lot of issues with the first movie, and just how to pull it all together and make it all work. Again, they knew the story they were trying to tell, but were just missing that last ingredient that really tied everything up. It was relatively late in the game that they wrote the song Let It Go, which was the thing that did precisely that, and wound up re-shaping the movie and pulling the whole thing together.
I think some people took a lot of the wrong ideas from that documentary. And all it tells me is that most of the people criticizing the movie based on that documentary have likely never actually been involved in a creative process of their own. This is fairly common in creative works, where you know the story you’re trying to tell, but you’re just racking your brain trying to figure out how to tie it all together, until you’re hit with that sudden moment of inspiration that just makes the whole thing work in a way that it didn’t before. And I assure you, the creative process shown in the Frozen II documentary is not exclusive to that film. I’d be willing to bet that almost every Walt Disney Animation Studios production in recent times goes through more or less the exact same process as that movie.
You can’t help when these moments of inspiration hit you, just so long as they do, and that you’re willing to run with them when they do, even if it means going back and making adjustments all throughout the rest of the story. And in this case, that moment of inspiration absolutely did, and it pulled the whole thing together and re-shaped it in a way that made it work wonderfully. I think the movie was brilliantly planned out in that regard, just as I’d say the same about the first movie. And I thought it was all tied together in a beautifully poetic manner, to where I wouldn’t have it any other way.
