No spoilers initial impressions of Frozen 2

Okay. It’s been about twenty-four hours since I watched Frozen 2. So this is all about first impressions. I’m curious to where my thoughts will be six months from now.

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Frozen was the first Disney movie our son saw and it remains his favorite movie. I have possibly seen it more than a hundred times and I still like Let It Go and think it is a great movie.

So, as a family, we are invested in Frozen and, as parents, we were afraid it would be bad.

But, in some ways, I liked it more than the first movie. Time will tell if that’s just because I haven’t seen it literally dozens of times or because it has some elements that I think were really well done.

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Here’s a couple problems sequels can have:  the original work tied up all the loose ends so there isn’t more story to naturally tell; the characters did all their character development in the first movie and they are flat characters in the later movie. Worse, they repeat the same character arcs.

I firmly believe that Frozen 2 continued to the next natural stage of the story with higher stakes and the characters had further character development, leaving them all meaningfully changed by the end of the movie. It was also a darker movie than the first one with a couple deeper choices than I expected. I don’t know if I’d have let our son watch it at three-years old.

Frozen is a big deal. Not only did it have a once-in-generation song with Let It Go, it deconstructed the idea of love at first sight, which is a dangerous idea in real life. The sequel doesn’t recycle the story but instead explores how we grow older and sadder and wiser. Maybe that’s why it resonates with grownup me.