As part of my winter writing goals, I’ve been reading Story Genius by Lisa Cron. Though it has its flaws (assuming that all stories are character driven instead of just most of them), I’m enjoying the thorough take on how to construct a character arc for your story before you start writing. My NaNo novel definitely suffered from a lack of planning in this department–I stalled out 1/3 of the way through because I had no idea how to pull the character out of her depressed funk. So I feel like the lessons learned in this book will be helpful in getting my next book going.
Story Genius also helped me with a problem that’s been rolling around in my head: why I don’t like Frozen 2. Ever since watching the movie over Thanksgiving, I’ve been wondering why a movie with such ostensibly powerful messages ended up feeling so hollow for me. I think Story Genius has given me the answer: what Frozen 2 wants to say, the story it wants to tell, isn’t backed up or earned by the plot that we see on screen. Sure, the songs are fantastic (you can’t fault Frozen on lyrics), and there are some great empowering one liners, but these end up falling flat because there is no substance behind them. It doesn’t come off as believable character growth, which means that it just comes off as a preach fest with lyrical interludes.
And so, without further ado, my attempt to fix the character arcs in Frozen:
Kristoff: Everyone loves the climax beat of his character line: “What do you need?” Aw, exactly what a perfect supporting boyfriend should say. The problem is that this ending doesn’t match up with his plot introduced in the opening number, which is that he doesn’t know how to express his sincere feelings to Anna. He feels awkward with standard romantic tropes, and so we see his attempts to propose getting wackier and wackier, leading up to the insane reindeer number. Unfortunately, after Anna leaves, Kristoff’s plot arc shifts to insecurity about whether Anna loves him and the torture of wondering if someone loves you back. Again, “Lost in the Woods” is a great song, but it fails to match up with the plot set up for him, which is the difficulty of expression emotions, not wondering if she still loves him and how he’ll live without her. Then he drops out of the movie and shows up again at the end, a white knight on a reindeer, suddenly being the world’s most supportive boyfriend, which has nothing to do with his arc.
Basically, the problem is that Kristoff’s arc is three different arcs at three different parts of movie. Any one of these could have been a powerful plot, but the pieces that we have don’t work together. Three possible better Kristoff plots:
* Expressing sincere emotions is difficult for men, especially because of societal expectations surrounding elaborate proposals. Over the course of the movie, Kristoff proposes in increasingly crazy ways, but he is only finally able to follow through when he realizes that the point of the proposal is to express feelings, and that Anna will accept him without the need for elaborate set dressing.
* OR Kristoff feels insecure because he seems to care more about Anna than she cares about him. She spends so much time focusing on Elsa, and he tries not to be jealous, but he feels a little sad knowing that she’s the center of his world but he is not the center of his. Cue “Lost in the Woods.” By the end of the movie, Kristoff comes to accept that people can have more than one important relationship in their life (perhaps through some plot that compares his love for Sven with Anna’s love of Elsa), and is able to propose to Anna while still maintaining his other important relationships and allowing her to do so as well.
* OR Kristoff struggles with proposing to Anna because he feels abandoned by his parents who left him with the trolls. He worries about committing to someone who might not always be there. Anna leaves to help Elsa, and Kristoff’s worst fears are realized. Then Kristoff learns more about why his parents left him with the trolls (hopefully good reasons here). By the end of the movie, he realizes that love means showing up for someone even when they can’t show up for you. Cue ending line “What do you need?” where he selflessly gives to Anna without expecting anything back.
Anna: The problem with Anna’s plot is that we’re set up to believe its one thing and then it gets completely sidetracked and never really followed up on. The most poignant character moments for her at the beginning of the movie are when she is arguing with Elsa about who will protect her from going too far. This led me to think her plot was going to be about how you can’t control other people and sometimes you have to trust them and let them go.
Then somehow she ends up mourning the death of the snowman and focusing on doing the next right thing. The song is awesome, the message is great, but it doesn’t connect in any way to where the audience was led to believe the character was going.
The song connects well with Anna’s ending plot, where she chooses to release the dam without knowing how Arendelle will escape being destroyed. So perhaps the key to her plot would be to redo her beginning. In order to make a leap of faith the ending of her character arc, we need to set her up at the beginning of the movie as someone who always needs to be in control and think carefully through every possibility before doing it.
Her conversation with Elsa could turn this way with a little work, but the problem is that this doesn’t fit with the carefree Anna from the first movie. The beginning would need to lay some hard groundwork to imply that Anna is still traumatized from the events of Frozen and has become a cautious control freak because of it. One way this could have worked would be to show her thinking through her possible marriage to Kristoff, determined to make it the exact opposite from her near-elopement in the previous movie as possible. She is worried that her carelessness will get her hurt, and so she has become the control freak, planning out her whole life with Kristoff before it even begins. This would play well into her plot with Kristoff and with Elsa and make the movie so much stronger when she has to abandon her plans and trust her instincts that she has buried to make a hard choice.
Elsa: Elsa goes from one fantastic song (“Into the Unknown”) to another (“Show Yourself”) in this movie without much connection between them. The emotions portrayed in the songs are spot on with the story the writers want to convey. At the beginning, Elsa wants to stay where she’s comfortable in spite of it not quite fitting her. There’s not really much evidence showing how she doesn’t fit, other than she doesn’t like to play charades, but a lot of people don’t like playing charades. The evidence for what Elsa is giving up to be comfortable could be made much stronger.
In her final song, Elsa has reached self-acceptance. The problem is that the movie hasn’t given us anything in between. Elsa keeps spurring the group on to the voice that’s calling her, but she never has to deal with the fact that her change is ripping the relationships they had apart. She never has to deal with that suffering because it happens while she’s gone and is resolved before she comes back.
Once she has reached self-acceptance, she’s able to magically avert all the disastrous consequences, and her loved ones accept her new life in which they barely have a part. This feels like a real cop-out to me. Elsa’s change really has no impact on anything, so it makes it feel unearned. Why was it so hard to change? The movie doesn’t give us a clear answer because it gets muddled up in the actions of their parents and grandfather which take up all the air in the movie. In order to make Elsa’s transformation feel earned, we need to see what’s holding her back and why this choice is difficult, and the movie fails to give us that because it turns to an external plot to justify everything.
I’ll stop here, but the point is that Frozen 2 failed for me not because of its message but because of the execution of that message. The movie needed to focus on how the characters change their misbeliefs in order to tell the story of personal transformation it so desperately wants to tell. Perhaps someone should mail the writers a copy of Story Genius for the inevitable Frozen 3, because great songs and cute sidekicks can only carry you so far.
Great article, I felt the same way about Frozen 2 and was not impressed by the muddled mess of half-developed story arcs. Add that to the half-hearted attempts at introducing new characters without any real depth (e.g., the Northuldra side characters) that are typical of Disney sequels and I was left just enjoying the music.
What a great write up. I now understand why that movie felt so off to me, despite liking many moments and of course the music.