ice

Review: Frozen II (2019)

A paper airplaneFrozen II is a journey from the comfort and joy of home into an alien and dangerous world. The danger centers on broken trust. Elsa (Idina Menzel) learns that she must resolve a betrayal that happened before she was born. In addition, the trust between the sisters is fragile. Anna (Kristen Bell) wants to help magical Elsa against the new dangers while Elsa wants to stride out on her own.

There is a legend about an enchanted forest that is the focus of the film. It has been walled off from the rest of the world with no way in or out. Elsa hears an ethereal voice and remembers a story from her childhood about the North country. To solve the mystery, Elsa explore the North with Anna, Olaf (Josh Gad) and Kristoff (Jonathan Groff).

Memory is an recurring theme in the movie. Elsa goes on a kind of vision quest to learn what a magical river knows about the past. To resolve that past requires Anna’s fortitude when she realizes what Arendelle might need to sacrifice. The friends come to accept the history of their family, even though it is sad and painful.

The classical four elements, Fire, Earth, Air and Water are important forces in the enchanted forest. They seem dangerous and hostile, but they are gradually tamed. To understand the mysterious forest requires perseverance from both Elsa and the rest of her friends. They find the truth and liberate the forest so that its people can become part of the greater world again.

From the outset, Frozen II lets the audience know that they don’t need to see the first Frozen to appreciate it. In the first scene you see that Elsa & Anna’s childhood had been revised. The movie doesn’t look back and it stands strong on the new foundation.

Often filmmakers strive to bring out a specific emotion at the close of their film. The producers try to close the story with an exclamation point instead of an ellipsis. Frozen II does that better than most by eliciting an emotion that is rare in films. In the coda, that feeling is reinforced with the joy and freedom that fills the new Arendelle with magic.

The Tree

This week I’ve seen news of a lot of really bad weather. Tornadoes, blizzards, floods…. It would be interesting to see an analysis of the costs. The National Centers for Environmental Information have studied the issue. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Overview introduces some of the issues in performing an analysis. This graph is interesting and it has a cut off of events costing 1 billion or more, so it still ignores many substantial disasters.

Some people scoff that these costs are not serious, that they’re not increasing or that to talk about the cost of climate change as being a threat to the country is ludicrous. I think that is very ostrich-like–if we willfully don’t look at it, it won’t be a problem.

Some countries have higher stakes in the climate. Some of the Pacific island nations can’t survive the sea level going up–they won’t have any land to be a nation over. I remember the glaciers that have shrunken so dramatically in the Rockies. Greenland and the Antarctic are melting too. If you calculate the volume of ice in those two places and divide it by the surface area of the ocean, if even part of them melt, the ocean will flood many places. Eventually, beach front property won’t be a good investment anymore.

A fallen tree crushing the sidewalkBut, more to home, I found some branches on the sidewalk from my tree. I was pretty fortunate. None of them were really big–I could break them into smaller pieces with my knee. My neighbors to the west had more serious problems with their tree last year. The extreme cold killed about 3/4 of the tree and the city cut it down before it hurt someone. The picture isn’t of my tree, but I thought it fit–I’ve been really fortunate and am grateful.