I went to see Pixar’s new film Coco today (It’s fine) and the short in front of it was a Christmas Frozen story called Olaf’s Frozen Adventure.
It’s fucking terrible.
I find it very much in the vein of the direct-to-dvd sequels Disney was putting out for a while, in that it’s a follow up story that completely pisses the point and appeal of the original and is just a shameless cash grab.
The first problem is that Olaf is the main character, and Olaf sucks; and he sucks here more than he did in the original film. The second problem is how cheap and contrived this story is.
It’s all about Christmas tradition. Elsa and Anna are all ready to throw a surprise Christmas party for the town, only for the townspeople to all go, “Yo, we got our own traditions so peace y’all” and fuck off. So Elsa angsts for like 5 seconds briefly shutting Anna out again, we get Kristoff being a weird dumbass and then Olaf goes on an adventure to find some tradition. Which he does he collects a whole sled of stuff from people that each represents their own tradition and then he accidentally sets it all on fire and into a ravine.
Fuck Olaf.
Also this short has more songs than the entirety of the original movie it’s based on, and they all suck. No song here is even a little memorable which eats up any time the characters might have had to really interact. Not that the character moments we do get are any good.
There are some poop jokes with Olaf. That’s what you want right? An Olaf based poop joke?
I call it a short, but this thing was interminably long too. Coco didn’t start until 40 minutes after showtime. By the time it started I had been ready to walk out of the theater for like 20 minutes minimum.
While watching this I thought “Well I guess Frozen is bad actually” and then “Well I guess Christmas is bad actually.”
God, this made me angrier than anything else I saw in a theater this year.
Fuck.
