For do you remember, how strong we are as two?
Happy New Year! This post is for day 2 of 2022!
Introduction
As I argued for in this old post, the songs in Frozen II were more evenly spread throughout the film. However, there’s another angle to look at the songs: who sings them, and how long do they get to sing? This topic has probably subconsciously affected my 2-year-old evaluations of Frozen and Frozen II, but this post is going to go into detail – and we’ll visit the songs from the stage version too!
Movie Songs
Solos
Let’s first look at the solos across the movies. When I say solos, I mean that there’s only 1 character singing the whole thing. If other characters are talking in the middle of the song, they don’t count. The solos are:
- Do You Wanna Build A Snowman? (Anna sings, some others talk)
- Let It Go (Elsa sings)
- Reindeer(s) Are Better Than People (Kristoff sings, though also for Sven, so…debatable. Duet?)
- In Summer (Olaf sings, Anna and Kristoff talk)
- All Is Found (Iðunn)
- Into The Unknown (Elsa)
- When I Am Older (Olaf)
- Reindeer(s) (Reprise) + Lost In The Woods (Kristoff)
- The Next Right Thing (Anna)
Honourable mention to ‘Show Yourself’, where Iðunn sings like 5 lines while Elsa carries everything else.
And this almost-solo is giving Frozen II a strong Elsa-dominated vibe.
But otherwise, looks like everyone important has at least one solo. (Though I argue Kristoff is hardly ‘important’ in the second movie…)
Duets
Let dive right into it, then. I’ll note down who sings the most where applicable:
- For The First Time In Forever (Duet: Anna & Elsa – Anna sings more, nice overlapping voices at the end)
- Love Is An Open Door (Duet: Anna & Hans – equal)
- Reindeer(s) Are Better Than People (Duet? Kristoff & Sven – equal)
- For The First Time In Forever (Reprise) (Duet: Anna & Elsa – equal, but Elsa drowns out Anna at the end)
- Show Yourself (Duet: Elsa & Iðunn, but Iðunn is like there in the last 30 seconds?)
If you treat ‘Show Yourself’ as an imposter among us, then Frozen II actually doesn’t have duets at all!
Group Songs
Group songs are songs sung by a large section of the cast. In this way they don’t really focus on main characters and are often serving an establishing role. They are:
- Vuelie (NA NA NA HEY YA NA)
- Frozen Heart (strike for love and strike for fear)
- Fixer Upper (trololololol)
- Some Things Never Change
- Vuelie Reprise (yeah, it’s not in the soundtrack, but so what? It’s important. It’s actually plot-relevant this time, cos it shows the People of the Sun accepting Elsa and Anna as part of the tribe. So there.)
As you can see, not a lot of group songs. And two of these don’t have what one normally calls ‘lyrics’.
“Some Things Never Change” is a bit weird because it starts off as a relatively ok duet (though I don’t like the Kristoff part at all). Then Elsa jumps in with a bit of foreshadowing, then Olaf has a poignant line about how we all look a little bit older (and are good enough to write epic poems now), then the whole town erupts into song. I found it a pretty unfocused song – Anna is singing about her own desire for things to stay the same, but Kristoff is off singing about his future proposal, and meanwhile Elsa is getting nervous about how ‘the winds are restless’. They aren’t focusing on one thing and responding to it, rather they’re all responding to things going on for themselves. It feels like 3 solos stitched together before suddenly merging into a giant song. Useful for establishing the scene, but still I can’t really treat it as one really cohesive song.
In comparison, ‘Fixer Upper’ is cohesive, because it’s just the trolls responding to Kristoff bringing back a girl, then finding out he can’t actually marry the girl, then deciding to marry them anyway. It’s a very unnecessary song, but it’s not messy. Can’t say this makes ‘Fixer Upper’ better than ‘Some Things Never Change’ though. ‘Fixer Upper’ is still much worse.
Analysis
Frozen has a nice balance of solos and duets – 4 each. Anna definitely has more total singing time than Elsa – another piece of evidence suggesting Anna is the main character, not Elsa. Elsa does steal the spotlight by having an uninterrupted solo in the form of ‘Let It Go’, but when I realised that ‘Do You Wanna Build A Snowman’ is actually also a solo – just with a lot of talking and interruptions – it actually felt good, knowing that Anna does technically have a whole song to herself.
In comparison, Frozen II is almost overwhelmingly solos. Even the only duet feels more like a solo, since we only realise it is a duet in the last one-quarter of the song. This is probably why it unambiguously feels like Elsa gets most of the singing: because it’s basically one song per person. More importantly, Anna goes a whole stretch between ‘Some things Never Change’ at the start of the movie and ‘The Next Right Thing’ without singing (except when she sings four lines of ‘All Is Found’ before ‘Into The Unknown’). Anna basically spent nearly the whole movie not singing, and then had one mostly soft and very sad song right at the end. That might be why it felt tacked on – compared to Frozen, Anna basically doesn’t sing – and doesn’t sing with impact. Elsa gets one and three-quarters solos, each of which directs the next section of the plot: after ‘Into The Unknown’, the gang must go on their adventure; after ‘Show Yourself’, Elsa dies, pushing the final destiny of the North Way into Anna’s hands. Elsa is clearly the protagonist, even just by looking at the songs.
Looking back on this now, I don’t think I like the conception of the songs in Frozen II so much anymore. Frozen II songs have that earworm, karaoke quality: consider how three Frozen II songs have official pop versions (‘Into The Unknown’, ‘All Is Found’ & ‘Lost In The Woods’), but Frozen only offers one pop song ‘Let It Go’ (and ‘Love Is An Open Door’ in Spanish). But a musical can afford to use songs to delve into character dynamics, too, not just the psyche of an individual. This is why I love ‘For The First Time In Forever (Reprise)’. The sisters are having a conversation through song. They’re not just singing their own piece, like in the first ‘For The First Time In Forever’, even if that’s in a connected, cohesive way. With this review, I can’t help but feel that the songs in Frozen were more… creative… in their style. They were unbalanced in pacing and stuffed to the front of the movie, but they don’t get old because they are a seamless part of the plot. The movie can’t happen without them. But the movie CAN happen without the elaboration of ‘Let It Go’. Elsa having a monologue like a Shakespearean character could have done the trick too. Maybe that’s why ‘Let It Go’ became cringe after a while. When you can take a musical’s song out of context, does that song really seem important or vital to the musical?
Stage Songs
Frozen: the Musical (at least, the 2019 version I watched) has 12 more songs added to the original 9. Some of the original songs were extended, but for the most part, their statuses as solos/duets/groups are pretty much the same. If you wanna see the songs from the original musical, click on this for the YouTube playlist.
These are the extra 12 songs:
- A Little Bit Of You (Duet: Elsa & Anna, equal)
- Hans Of The Southern Isles (Solo: Hans [duh])
- Queen Anointed (Group)
- Dangerous To Dream (Solo/Group: Elsa sings, Anna talks and the cast reprise a section of ‘Queen Anointed’)
- What Do You Know About Love (Duet: Anna & Kristoff, equal)
- Hans Of The Southern Isles (Reprise) (Solo/Group: Hans sings, but the townspeople and the Duke of Weselton also sing and talk to him)
- Hygge (Solo/Group: Oaken dominates the singing, but the backups do sing, and Anna and Kristoff are talking to Oaken throughout the song. Also, Oaken interacts with the audience during this song.)
- Kristoff Lullaby (Solo: Kristoff)
- Monster (Solo/Group: Elsa dominates the singing, with a few scattered lines from Hans and the guards sent to arrest her)
- True Love (Solo: Anna)
- Colder By The Minute (Group – you could say it’s a quartet, since Elsa, Anna, Hans, and Kristoff are the focus, but the whole cast sings out what’s going on on the stage.)
- Finale/Let It Go (Group)
The final count for the extra songs is: 7 solos, 2 duets, 3 group songs.
Of the solos, 2 are for Elsa, 2 for Hans, 1 for Anna, 1 for Kristoff. Elsa now takes the lead in the stage version with 3 whole (almost-)solos to her name: ‘Dangerous To Dream’, ‘Let It Go’ and ‘Monster’ — and ‘Dangerous To Dream’ is probably the longest single song in the whole musical, going beyond 5 minutes.
The total count in the musical is: 11 solos, 6 duets, 5 group songs.
The balance of songs has dramatically shifted. The focus now is on solos, and duets as now far fewer.
But the balance of the musical still feels ok, because characters talk even during the songs. Also, remember that there are 11 duets + group songs when combined, so the balance of solos to non-solos is 50-50. In the group songs, there is often some back-and-forth between different characters, so it never feels like characters are left out.
And yet, since the musical (2017) was supposed to foreshadow/anticipate Frozen II (2019), the focus on solos seems understandable, or at least indicative of the direction Frozen II was trying to take. It’s not the musical’s fault that Frozen II decided instead to throw out the duets and group songs almost entirely.
Wrapping Up
I’ve taken a look at the songs from the movies and the musical, and my conclusion for the movies is that the songs have had a big impact on the delivery of the story. As a personal comment, this deep dive into the songs makes me think that Frozen II could have used its songs better. Rather than just use the songs as a platform for characters to express their feelings (‘When I Am Older’, ‘Lost In The Woods’ and ‘The Next Right Thing’ being prime examples) while they kind of move around and touch things, the songs could have been woven into conversations, like in Frozen with ‘For The First Time In Forever (Reprise)’ – or like so many of the stage version’s songs. Characters sing while other characters talk, but there is interaction at the level of body movement, interaction with the stage, AND speech. Again, I ask: if a song in a musical is just a musical monologue, then does it need to be done in music? Well, yes, probably. But surely a mix of monologue songs and duologue songs is better.
I have regained a small portion of appreciation for ‘For The First Time In Forever (Reprise)’. I still regard it as one of the “truest” songs of Frozen. It can’t match ‘Let It Go’ in power or ‘Do You Wanna Build A Snowman’ in weight, but it is a perfect song for the sister dynamic the movie was aiming at.
Please go back home / Your life awaits / Go enjoy the sun and open up the gates
Yeah, I know but–
You mean well, but leave me be / Yes, I’m alone, but I’m alone and free!
Just stay away and you’ll be safe from me!
On that note, you can check out two of my poems on this theme:
– In The Hall of the Mountain Queen
– She Is Trapped Who Fears Her Guardian
Once again, Happy New Year!
Queendom of the Crocus 