Consider Giving Olaf's Frozen Adventure The Cold Shoulder

The reaction my audience at my screening of Coco had to the pre-movie holiday special Olaf's Frozen Adventure, a 21-ish minute long short originally intended for release solely on ABC, was intriguing to me, as quiet confusion slowly morphed into people, who were realizing this thing was going on much longer than the typical five-minute PIXAR or Disney Animation short, leaving in hordes to go to the concession stand. Those who left the auditorium didn't miss much as Olaf's Frozen Adventure is a middling creation and I say that as someone who actually enjoyed both the original Frozen and the character of Olaf The Snowman.


Taking a short but unspecified time after the first feature ended, Anna (Kristen Bell) and Elsa (Idina Menzel) ring in the holiday season for the kingdom of Arendelle but become forlorn after realizing they, unlike the other residents of the kingdom, have no big holiday traditions to call their own since they've always lived apart growing up. Olaf (Josh Gad) takes it upon himself to help out Anna and Elsa by tracking down what kind of traditions the various residents of Arendelle partake in. Hoping to find something incredible he can bring back to Anna and Elsa as their own newfound holiday tradition, this search doesn't go as planned.

Olaf's hunt for holiday traditions is accompanied by a handful of new songs sung by the characters whose lyrics are penned by Elyssa Samsel and Kate Anderson. The tunes aren't all that great and it's a real insult to say I found them forgettable since usually even the most middling song ends up getting stuck in my head for whatever reason. While the barrage of direct-to-video animated Disney sequels in the early 21st century mean I'm more than familiar with seeing beloved Disney characters belt out weak musical numbers, it's still od to experience such rote lyrics being harmonized by Idina frigging Menzel.

Most of the rest of the special is better than the music at least, with Gad's Olaf providing a few laughs with his line readings but it's mostly just plodding and feels like it doesn't have enough story to justify even a truncated half-hour runtime. It's so odd the special comes up so short even on just barebones baisc entertainment since directors Stevie Wermers and Kevin Deters have had some real winners in their decade of working as directors at Walt Disney Animation Studios, whether it's in the charming retro short How To Hook Up Your Home Theater or in the delightful holiday special Prep & Landing (I assume the latter project helped them score this high-profile Yuletide themed gig) but the only trace of the duo behind Prep & Landing being behind this new Olaf-centric adventure is that, like in Prep & Landing, a fruitcake becomes the centerpiece of a recurring gag.

Things do go from middling to frustrating in a corny climax that attempts to wrap up the story by having Anna & Elsa reveal that they do have a holiday tradition after all that entails them having slipped each other drawings of Olaf each year since they were kids. It's an abruptly introduced storytelling detour that undercuts the pervasive isolation between Anna & Elsa that was a crucial part of the original Frozen and tries to retroactively make Olaf a far more important character than he was ever intended to be, ala Darth Vader in the Star Wars prequels. What an oddly sloppy way to close out Olaf's Frozen Adventure which doesn't just fall short of its feature-length predecessor but is also by far the weakest of the various holiday specials produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and PIXAR in the last decade.