Asked And Answered

From Anthony Lane's review of Frozen in The New Yorker, December 9, 2013.

"Frozen” is about a couple of royal sisters, swiftly grown up, one of whom is the snow queen. She is called Elsa, and her merest touch is arctic; she wears gloves to stop the spread of such contagious cold, and, even when she flees and holes up in a mountain palace, her sole desire is to be alone. In short, where is our villain? Idina Menzel, who voices Elsa, played the green-faced lead in “Wicked,” on Broadway, so everything is set for vengeance and spite, but nothing happens.

From Maria Konnikova's "How 'Frozen' Took Over The World" in The New Yorker, June 25, 2014.

And part of the credit goes to Jennifer Lee’s team, for the choices they consciously made the screenplay as complex as it was. Elsa was once evil; Elsa and Anna weren’t originally sisters; the prince wasn’t a sociopath. Their decisions to forego a true villain—something no Disney film had successfully done—and to make the story one driven by sibling love rather than romantic infatuation have made “Frozen” more than simply nuanced and relatable. They've made it more universally acceptable.