Off Topic: The Frozen 2 teaser trailer has more emotional heft than hours of Kingdom Hearts 3

I’m watching the Frozen 2 teaser trailer that Disney just released  and all I can think about are Sora, Donald, and Goofy.

The lovable, but often-idiotic trio of the Kingdom Hearts series, and recently Kingdom Hearts 3, rarely grapple with issues that can’t be solved by hacking away at monsters with their magical weapons. Kingdom Hearts is a series about friendship and all of the effort and struggles involved in them, but the obstacles are usually black-cloaked rows of health bars that have monologues about The Darkness. Sora, as the game’s heroic Keyblade wielder, rarely fails, be it when he’s up against impossible odds or simply against a disagreement or misunderstanding among friends.

The Frozen 2 trailer carries the weight of failure, both from the first film and what happens in its own two-minute length. Elsa may have control of her ice powers and her relationship with her sister, Anna, but she’s alone again. On this surprisingly realistic shore for a Disney film, she tries to cross monstrous waves with no help from her friends. And she can’t do it. No matter how hard she tries (even with that massive ice bridge!) she can’t help from being pulled back again.

The rest of the trailer speeds through shots of Kristoff, Sven, Anna, and Olaf fighting what looks like the threat and magical powers of a super hero villain you’d see in a Marvel movie — without actually showing who they are. Clearly something or someone is coming for them. All of the shots feature them either alone or racing toward something. It’s not until the very last moments where they’re finally together, standing before a beautiful autumnal landscape.

Of course there’s no real plot in this teaser trailer, but all of the brief shots use enough cinematic techniques to both reference what came before and what’s coming soon. It’s all of the stuff I wanted from the Disney worlds, and especially the Frozen world in Kingdom Hearts 3 that weren’t there. There’s no deftness to the retelling of the film’s story in Kingdom Hearts: it’s just a lazy way to insert the awkward anime-level challenges of Sora into worlds and characters that are way more compelling outside of the game. They even re-do Elsa singing “Let it Go” shot-for-shot but none of it works because her relationship with her sister and powers has no time to be established in between the Heartless and the Organization XII showing up.

It’s bad when a teaser trailer does more work than the three or four hours I spent in Arendelle in the game, clumsily watching Sora and crew stand inside of remade Frozen scenes. Kingdom Hearts 3 repeatedly misunderstands what emotions are and it shows when its story is literally mixed into better-written ones like Frozen’s. There’s work and craft to the way films express how characters feel, what they want, and how they struggle to achieve that, but Kingdom Hearts 3 is only interested in being a video game where experience points and stats are shorthands for actually feeling something.