Film Theory: How To FREEZE Elsa! (Disney Frozen 2) - YouTube

So Punk where's Queen Elsa you were the last ice block she made so now it's time to talk

Playing it cool, huh? Well, we have ways of getting you to sweat.

Ha now you're feeling the heat so I ask you again where is Elsa?

What did he say ah

Nothing turns out water doesn't have a memory or a voice or honestly anything that helps us solve this case. It is literally just water

Hello Internet

welcome to film theory where it's January and that means it's time to

YouTube and chill since it's too warm in Southern California to build a snowman whether I wanna or not I have to find other ways

To celebrate this time of year

So I'm cranking out a sequel of my own unfrozen - just a silly but somehow less of a cash grab the Disney's version

Yes

I am ready to break the ice to talk about the most anticipated animated sequel of all time with most blatantly

Merchandising all costume changes in Disney history in case you're wondering yes, there will be spoilers

So if you don't want to hear the ending

You don't want to put this video on ice

And go watch the movie already or in other words go get it over with now despite the opening of this video

I'm not actually gonna talk about the big theme of this movie which is water having memories. That's actually a theory for another day

No instead today. They're actually turning back to frozen one to address the famous adage from Elsa. I

Don't know if you've heard this one guys, but the cold never bothered also

anyway

Apparently that's their reasoning for her walking around on mountaintops and silk-organza

gowns that are easy to mass-produce for the children of the world and one of our most famous lines from the most famous song the

movie Elsa

lets us all know that part of her power said is that she's

impervious to how cold her ice castle is not only that but she walks around in the snow and has a gown with a very

Chilly looking neckline, but it doesn't seem to matter because none of it can affect her seems like a very clearly defined power set

I can respect that and then he fast-forward frozen to where?

They throw all of it out the window in frozen - we have this massive

climactic moment near the end of the movie where we see Elsa freeze

Solid what we just went over how Elsa can't be hurt from the cold

Oh, she's literally swimming in the Arctic Ocean and walking around in this permafrost forest for days in a jacket

That's perfect for your next trip to Walt Disney Land, by the way, and when we see her defeated it's by freezing her today

Ah, not only is it a blatant ripoff of the climax of the last movie where honour froze to death?

But it just doesn't make sense

The cold doesn't bother her so you know what the question is a theorist watching this movie have today

Well, there are just so many questions, but the question I want to ask today

Is this how cold does it have to be to bother Elsa clearly? She's not immune to freezing

So what temperature does she freeze at what is actually going on in the scene?

Where is the temperature that we get ourselves a nice?

Elsa cold now in case you didn't feed the beast of the Disney sequel machine or your memory of this movie is foggy or you

Just checked out after the words North old run at to Holland

we repeated like

47 times in this movie for four-year-olds also winds up in this chilly little predicament after embarking on a quest at the behest of

Well almost nothing some spirits who are whispering tor or something and almost killing her entire kingdom, but they're not the same spirits

Who are trapped in the misty wood? It's super confusing really inconsistent and not that well-written. Okay

I just I gotta get that off my chest. Anyway, she journeys around the north to claim her place as the ultimate ice queen

She abandons her sister who clearly has PTSD from the last movie and is angry about being left alone on this journey

Which is a plotline that never gets resolved fantastic

she rides a horse mermaid hybrid up to the north country and forgets about Kristoff along with the rest of the cast and crew of

This movie who is left alone to sing an 80s inspired power ballad the real

Theory here is whether Disney knew how badly put together this movie was but I really don't need to get myself started on that long

story short what you need to know for this theory is by the end of the movie Elsa finds herself in the North Country and

A dark mysterious ice cave of self-discovery. She falls a long distance into it. That's it. She freezes eventually

She gets thawed by the power of who even cares anymore

Let's pretend for the sake of this theory that they were trying to make a movie with logical cohesion and address

How the heck a literal Ice Queen could possibly freeze to death

Is there an actual scientific?

Explanation here or was someone just banking on a little too much Disney magic if we're trying to figure out how chilling it needs to

Be for Elsa to freeze. We need to get some perspective on temperatures that we're dealing with throughout these movies

We know that Elsa has no problem surviving the cold in the movies two primary settings

Arendelle and the northern forests as well as most of the other time that she spends in the northern sea in Holland

How cold are these places and how much colder is it when Elsa actually winds up freezing?

Arendelle as he might already know is a cross between Aaron Dahl and Bergen, Norway

Aaron Dahl for its namesake and Bergen for its architecture and scenery we discussed this in our previous little frozen theory about the fact that

Anna and Elsa shouldn't be

biological sisters which in case you're interested you can catch up on here if you missed it since that theory Disney's released more information about

Arendelle including a map shown in frozen fever which we can then

cross-reference with the geography of Norway since the only real feature here is the forked river's I searched for similar geographic areas in Norway and

Found Alisoun an area that lined up almost perfectly with a little map

Manipulation the historic highs and lows for Alice wound in the fall

Which is when the movie begins is seven point seven to twelve point two degrees Celsius or 46 to 54 degrees Fahrenheit

Which gives us our parallels to arendelle interestingly Alice soon doesn't get very cold

Even in the winter the highs and lows tend to hover just above freezing

Meaning that Elsa's winter wonderland and frozen one would have been much colder than the geographic norm additionally

We know North old roof. The Enchanted Forest is within a day or two wagon ride from arendelle

So we're likely looking at the same temperature averages there as well with maybe a degree or two of difference

None of the people living there seem to be Keeling over from frostbite

So Elsa can just survive there like everyone else

So with those two out of the way

we can actually focus on the more northern locations to the movie the North Sea and

Holland as Elsa journeys north again after abandoning her sister in the middle of nowhere

We reach a point where according to the frozen fever map

She runs into the North Sooey

Which is Danish for North Sea now

The closest body of water north of Norway on a real world map is the Norwegian Sea interestingly the name of the Norwegian Sea

roughly translates to sea of the north

So it's a fair stand-in a bit of research will tell you that the Norwegian

see, especially the areas close to the coastline that we're dealing with all max out at about

5.9 degrees Celsius or 40 point 8 degrees Fahrenheit

which is not exactly prime surfing temperature yearly minimums of 1.3 degrees Celsius or

36 point two degrees Fahrenheit are reported so waters that are just barely above freezing

Making this some seriously cold water and easily enough to kill a normal person in a matter minutes interestingly

OSes ability to survive in the cold water is perhaps more impressive than our ability to survive in icy castles on dry land

Especially when you look at the thermodynamics of a human and water falling into water as warm as 68 degrees Fahrenheit or 20 degrees

Celsius can trigger what's known as a cold shock response

Which is the same response you get if your shower suddenly runs cold you gasp from surprise as a reflexive part of the response

But if you're in a freezing ocean

The gas forces water down into your lungs your limbs are suddenly stunned from the shock of the cold and you drown

Almost immediately. That's not scary enough or you managed to avoid the cold shock response. You're still not in for a good time

Even if you're in control of your body to begin with you lose control of your limbs in about ten minutes at water 50 degrees

or lower in hypothermia

Your internal body temperature dropping below 95 degrees sets in in under an hour even in the best possible conditions

So for Elsa to survive even minutes in the north sea waters

She would have had to have been wearing the equivalent of several immersion water survival seats these big old rubbery looking things

This means that in water where other people are literally

Paralyzed and where body temperatures would drop below survivability in a matter of minutes

Elsa's maintaining a normal internal body temperature and ice surfing with the best of them

It is unbelievable, but it doesn't freeze her that said do one final location to consider. Dr

Holland is the glacier of Heinlein that also rides - and what seems like a few minutes from North old Rock

well initially I wanted to say that this was intended to be Iceland since the crew from frozen - visited Iceland for

Geographic inspiration a movie. It's just too far north

Honestly, the closest coast of Iceland is about 900 miles from Hollis food or any part of the Norwegian coast

which would take a horse even a magic water horse like 40 hours of straight running at top speed with no rest to make our

Movie travel more realistic. I chose the small island of can't pronounce those letters just off the north coast of Norway

There's also possibilities like Bear Island up here. But you know, they all function basically about the same

So just loop them all in as potential otto holland stand-ins interestingly

All these types of islands tend to have sub-zero temperatures at least nine months out of the year

Meaning that when Elsa likely lands in hot Holland the temperature is gonna cause water to freeze directly onto her skin

Immediately on top of that she's facing ocean winds

which will give her a windchill effect making it feel even colder for her starting at negative five degrees Celsius the average temperature for

unpronounceable Norwegian Island in November

We can calculate wind chills for 10 to 30 miles per hour or 16 to 48 km/h at these winds

Elsa's feel like temperature is gonna be about negative 10 degrees Celsius negative 15 degrees Celsius

Or 12 degrees Fahrenheit to 5 degrees Fahrenheit, even then there's not even a shiver so we know even at temperatures significantly

Below freezing. It is still not cold enough to bother so geez

how cold does it need to be for me to seem like a research dead-end since we can't even guess about the temperature in the

Magic cave she's in how far she's falling things like that heck inside the cave

it

Probably should be warmer because she's not subjected to being wet in the wind that said who's one thing that we can still speculate about

Elsa herself. What if instead of looking at the air around her the water that she's impossibly swimming through all of that stuff

What if we stop comparing her to the way that humans freeze and stop assuming that she's human at all instead of assuming that her

Body functions like a normal person's body

It might make more sense to assume that it functions like the element that she's associated with ice

Let's take a look at the moment that Elsa freezes again. We see her jump into the ice chasm to follow her past

She falls for a couple of seconds and we see her make a quick landing on her hands and fingertips like this a moment

Later, she hears the truth about what terrible imperialists her

people were we see her start to freeze again at her fingertips and toes where she landed interestingly it may be the only

scientifically accurate part of this movie

Elsa is freezing like ice to better explain what I mean here and what's actually happening to Elsa and how her body functions

I'm gonna need to flip it to live-action

Hey film theorists matpat here might not look like it because they have less hair up here more hair down here, but don't worry

That's what happens when you do a charity livestream and put your hair on the line

I'll be back to my old self in like t-minus three months. Who knows. Anyway, let's do some real world science

Shall we back in high school?

Because you know this is not child-directed content only 13 and up here on this channel

You may have done yourself a little experiment in the realm of supercooling now

There are lots of YouTube videos out there on this, but you only trying to license those

Because they're expensive and doing science myself is really fun and cool. So anyway supercooling is just one of those really nerdy things

That's fascinating to talk about and even more fascinating to watch in person and frankly

I just kind of want to try it here since I have the ability and people to film me doing this sort of stuff

So why not take advantage of that? This is also one of those rare things on YouTube that you can actually do yourself

It might take a couple of times to get it right, but the idea is to cool a bottle of water

I'm gonna go get the bottle of water

I'm gonna take off my microphone and then get the bottle

Chris is gonna go get the bottle of water. Thank you, Chris

Hopefully super chilled ready to be crystallized

now

The things they got a note here are the water first and foremost needs to be clean and it needs to be left

Very still no this is because in a freezer water will actually cool below freezing temperatures after a couple hours

But still have a magic area where it stays in a liquid state because it doesn't have what's called a seed crystal

Just a couple of crystal structures in the water that ice can form on to now

There's a lot of complicated math that goes behind seed crystals but for our purposes

we're gonna think about

Elsa in frozen to as our little bottle of water here probably could have cut out a face and stuck it on here, right?

little adele dazeem action figure here

She looks human right but in the movie because she represents the ice element at a molecular level

Her body is actually behaving more like freezing water than it does a person now when Elsa falls down in that ice cave and hits

The bottom we suddenly see her whole body

Crystallize into an Elsa popsicle kind of like we should see with this experiment ready Dan ready, Chris

It's gonna land right here ready? Three two one

And you see see it it's that's going it's going what you're seeing here are water molecules

so that's suddenly colliding into each other a little seed crystal at the top and all the water molecules hitting into it and

Glomming on crystallizing into that structure proceeding all the way down into the bottle until now we have mostly ice

With a little bit of water left over

How much?

Not a whole lot

Okay a little bit more than I expected

But you can see that as soon as there was a big impact on that bottle

Disturbing the super chilled water inside of it the entire thing crystallized from the top down to the bottom

now this happened because when the bottle dropped onto the table

It sent a shock wave through the liquid

Literally forcing water molecules to bump into each other through randomness that extra movement eventually results in water

molecules forming something close to the crystal structure of ice

Once that happens the water suddenly has the seed crystals that it needs and now more water

molecules quickly bump into that seed crystal and align themselves into the proper structure

locking in and freezing almost instantly in

Elsa's case in frozen 2 we see the

crystallization or nucleation process as it's cold start from her extremities right her feet and her

fingertips where she landed on the ground

but if we were really being

scientifically accurate would actually start from the top of her head because that is the end of the shock wave that she

Experienced from falling that said this experiment still provides the best explanation that we have about how an ice queen could freeze to death

She's not a human who controls ice at a molecular level

She actually is ice

herself in a very roundabout way this explanation also helps us understand why Elsa's impervious to cold climates cold air heck even

Brutal wind chills at a molecular level elsa is effectively colder than all of those things

She is super cool. Meaning that they're not cooling her. She is the one that's cooling them

It's science. It's frozen and it is super cool

literally and figuratively

Fascinatingly even understanding that else's body functions like a supercooled liquid

It still doesn't give us a true sense of our molecular temperature according to a 2018 study at the University of Frankfurt in Germany

Supercooled water could reach temperatures of negative 42 point 5 5 degrees Celsius or negative 44 degrees Fahrenheit

meaning that Elsa has the potential to achieve a

massive range of temperatures that would allow her to not only survive the harshest conditions on earth

But even survive in some places on freezing planets like Mars and all of this

Actually makes sense in the context of the movie or as convoluted as its lore is just like the earth

Giants are made of rock. The wind spirit has literally just wind and the waterhorses water just ignore that dumb little cute fyrelizard

Elsa is made up of the element that she controls if she truly is the fifth elemental creature

Which honestly she shouldn't be because ice isn't an element that's different from water horse over there

but still if ice truly is a different element in this world her being

Supercooled and only freezing from a landing that strikes hard makes perfect sense

so in an ironic twist Elsa truly is

Impervious to cold as long as she doesn't get smacked too hard by anything for future reference to all the villains in the inevitable frozen

3 keep all the swords or guns or flamethrowers or whatever and just give Elsa good ol swamp with a frying pan

Tangled style organ - a particularly aggressive pillow fight and frankly she is done for don't tell anyone

I tipped you off though

Because if you're a regular viewer of this channel, you'll know that Mickey Mouse and I already have ourselves a chilly relationship

But hey, that's just a theory

This island that I cannot pronounce nor can I find any online pronunciation guide because it's just really hard to find

Pronunciations for very small areas. Can I just say for a sorry cut cut the video? Oh you travel logs on YouTube right now

Why do you not talk in them?

There are so many

Norwegian travel logs that I've clicked on as I research this video hoping that someone will teach me how to pronounce the names of these

Places and all of them are just clips set to music with moderate amounts of text on top

It's not helping me, please teach me how to pronounce these places not even Wikipedia as a pronunciation guide for this one sore

Fuglie Ola. I mean look at these letters. What am I supposed to do with this? It's a zero

It's an O that's been crossed that it's like no. No. Thank you

Oh, this is an O pronunciation old and geez

Would you even puts a G there sore folk sore fug Lowa sore fugu, OA

Can someone watching this video in Norway?

Can you please upload videos of you?

Pronouncing sore fug Lua and then link them to me on Twitter matpat GT or in the game theorist subreddit

And I will try to make a greatest hits compilation of all of them. We'll do a community tab post or something of it

That'd be great, please teach me how to pronounce or Foglia

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