I didn't "rag on him" for not liking the film, I just pointed out he is indeed in the minority, But about the quality of the animation itself, "dated"? Come on!
Yeah, definitely not dated in the least. Frozen has some stellar character animation, as an animator I'm particularly fond of the facial animation in the film, on pretty much all of the characters. I'd love to be able to fiddle with Anna's rig and just see all the controls available, and the poses that can be accomplished.
The lighting is gorgeous, they really did an amazing job of keeping the film colorful and emotive while many other films would or have mainly shown snow and frost as a near pure white. With all the translucence of the ice and all of the reflective properties of both ice and snow, it must have been an incredible undertaking to keep the lighting under control while balancing all of the subsurface scattering in the close and mid shots, and compensating for other effects. There are so many elements at play in any one shot, whether or not they are immediately obvious. I will admit though, as much as I love the lighting in the film, I would give a slight edge to Monsters University in that department. Damn, that is some stellar lighting and some great storytelling via lighting. Though Frozen's lighting was definitely the bigger undertaking.
And of course there are all the effects and simulations. You've got fur, hair, various fabrics and drapery, every snowflake is unique, and the particles... and all of the snow tech for clumping, and collecting, and footprints, falling, and breaking. Much of it is a huge step forward for both the games and animation industry. Even some of my friends at VFX houses talked about how much they can't wait to be able to use the snow tech.
And the hair... Rapunzel was a massive undertaking, but Anna and Elsa each have hundreds of thousands more individual strands of hair on their heads than Rapunzel did. Then there are the braids, which are much more of a headache than you'd expect, taking a hair sim and putting a rigid body in the mix. I can't imagine the amount of breaks and glitches that arose during the rendering stages for their hair alone. It's exactly why Elsa's hair HAD to pass through her arm, and why it was an intentional solution to a technical problem, framed specifically to draw the eye away from the "cheat".
There was nothing dated about the visuals in that film, other than the time period it drew inspiration from. A tremendous amount of work went into that film... and when you look at each piece that had to come together, it's rather awe inspiring.