Last Sunday’s Best Animated Feature winner, Frozen, has been making its mark since its release on November 27th of last year. It’s already capped a billion dollars worldwide. It’s gotten crazy-good reviews, hailing it as a return to at the very least the early ‘90’s Disney era, if not a full on all-time best ever from the studio. What’s inexplicable to me (besides the fact that it also won Best Song for that unlistenable ballad “Let It Go”—I mean really, am I hearing something different than everyone else is?) isn’t necessarily the good reviews—the movies’ entertaining enough. My issue is exactly what the film’s being praised for, which is its progressive gender politics. And, having seen the thing, I don’t know what anyone’s talking about in that regard.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet (both of you), here’s where the argument in favor of Frozen’s representation of some sort of New Feminist Era for Disney, a studio known and long-chastised for its portrayal of young women as helpless princesses. In Frozen, Ana and Elsa are sisters who were torn from each other when they were young girls, because Elsa has a secret: everything she touches turns to ice. Worse yet, as she grows older, there’s no way for her to control this, and eventually she’ll just be freezing everything with no will of her own. Ana has no idea that his is why Elsa has been shielded from her, and wonders why her sister has, no pun, become so cold. The legend behind the curse is that only an act of true love can break it.
Elsa hides herself in the mountains and Ana travels to find her, still confident that their sisterly bond is as strong as ever. Along the way, she meets a helpful mountain man named Kristoff, who serves as a romantic foil for her as well as a distraction from her fiancé Hans back at home. For a while during this movie, you don’t know where it’s going, because both Hans and Kristoff seem like totally nice suitors. Which one is she going to choose? Which one will help perform the act of true love that ultimately will save the day?
Well, spoiler alert, but the answer is neither, and that’s the source of all the praise: it turns out that in the end, it’s Ana and Elsa’s love for each other that breaks the curse, unfreezes everything, and that Kristoff and Hans are just red herrings for us. Girl power, etc. And this does seem like a really great step forward for Disney, until you think about any of it for more than about thirty seconds. Then things get hairy.
First of all, there’s the idea that it’s a throwback to the Disney renaissance era (kicked off by The Little Mermaid and ended right around the time of The Lion King), with its musical numbers, its source material in fairy tale lore (Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen”), and its fetishization of royalty at the center. And to that I say: well, yeah. That’s exactly what it is. That’s kind of the problem. Nobody’s going to find much in the way of progressive gender politics when they sift through Disney’s late ‘80’s/early ‘90’s stuff, and the idea that Frozen’s likeness to those films somehow marks it as more evolved than anything in between is astonishing to me. We stopped seeing princesses in Disney films for quite some time, actually, until The Princess and the Frog—which at the very least finally showed an African American heroine—and then Tangled, whose heroine was an ass-kicking, take-no-prisoners type who really didn’t need saving.
Which brings me to the next point, which is that America evidently has a pretty short-term memory. There are a lot of reviews suggesting that Frozen is the first Disney movie with strong female protagonists, which is ludicrous to me. I know that, for instance, Mulan and Pocahontas weren’t exactly the world’s biggest hits, but both of those films had not only minorities as their protagonists, but females who either didn’t need to be saved from anything at all, or who did the saving themselves (or both). Why are we still acting as though this is 1989, and Ariel and Eric were as sophisticated as it got?
Maybe because Disney’s merger with Pixar in the mid-90’s seemed to stop the (admittedly slow) march toward feminism that the studio had been headed in. Sure, Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Up, and Wall-E were extremely intelligent, but, no, not a single one even had a female protagonist, let alone a progressive one. (I tend to think this is because the Pixar people are nerdy problem-solvers, much more interested in sexless, gender-neutral characters who run into puzzles and have to find creative ways to solve them—not because they’re regressive, but that’s just me).
So, granted, it’s been a while. But then all we have to do is look at Frozen itself to find out whether it’s putting us back on track (now that Disney is Pixarless), and it’s pretty easy to see that they’re doing no such thing. Is it the first Disney film to promote sisterhood? Sure. But let’s look at those sisters. First of all, they’re both princesses, so Disney’s still pedaling that particular version of the ideal female to its young audience (and it should definitely be noted that the princess thing is a Disney construction; the original characters in “The Snow Queen” are just a couple of average siblings). Secondly, they spend the entire first act upset about the fact that they don’t get to go outside and socialize with any men, Ana herself overjoyed on coronation day (despite the fact that it isn’t even her coronation) by dancing with suits of armor and batting her eyes at pictures of men on the wall (!), she’s so unable to contain herself. She runs around and sings about what a shame it’s been living in a big empty castle with no men around to enjoy it with (“Why have a ballroom with no balls?” goes one of the lines, and either I’m a perv or that was no accident).
Ana is, indeed, rescued by Hans before coronation day even begins—that’s how they meet—and falls for him in like twenty seconds. And when Ana goes to chase her sister, she’s rescued again by Kristoff, his male moose, and a male snowman named Olaf (she falls for Kristoff in about forty seconds). And Ana, this whole time, has been hit with a shard of ice in her heart by Elsa, so slowly becomes weaker and weaker as the third act approaches. The trolls, oddly, who actually know exactly what kind of act of true love is going to save her (they’re the ones who delivered the prophecy, after all)—even they get a song wherein they try to convince Ana and Kristoff to get together. I guess it’s more important to find the girl a nice man than to even suggest that loving her sister will save her life.
Does that climactic moment, when Ana and Elsa are revealed as the true central duo, have some poignancy? A little, in the same way that seeing shots of sad dogs in cages while Sarah McLaughlin sings “Arms of the Angel” makes you feel sad. In other words, it works in the moment, but afterward you feel manipulated. Elsa gets maybe twenty-nine minutes of screen time the whole film (no particular complaints there, since if I ever have to hear Idina Menzel sing again, I’ll tear my own ears off), so there’s no substance to their sisterhood, just a quick, eleventh-hour trinket. And of course there’s a coda at the end in which, yup, Kristoff and Ana live happily ever after. March on, sisters.
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.