After Sofia Payano ’15 raved about Frozen in the Stacks Room, I didn’t put up much of a fight when my friends suggested that we see it to celebrate the snow day. I sat in my seat hoping this animated flick would blow my mind, as my preferred genres are romance and comedy. After the first song, I was swept off my feet….and then I began to notice what Dr. Sabol was talking about in his Literary Monsters class.

His last assignment was a five to seven page paper about gender roles and how women are presented in the many adaptations of classic fairytales that we have read, like “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Beauty and the Beast.” He brought up that he had read a critique on the movie Frozen about this topic, and I didn’t understand the reference because I hadn’t seen the movie yet. However, as I was watching, I began to pick up on the ways through which Disney altered this movie to be different from all the preceding princess movies, which have been highly scrutinized for depicting women as helpless damsels in distress who cling to knights in shining armor to rescue them.

The movie catches us up to speed by beginning with the scene of Princess Elsa (Idina Menzel) and Princess Anna (Kristen Bell) playing around with Elsa’s power to freeze, but she accidentally shoots her sister’s head with a magical, frozen stream. Anna then has the memory of her sister’s power wiped away, and Elsa is forced to lock herself away and conceal her power.

Credit: Giphy
Credit: Giphy

As soon as she is freed from her life stuck behind the castle walls for Elsa’s coronation day, Princess Anna sings a song about hopefully meeting “the one.” She then meets a prince from the Southern Isles, Hans (Santino Fontana), and gets engaged after just one day of singing a beautifully harmonized song about being made for one another. This was Disney’s play on the stereotypical love-at-first-sight business that we are all used to seeing; however, this is later challenged.

Queen Elsa, who clearly is having none of it, forbids their marriage and, when Anna doesn’t take no for an answer, loses control of her freezing power and unleashes it in front of everyone. Elsa is the character in this movie with the most power. In fact, she has more power than any king or prince, unlike most Disney movies where men are the ones with the most ability and most control.

Elsa leaves the kingdom of Arrendale in an eternal winter and runs off to a mountain where she can live with her power to freeze without harming anyone. Elsa’s breakout song “Let it Go,” by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, was nominated for a Golden Globe. Anna then decides to go after her sister, leaving her fiancée as of one day in charge of the kingdom.

The two female leads, Anna and Elsa, are both wide-eyed, impossibly thin, and white. There are some women in the crowd scenes that are of different body types, but it would have been empowering if one of the main characters was portrayed as anything but tiny-waisted and big-busted. “[Walt Disney was] a man who built his vast fortune on cartoons that suggested to little girls that ‘happily ever after’ is an hourglass figure and a stony-jawed dude,” wrote Joe Incollingo.

Elsa and Hands. Credit: disneysfrozenguy Tumblr
Elsa and Hans. Credit: disneysfrozenguy Tumblr

Many critics of the film pointed out the different body dimensions of the men and women. “In Disney movies, men’s wrists are often three or four times larger than women’s wrists,” says Amanda Marcotte in her article New Disney Heroine’s Eyes are Bigger Than Her Wrists. This gender-based body size difference tells young girls that women should take up almost no space in order to be loved by a man. In this respect, Disney has not taken a step forward but actually stood in place, resting on past traditions.

As far as race goes, a black woman (Maia Wilson) voiced one of the trolls, but that was about as racially diverse as the movie gets.

Frozen is based on the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Snow Queen,” in which a girl named Gerda goes on an icy journey to rescue her kidnapped friend Kai, who is a boy. Disney’s rewrite of the classic fairy tale adds a mountain man, Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), to accompany Anna on her journey. Even though including a man undermines the independence and bravery that Gerda has in Anderson’s tale, Kristoff is not blazing a trail for her to follow; she’s leading the way. When Anna and Kristoff seem to be stuck at a dead end, he tells her that she can’t climb a mountain, but she proves him wrong. This scene demonstrated that women are just as capable, if not more capable, than men. This message particularly stuck with me as a young woman at an all-girls school where girls are not silenced by boys.

When Elsa loses control of her power again and turns Anna’s heart into ice, Anna learns that the only way to reverse it is an act of true love. So, her mission is to find the guy to kiss her that will bring her back to life. The message being delivered here is that girls need the love and attention of a man to survive, which is exaggerated to show how ridiculous this societal pressure really is.

Frozen does not follow the traditional story line of a beautiful princess meeting her prince charming, being separated from him because of a certain villain, being saved with a kiss, and finally living happily ever after. Whenever I feared this movie was falling into the stereotypical plot, the movie addressed my expectations and went in another direction.

[spoiler]Anna is nearing death and looks to a man, her fiance, to save her, but he drops her. He has deceived her, and Anna now realizes that he had an ulterior motive: to park himself on the throne of Arrendale. The next expectation is that the act of true love will be between her and Kristoff, the guy she actually got to know.[/spoiler]

In the final scene, we are expecting a long-anticipated kiss between them, but [spoiler]no–PLOT TWIST! Anna jumps in front of her sister as Hans is about to kill her and suddenly freezes. When Elsa begins to cry, Anna unfreezes because Disney is trying to tell us that “an act of true love” is not necessarily between a boy and a girl.[/spoiler]

Previous subtleties in the movie point to the transgression of Disney’s traditions when Oaken, a salesman, points to his family in the sauna of his mountainside shop: a man and four children, implying that love can be between a man and a man as well. This is the first time Disney has ever shown a same-sex relationship, and so it is a big step for the company that has been programming children into thinking that heterosexual relationships are the only kinds of relationships.

When Arrendale is restored back to its usually summery weather thanks to the power of sisterly love, Anna punches Hans in the face as payback for messing with the wrong gal. Girl power!

“Rewriting the storybook definition of true love doesn’t mean that Frozen entirely gives up on romance, though. The movie has to end with a kiss. And the most significant (though subtle) feminist moment comes in that final scene — our hero takes his princess into his arms, he leans in…. and asks her permission,” says Marnie Ann Joyce.

Frozen turns everything Disney has ever taught us about what love really means upside down. The best part about this movie? The fact that young girls will be singing songs about being themselves regardless of societal pressures.

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