Fine,
I admit it: trekking to the movie theater after a day of heavy snow
against my husband’s generally sound advice was not my best plan. But I
had promised our 4-year old that I would take him to the movie theater
for the first time that Saturday night, to see Disney’s Frozen, and I
loved the symmetry between the white-covered world outside and the
premise of the movie featuring a snow queen (which is about as much as I
knew about the plot).Clad in boots, gloves, and puffy coats, we drove ploddingly to the mall, where I skidded terrifyingly a couple of times and vowed to always take my husband’s advice from then on. But we made it safely and, tickets and popcorn in hand, settled in to enjoy the show.
It was magical. And not just because I loved seeing my adorably inquisitive son’s eyes grow wide with wonder as he took in a new experience with “the biggest TV screen ever,” but because the story itself was a revelation.
Somewhere between re-watching generic princes fall instantly in love with the passive Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella and seeing Ariel giving up her family, mermaid body, and voice for a man she had only glimpsed from afar, I realized–amid the magic of talking forest friends and deliciously evil villains–that Disney films of “olde” have some serious flaws. Chief among them is the idea that love happens at first sight (lust, maybe, but real, lasting love?) and the repetitive obsession with storybook romance as the ubiquitously happy ending. This was driven home to me after watching Mulan, which concludes in the protagonist and her boyfriend sitting down to dinner. My son refused to go to bed. “It can’t be over,” he protested. “Nobody got married yet.”
But Frozen’s central love story is not one between a man and a woman. It’s between two sisters: the elder one, a princess named Elsa enabled with the initially-uncontrollable power to create snow and ice with the flick of a wrist and the younger one, Anna, who adores Elsa and cannot understand how they went from being childhood best friends to strangers in their adolescence and young adulthood. When Anna eventually discovers her sister’s secret power, along with the entire kingdom, Elsa banishes herself and inspires Anna to undertake a mission to retrieve her sister and renew their close bond.
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