Think Frozen is About Sisterhood and Girl Power?
It isn’t
[Spoiler alert]
Everyone is lauding the movie for the great lessons it teaches about sisterhood, and even feminism. By Disney standards, this movie is golden, but that’s only because Disney’s record on the lessons it teaches little girls is so abysmally bad. It’s definitely not the worst thing I’ve seen, but supposedly the ideal target for this movie is girls aged 5-8, and the movie is full of elements and themes I’d never go out of my way to expose a 5 year old to.
This is my response based on a not-so-close viewing that was interrupted several times.
First of all, it’s scary. It is not graphically shown, but the girls’ parents die a pretty terrifying and violent abandonment death in the first 12 minutes of the movie. (Later scary/tense elements: wolves try to eat them, foreign men try to murder Elsa, several people almost get impaled or otherwise killed by ice, there’s a giant scary snow monster chasing them away, Anna almost dies several times.)
The audience knows that Elsa loves Anna, but in reality, her behavior towards her is terrible, and even though the movie tries to teach us that things would have been easier had Elsa been emotionally available and open, Elsa suffers no real consequences for how Anna gets treated. By the time they reach adulthood, Anna is, as the movie calls her, “so desperate for love” (due to the isolation Elsa inflicted on her) that she was ripe to be manipulated by a man who pretended to love her for political gain and then tried to murder both her and her sister. Great feminist message.
Elsa seems to have some sort of psychotic break after her many years of confinement, and goes on a massive temper tantrum that hurts a lot of people before she is finally able to control herself. The movie totally indulges her being irrational and selfish, most obviously in the song Let it Go, which everyone seems to love.
The main thing I have heard glorified as great feminism is that in the end, the sisterly love is what saves Anna, rather than her “true” male/rescuing love. Throughout their entire relationship Kristof rescues Anna probably a dozen times, and the main storyline of the movie is really a love story between them, not the two sisters. More accurately, it is a love triangle, because for most of the movie, we are led to believe there is another man waiting at home who loves her. The sisters have almost no screen time together by comparison. There is also the seemingly innocuous scene of the marriage-obsessed trolls trying to put them together, which is presumably when Kristof suddenly realizes he loves her and they belong together.
It’s like Disney wants to make a movie about sisters, but they can’t manage to do it without adding in an element of unrealistic romantic love. They just can’t help themselves. Then Kristof and Anna make out in the end.
Disney did a much better job on feminism with Brave, and even Mulan.
