Frozen and Pseudo-Feminism

            When the film Frozen came out in late 2013, many people over the Internet were calling it a feminist film. While you could argue that point, especially in the case of Elsa, I think the film is trying to appear feminist without really skewing from the path of a traditional Disney Princess film.

            The original idea for Frozen was based on the story of the Snow Queen by Has Christian Anderson. In the advertising, Frozen was said to be based on the story, but the film as we know is far from it. The Snow Queen, in an abridged summary, is about a girl traveling up to a mountain to save her friend from the clutches of an evil Snow Queen. Along the way, she meets various  characters – almost all of them are female. Looking at this story the way it is, this would be a good opportunity to adapt this into a film, right?

            Well, Disney went another direction. Frozen tells of Elsa and Anna. When Elsa’s powers are found out at her ball, she flees to isolation in the mountains. Anna goes of to find her and get her back home. While I like Elsa and what little of character we are shown of her, my main issue is with Anna.

            Anna was written as a likeable character, and through her naivety and quirks show an new and interesting Princess character. She isn’t perfect, and she also isn’t proper all of the times. It was refreshing. When she goes off to look for her sister, she doesn’t go alone; she needs to the help of a man, her love interest. 

            In the beginning of the film, she falls in love with someone within a couple of hours. Though I think Disney was trying to get across the message “you can’t marry a man you just met” (Why are they giving relationship advice to their young audience?) Anna stills ends up with a man at the end. My question to Disney; does your box office depend on the princess being with a prince at the end? Is it going to somehow effect your merchandise sales if Anna and Kristoff aren’t together?

I am not anti-romance, not at all, but when you see the same constant trend of Disney movies – a man can have any goal, but a woman’s goal only needs to be to get with a man – it’s taxing. There are at least three songs in the film that talk about Anna and her quest for romantic love. It’s like her motivation from the beginning and until the end is to find true love, not to get her sister down from the mountain.

Another thing that I noticed, and it distracted me from the film itself, are the women’s character designs. Elsa, Anna, and their dead mother all have the same face and body, just with different colored attributes and hairstyles. Their eyes are very large, but their noses and lips small. Their body shapes, too, look like sticks. If they were standing next to male characters who looked as cartoonish as they did, it would have gone unnoticed, but when you see the variety of male characters and the stiffness in design of the female characters, you know they thought of making a doll first before they thought of making a character.

Though I think Frozen has some good messages about family and sisterly love, I don’t think there was any real progress made. Films like Brave and The Princess and the Frog helped; Merida didn’t end up with a prince, and saved her mother, and Tiana opened up her own restaurant and saved herself and her man, and was also the first Black princess. I give Frozen credit where credit is due, but I think it was also a missed opportunity for Disney.

Autobots and the Women That Lean Over Their Engines - Female Representation in the 'Transformers' Franchise

(Pictured Above: Arcee, the most famous female Transformer)

When the Transformers franchise came about in the 1980’s, feminist groups brought up the issue that there were no female Transformers. Although Transformers, at the time, were sexless (though their gender was male) the creators added many female Transformers. Though they were stereotypically girly in terms of how they looked, just like the male Transformers were stereotypically manly looking, they were just as competent and skilled like their male counterparts. Throughout it’s thirty year history, the television shows of the Transformers franchise has treated it’s female characters, both robot and human, with respect.

            Then Transformers came to theatres in 2007. Though there were no female Transformers, there was Megan Fox’s character Mikaela Banes. With the character’s knowledge of automobiles and her helping during the final battle of the film, she could have been the main character over Shia LaBeouf’s character Sam, who is only the main character because he is 1) male and a teenager, the film’s targeted audience, and 2) because he owns an object because of the film’s plot. Though Mikaela has many abilities, what she is most remembered for in the film is being objectified while leaning over Bumblebee’s hood. This particular scene has garnered so much attention that it's been used in multiple documentaries about gender and media because of it's disrespectful nature and "male gaze."

In the second film, she isn’t much different. Shia LeBeouf told the news website Gawker in 2011 that Fox was too feminist to continue on.

For the third film, Megan Fox was replaced by model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who is objectified much more than Megan Fox was in the first two films. A scene opens with Carly’s butt and legs being the center of a shot, she is compared to an object, a car, by her boss, small robots look up her skirt, and she is threatened with sexualize violence with one of the characters. This is probably one of the most disturbing ways a character has been treated, and when women watching this film (they make up 55% of movie-goers according to Caroline Heldman of thesocietypages.org) see how Carly, the main female character is objectified, women see themselves as objects.

            Carly’s representation in the film is completely different than how she was represented in the original television series. She attended MIT and has a gift for chemistry and electronics. It’s particularly sad, because Carly in the film could have these characteristics and it would make no change to the box office whatsoever, but because of blatant sexism, Carly in the film is just an object.

             Carly - circa 1980's                                                                               Carly - circa 2010's