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.