FROZEN: Ice Queens Aren't So Frigid

In ice, no one can hear you scream.

Directors: Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck
Writer: Jennifer Lee
Cast: Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Jonathan Groff, Josh Gad
Runtime: 102 mins.
2013

Disney's Frozen has a lot going for it.  The visuals are stunning.  The soundtrack has its moments.  The characters are strong and well-written.  The humor hits the mark with pleasing consistency.  The pace is usually brisk.  The cast is spot on.  It's also just damned fun to watch.

The movie has another thing going for it though.  It strives to be a contemporary feminist version of the well-established Disney Princess paradigm.  In one sense, this branding of Frozen as a feminist film leads to a lot of bickering that distracts from the movie itself (some examples in a minute).  In another sense, the movie begs to be viewed and reviewed as a subversive step forward for women's issues in Hollywood--it's written into the film's DNA.  So that's how I'm going to review it.

All you really need to know about the plot is that Frozen is basically just like X-Men.  The Queen of the kingdom, Elsa (Idina Menzel) has a special ice-related enchantment (otherwise known as a mutant power) that she has been forced to repress for her entire life.  When she accidentally displays the frightening powers at her coronation, she flees from the kingdom.  Our protagonist, Anna (Kristen Bell), sets out to pursue the sister who has been shut away from her since childhood.  She is accompanied by a normally isolated fellow named Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), Kristoff's reindeer friend, and that stupid but hilarious snowman, who basically has no reason to be around.

As I said, Frozen is an incredibly fun film, but there are some weird narrative imbalances (a song-saturated first act followed by a musical drought, and an entirely new conflict introduced in the final act), squandered character arcs, and lackluster musical numbers that keep it from reaching the pinnacle of its Disney animated forbears.  Olaf (Josh Gad), the moronic talking snowman, is far more entertaining that he has any right to be, but he doesn't approach the manic energy and originality of Robin Williams' Genie.  The fairy tale setting gives the movie an ethereal feel, but it's more tangential and small than the mythic feel of The Beauty and the Beast.  The soundtrack has some hits, but for the most part doesn't even approach the iconic catchiness of stuff like "Under the Sea".

It does one thing that sets it apart from the crowd, though.  Frozen features not one, but two female protagonists.  Not only that, but the central conflict of the film revolves around their relationship with each other.  Not only that, but their relationships with the men of the film, romantic or otherwise, are tangential and often satirized.  Not only that, but the film was co-helmed by Disney's first female director.  This is huge and exciting stuff.

Just look at the near-universal critical praise, the Golden Globe for Best Animated Picture, the huge box office numbers, and the electric word of mouth.  The internet is a-buzz, and when the internet is a-buzz, there are always a few assholes trying to stir up controversy.

For example, this article by Marjorie Ingall imagines a world in which many men are not ready for the feminist bombs that Frozen drops.  At least, this is her explanation for why "most of the reviews have been meh."  She goes through a laundry list of critics who have not heaped praise on the film, then comes to her well-measured conclusion:

All these critics are boys. This movie is an extraordinary, subversive story about sisterhood, and it is funny and surprising and weird, and they do not get it because they are writing with their penises.

This sort of militant discourse is the kind of thing that shuts down healthy discussion.  I've read the reviews she mentioned, some of which I'll cite later, none of which say anything less than positive about Frozen's representation of women.  The issues of the reviewers had to do more with story and structure.  Then I tried to seek out some reviews that were as militant as Ingall but from the opposite perspective, i.e. people who reacted poorly to Disney's advancement of the agenda of women's issues in the film.  I couldn't find any.  I'm sure there are some in some backwoods podunk blog-riddled corner of the internet, but it seems like people are universally pleased with how women are treated in this film.  I'll leave you to decide whether it's pertinent that all the negative reviews I did find were in fact written by men.  While you decide that, allow me to write with my penis for a bit, because I do have some minor quibbles about heralding Frozen as subversive and cutting edge.

Tim Brayton at the film blog Antagony and Ecstasy summed my feelings up well in his excellent essay on the film:

Disney has taken great pains to make exasperatingly clear, this is a Progressive, Feminist movie in their ubiquitous and socially horrifying Disney Princess brand.

Strong words, but perhaps accurate.  The Disney Princess genre has pervaded popular culture for decades, and its treatment of women has rightfully drawn the ire of anybody who cares to pay close attention to what these princess role models are saying to their kids.  But it's also a cash cow.  And less cynically, maybe there is something redeemable about the genre.  Frozen is Disney's attempt to graft modern sensibilities to the archaic princess genre, and by and large the film succeeds in a lot of exciting ways.  But when you mash two very different things together, there is going to be some dissonance along the way.

Sure, the movie allows its protagonist to wake up looking bedraggled, and spout lines about gassiness, but as Brayton said this feels to me like Disney making its agenda exasperatingly clear.  These examples make our princess more identifiable for a few moments, but immediately after the bedraggled wake-up she looks lovely as ever, and she never does display any actual signs of being gassy.  Even the "deformity" of her white streak of hair is either charming, hidden, or barely noticeable.  (I'm not necessarily advocating a Disney princess who goes around gassing it up with her hair in tangled knots, I'm just trying to point out a double standard here.  This feels like a much more toned down version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope of "Ha ha I'm so clumsy and not put together, how could you ever love me!" while the Dream Girl in question actually displays no discernible flaws.)

Sure, the movie subverts the perfect-prince love-at-first-sight stereotype.  But again, this is subversion just for the sake of subversion, an attempt to appear like the progressive movie it is trying to be.  The twist of Prince Hans actually cripples the movie a bit from a narrative standpoint by distracting us from the central conflict (or at least simplifying that conflict and making it external and event-driven), and by robbing us of any sort of non-gimmicky character arc for Hans.

Sure, the movie shows us sisters who bond over their unabashed love of chocolate, but these chocolate-loving women remain unattainably beautiful physical specimens.  Even the gung ho Marjorie Ingall admits that the princesses' eyes are wider than their arms.  Is the fact that these princesses are unrealistically gorgeous a bad thing?  Some people would undoubtedly argue that of course movies are going to feature the most attractive aspects possible, from actors to character models to settings to CGI etc.  That's part of the magic of seeing a movie, right?  Sure, but that misses the point that Hollywood is also setting standards for what is considered attractive.  There are many ways to represent abstract beauty, and there are also many ways to represent physical beauty.  Why shouldn't our movie stars be more distinctively beautiful than inhumanly beautiful?  I'll leave it at that before I fall deeper down the aesthetic-ethical rabbit hole.

Pictured here: feminism?

I'm going to hardcore backpedal now.  Those last three paragraphs of critiques about the slightly forced feminist perspective of Frozen?  Those are quibbles.  I can't emphasize that enough.  Minor complaints that I felt the need to discuss in order to do justice to the movie's vision of itself.  Frozen doesn't drop the ball.  Far from it.

You've probably heard the already-famous ballad "Let It Go".  Elsa, the more compelling of the two sisters, belts it out after she runs away from her kingdom, and it's a moving song about shrugging off the fetters of repression and glorying in what she knows she is capable of rather than obsessing over how other people will see her.  This is by far the best scene of the film; it knocks it out of the park on all accounts.  The lyrics are simple, visceral, honest.  The voicework is powerful and emotional.  The choreography and character animation are expressive.  And the snowy setting transformed into a giant ice castle by Elsa's Magneto-like mutant powers... well, it's a sight to see.  This scene is downright sensational and motivational.  Anita Felicelli argues in her generally positive review that this scene still plays into the good girl/bad girl Madonna/whore paradigm that restricts female expression.  Either Elsa is repressed, meek, and pure, or she is bombastic, capeless, and lets her hair down.  There is some merit to that, but it doesn't change the fact that this scene delivers a healthy and powerful message in a breathtaking way.

Let me try to come to a conclusion here by quoting one of the penis-writing critics that Marjorie Ingall spurned in her review:

“Frozen,” for all its innovations, is not fundamentally revolutionary. Its animated characters are the same familiar, blank-faced, big-eyed storybook figures. But they are a little more psychologically complex than their Disney forerunners. Its princesses may gaze at a glass ceiling, but most are not ready to shatter it.

I generally agree with NYT writer Stephen Holden here.  I don't think Frozen's representation of women is revolutionary, nor is it without its flaws.  But it is very exciting nonetheless, and it's something that we've never seen before out of Disney.  Mulan may end up being the more historically important film (although it's really difficult and probably unfair to compare the two), but Frozen comes at a time when the man-encrusted ice of Hollywood is beginning to thaw a little.  2013 was an imperfect but exciting year for women in film.  As Devin Faraci points out in this brief article, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire ended up the top grossing movie of 2013... and is also the first film with a female lead in forty years to achieve that distinction.  The last was The Exorcist in 1973, and it's sort of ambiguous who the real lead in that movie was.  For a definitive female lead, we have to go back to 1965's The Sound of Music.

Not only that, but Frozen came in at number 4 and Gravity at number 7.  I'm trying to think of something clever or insightful to add here, but it's probably best to let those numbers speak for themselves.

All this is to say that a film like Frozen represents strong political and social progress, but it's not perfect, or ideal, or even good enough.  Filmmakers and moviewatchers shouldn't use this banner year as an excuse to sit back on their/our laurels, but rather as an inspiration to continue pushing the envelope.  To quote the great Professor X:

My name is Charles Xavier. I am a mutant. And once upon a time I had a dream... of a world where all Earth's children, both mutant and baseline human, might live together in peace. This isn't it. This is today's reality.

3 / 5  BLOBS