[movie review] "Frozen" (2013)

[siderea]

Not evil. Visually gorgeous, and kinda emotionally incoherent, but not evil.

PSA: Parents! Making your child neurotically uptight about their laran will not make them better able to contol it! That is always the wrong answer!

Can we just, like, get that meme out there?

Comments

[dpolicar]

The talking-animal comic sidekick union is a lot more powerful than people think.

That said, the only way I was able to sit through Pocahantas without gnawing off my own limbs was to experience it as a movie about a raccoon who discovers biscuits.

[adrian_turtle]

The character formula: does Disney know they're doing that? Do they have some scientific research that demonstrates that they won't make as much money if they don't have an irritating "funny" talking-animal/object side-kick? Or is a union obligation or something?

I believe their marketing department requires it, because some kids will play with animal toys but not princess toys. Most boys, some babies, a few girls...

[siderea]

So, some years ago, I had occasion to talk to someone involved in the development of a certain slightly famous edutainment game for kids. I was told that originally, the protagonist characters were circle-shaped, but they did acceptance testing with actual children, and found that kids much preferred the characters oval-shaped. I was slightly appalled to discover that, because I had thought the circle-shaped versions were much cuter (and the oval-shaped versions quite unappealing), and I'm pretty sure five-year-old me would have felt the same way.

So every time some corporate producer of media for children does something that strikes me as unappealing, and I'm pretty sure would have struck me as unappealing when I was a kid, I wonder if they have market research that backs it up.

Or whether they're just making unsupported assumptions.

[sichling]

Agreed on the PSA and Elsa stealing every scene. Hurray for a powerful woman getting to keep her power and rule. At least the side-kick does something useful and isn't quite as annoying.

It's still Disney, but Razi has been singing "Let It Go" and wanting to watch the video of that sequence. Both the older kids (and another boy they were talking to) thought that how she built the ice castle was awesome. I think they'd like to do it in Minecraft. LOL

[siderea]

Hurray for a powerful woman getting to keep her power and rule.

Someone proposed that, in a media world saturated in princesses, we have finally been given a queen and that is a big, big deal.

Now I'm wondering if there are any other strong, positive queen characters.

I think they'd like to do it in Minecraft. LOL

OOOH! LEGO ELSA'S CASTLE!!

OT

[siderea]

Hey there, you have a private message from me in you LJ inbox.

[siderea]

My companion left the theatre going, "...You live in the arctic, and your baby girl controls the weather. How is this not awesome?" at the parents in frustration.

Yeah, the amount of fridge logic here is epic. Also, "you sent 'most' of the servants away. Which means not all. Where are the trusted parties who know Elsa's secret, who have to exist?" Also, "Regardless of what her parents thought the right answer was, why did they not, at any point between getting the initial description of the problem and realizing before adolescence that things weren't working out too well, did they not do what royalty have done since time immemorial, and hire help? Like go back to the stone trolls and say, 'Can you recommend a tutor to teach the princess to repress her emotions?'" Also, "Okay, I get that the situation the movie is trying to set up is that the king and queen lock the princess in a tower but, (1) Disney already made that movie, and (2)
there's no way to do that and have them be sympathetic characters, so they don't actually do

[siderea]

Kristoff's "Who marries someone she's just met?!" strikes me as holdover "IT'S NOT THAT SIMPLE!" at his adoptive-family.

Okay, yes, that's an excellent point.

I was very struck by Elsa's childhood, too, thinking, "Um, this isn't nearly as benign as I think they think it is. Man, this poor kid. She's gonna have issues. And boy is it weird that they're focusing on Anna, when the primary awful is happening to Elsa. This is 'raise kid in a locked closet' stuff."

As much as I liked "Let it Go", in context it felt incongruous to me, in how easily she enjoyed her freedom. I kept mentally comparing and contrasting to Tangled which absolutely nailed the ambivalence of defying an absent parent's evil wish.

[hudebnik]

at the romantic climax, the male love interest asks the protagonist's permission to kiss her. Yay!

Even better: the "romantic climax" is in a coda after the dramatic climax, which is obviously going to be about a female character being saved by True Love's Kiss, and then... isn't.

There must be a bunch of Young Turk writers at Disney doing everything they can to deconstruct the classic Disney princess: look at Enchanted, Brave, and now Frozen. Presumably deconstructing sexist tropes is a higher priority than deconstructing ethnic tropes or standing up to the Comic Sidekicks' Union: one battle at a time.

[siderea]

Haven't seen "Enchanted"; can't say. "Brave" is... maybe not the deconstruction you think it is. But "Tangled" gets a half a cookie: the male love interest spends most of the movie getting rescued by the princess; things only go pear shaped at the very end.

I don't think it's Young Turks. The trajectory is wrong. This whole slow-progression-of-steps, with lots of flailing actually suggests a whole system-wide attempt to get over sexism. I think Disney corporately recognizes they have a massive PR problem among women -- that the expression "Disney princess" has become a pejorative in some quarters can't have escaped them -- and even agrees: I think Disney's got enough employees of all sexes that realize, "These are not the messages I want my daughter getting in her media," to make fixing this a corporate agenda. The Free To Be generation is now running the show. Literally. And large swaths of them, even at Disney, have to be uncomfortable with the Disney Princess

[kareila]

Related to the question of evil and coming into one's own power, I find the parallels between Ilsa and Wicked's Elphaba to be fascinating. Idina Menzel sang both roles.