Thawing Disney's Frozen Heart

 

As a millennial Disney fan and film student in utero, I often thought about what it would have been like to be there when Aladdin or The Little Mermaid, or even “Snow White” or The Jungle Book, premiered to the culture. It’s one thing to grow up and realize you have a piece of film history with you here in your living room. It’s another to get to watch the culture transform as it engages for the first time with something 

And I have this envy for a great many cinematic works. Like, what I would give to go back to 1946 and tell those losers who dismissed It's a Wonderful Life how they had no idea what they were sleeping on. But the Disney canon’s place within the culture is also specific. Their interest in delivering hopeful stories to an audience that believes itself beyond such frailties as faith or kindness is unparalleled, and that makes their contributions worth studying and celebrating.

And so I didn’t take it for granted during that period in late 2013/early 2014 where the entire world was at the mercy of the latest film from Disney Animation.

It is mind boggling to reckon with just how successful Frozen was. At its apex, it was in fact the fifth highest grossing movie worldwide. The only movies that outpaced it were the first Avengers movie, the final Harry Potter movie, and James Cameron’s two juggernauts. 

So when the cultural gatekeepers look back on the Frozen craze, and when they try to reconcile it with their on-the-record comments about distrusting Disney Animation, they tend to default to some explanation that the reason Frozen struck such a chord was that it was some kind of necessary rejection of Disney tradition. Like when Cole Reilly of Towson University describes movies like Frozen as “a noteworthy evolution among the Disney princess films in terms of offering progressively more substantive story arcs and characters with agency.”  

    And Disney spent the intervening decade trying to see how long they could feed both this crowd and longstanding Disney fans. How did that go? Honestly, about as well as it did for Robin Williams in the climax of Mrs. Doubtfire when he tried having dinner at the restaurant with both his family, as Mrs. Doubtfire, and his boss, as himself. There is some connective line between Frozen and the “Beauty and the Beast" desecration some three years later, and everything that happened as a result of that. That will be the dark shadow looming over this movie until such a time that Disney ever decides to feel comfortable in its own skin.

But the real legacy of Frozen is far more intricate than many of the ways Disney would mismanage that movie’s success, or all the ways the public would try to distort what that meant for the culture.

Speaking as someone who spends way too much time thinking about the Disney canon, I actually have the opposite experience with Frozen that I do with The Lion King. The more I dig into the material, the stronger the movie’s connections to the Disney legacy become. Which is surprising for a film that was built to subvert the Disney playbook and to speak to an audience that did not want Disney Animation to have a seat at the table. 

    And to understand why, you have to be willing to look past all the clickbait articles about Frozen being the first Disney movie not to be a badexample™ for little girls, or the meanspirited parodies that followed that wave. You have to look at the behavior of the film’s thematic dialogue, its treatment of its musical backbone, and the way the audience chose to engage with it. 

The Frozen empire is vast and storied, so I am going to, for the most part, keep this analysis focused on the original film--saving discussion on things like the movie's fantastic sequel and "good enough" Broadway adaptation for some other day. What I want to do with this piece is highlight how the more immersed a reader becomes in the historical practice and presentation of “Disney,” the less “radical” something like Frozen becomes—and how maybe we were all actually better for that. 

 

Building a Snowman

         Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” was another one of those fairy-tales that Walt himself had tried to develop into a feature film during his lifetime. His team could never crack the code, but attempts were also made in the early 21st century.

    Across the 2000s, Disney tried crafting a version where The Snow Queen was an icy sorceress living atop the mountain whose heart was going to be melted by a handsome and kind-hearted stranger, in the style of a classic fairy-tale adaptation. That version saw involvement from the likes of seasoned Disney songwriter, Alan Menken. One of the songs from this treatment, “Love Can’t Be Denied” has surfaced on the internet, sung here by Brian D’Arcy James.     

Left to right: Robert Lopez, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Jennifer Lee, 
Chris Buck, Peter Del Vecho (producer)

     But at some point in the 2000s, Disney also became really attached to the idea that nobody wants a “real fairy tale” anymore. And so, emboldened by the likes of films such as Enchanted, Disney Animation premieres more self-aware fairy-tales in the forms of Princess and the Frog and Tangled. Those films were profitable enough that Disney saw the need to keep spinning at this new take on "The Snow Queen." This attempt was assigned to Disney veteran Chris Buck in the director’s chair with songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristin Andersen-Lopez supplying the songbook, with Jennifer Lee jumping on board as co-director in 2012. 

         The idea here with this adaptation was going to be that the Snow Queen character, who had at some point acquired the name “Elsa,” was going to have her frozen heart thawed not by a handsome prince, but by the film’s heroine. At some point, this character acquired the name “Anna.” This version of the story was always anchored on this idea that this ice goddess would have her heart thawed by the heroine, that the salvific act of true love would come from the princess. Chris Buck described an early treatment, saying,

Concept Art by Scott Watanabe and Claire Keane

“It opened with Elsa’s wedding, and she was jilted at the altar. She ran out of the church, ran up to the mountains, and made a wish on a star so that she would never feel this pain again. The wish froze her heart, so she would never feel pain—but she also couldn’t feel love again. She couldn’t feel anything. She was basically a villain. Anna and Elsa, they knew each other. They lived in the same village. Believing that Elsa was not a bad person, and was not evil, Anna was the one that was going to save Elsa.” 

         There would be a couple of major breakthroughs that would come to define the project that would become “Frozen.” The first was that Anna and Elsa would be sisters, and their potential reunion would be motivated by the possibility of seeing this family restored. The second would be in shedding Elsa’s villainous coating, which would fall off in phases across a few drafts.

    By the time Idina Menzel had joined the project as Elsa’s voice, she had done a few voice recording sessions with Elsa as an explicit antagonist out to conquer Arendelle with her army of evil snowmen. (Interesting note, Josh Gad was actually on board with this early version of the project as one of Elsa’s evil snowmen henchman, back when the character who would become known as “Olaf” was more in the vein of Iago than Genie.) Jennifer Lee describes,

“— what’s interesting is the heart moment, where [Anna’s] heart is struck, was originally in the first act, and it was deliberate. And it was when she was evil and it’s when the girls were divided in a different way. But the whole second act was about Anna trying to get to Hans and to kiss her and then Elsa trying to stop her. And that was the whole second act.”

         And by the time that what we think of as “Frozen” started coming together, they very quickly landed on this ending of Anna taking the off-ramp from true love’s kiss as part of some sacrifice for her sister. Jennifer Lee described, 

“Chris had pitched a beautiful ending way back, which is still the ending. But, to earn that ending was a lot of work. It was not something that came easily.  When I came on, I remember Ed Catmull specifically saying to me, ‘First and foremost, no matter what you have to do to the story, do it.  But you have to earn that ending. If you do it will be great.  If you don’t, it will suck.’”

  So, right from the beginning of what we’d call “Frozen,” there was always this idea that the movie would deliberately engage in the discourse surrounding Disney lore, and that the movie’s main thrust would see it rebuffing preconceptions of how these stories played out. Some crowds really ran with that. Boston University summed up the movie by describing, “Frozen stands out from Disney films of yore in that the storyline doesn’t focus on a princess needing to be rescued by a handsome but blandly boring prince.”

    But in execution, Frozen’s approach to subversion has much more in common with something like My Best Friend’s Wedding than something like The Power of the Dog. With Frozen, there’s a deliberate incentive to play with the expectations of the genre, yes, but it’s no surprise that the movie’s biggest advocates wind up being lovers of the larger Disney library.

Because really the strengths of this movie emerge as the movie’s connections to its Disney legacy are revealed. And these connections run much, much deeper than tiaras and singing snowmen.

 

An “Unconventional” Fairy-Tale

Let’s take a moment and consider that maybe there’s a lot about the Disney fairy-tale romance that the discourse just kind of takes for granted. I literally have a three-part essay series about this.

Consider that none of these classic fairy-tale movies, for example, have a definitive time window between the events of “love at first sight,” “true love’s kiss,” and “marriage.” Most of those films don’t even feature a wedding, and those that do don’t bother stipulating whether Cinderella and her Prince are getting married the day after she claims her slipper or three years later. So, the folks grilling Aurora for marrying Prince Phillip after one encounter (I have to imagine they also feel the same way toward how quickly Cary Grant falls into bed with Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, released the same year as Sleeping Beauty), they’re maybe not being as shrewd as they imagine.

    Something like Ariel’s romance exists in tandem with her storyline about not only making peace with her father, but also shedding her safety net so she can move into her own element. There's a lot more going on there than just a princess pining for a man. Really, you could say this about all of the princess storylines. Yeah, even Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora all explore something about the viability of charity and hope in a world that is hostile toward gentle things. 

The imagery across Anna and Hans’ courtship is obviously meant to invoke something like “So This is Love” from Cinderella. The film is relying on us making a specific connection. At the same time, I can’t really imagine either Snow White or Cinderella’s Prince accidentally knocking their respective princess down with their horse. Those "love at first sight" encounters were picturesque and came together without needing to invoke anything like “adorkability” for an interface. So, Anna literally accepting Hans’ proposal after one swell date, that has more in common with like Sex and the City than anything “Disney Princess.” 

         The best way to understand Frozen’s revisionism can be made by studying something like Amazon Prime’s 2021 Cinderella retelling, which was billed early on as “Cinderella for the #MeToo generation” (and which coincidentally also featured Idina Menzel). There are parts of the movie’s experiment that are maybe worth digging into, like the attempt to make the Stepmother character more fleshed out. I’m even open to giving Cinderella her own start-up business.

         But the psychology of the characters can all be summed up in very unbaked sentiments– revelations that aren’t worked for. I don’t know. The Prince handing off the crown to his more competent little sister so he and Cinderella can go on a sophomore year world tour might have worked if this girl had been given more than three lines of dialogue. 

    An exorbitant amount of projects feel confident they can show-up those silly old cartoons by injecting them with a very passé brand of progressivism, and so they neglect the basics of narrative. And when none of the judges are impressed by their baking soda volcano, they wind up embarrassing themselves. “I don’t understand. We tried everything to make this as cloying as possible. Did James Corden not make enough penis jokes?”

           What actually makes Frozen 70 times better than Cinderella (2021) is that this film respects the territory enough to understand that, yes, even musical fairytales rely on things like thematic cogency or the basic arithmetic of narrative. A lot of what works about Frozen can be understood through very basic principles of storytelling and theme. Frozen plays by the rules that most narrative-driven films do. Movies build themselves around an idea, and they use the characters and the situation to explore that idea.

         As one example, the 1957 Soviet masterpiece, The Cranes are Flying, devotes itself to this idea of war having specific, personal costs. That idea is explored in the characters within this narrative, both the things that happen to them and the decisions they make. The film follows a young couple on the threshold of marriage only for the dude to be called away to war while the girl promises to hold the torch for the both of them. Complications on both fronts test the viability of true love in the face of war. This all works to create a powerful illustration of war having a human cost. 

Frozen works in much the same way. Frozen explores, in the words of Lee, “the concept of the power of love over fear.” The conflict sees our heroine trying to restore balance to a disrupted relationship between her and her sister. Elsa’s fear of herself has kept her in deep isolation, such that only someone with a heart as pure as Anna could ever hope to reach her. 

But Anna lacks the knowledge of how to repair that gap. So, the story gives her someone to practice on—this gruff mountain man who is also hard to love in his own way. Where Hans feels too-good-to-be-true, this Kristoff character, while not demeaning or abrasive, is a bit of a grump. Not someone she could ever imagine loving. But choosing to assist one another puts them in positions to appreciate how sometimes love only reveals itself after you walk through some fires together, and Anna, as someone who carries her heart with her, is in perfect position to bring this love out in others.

    Anna actually really reminds me a lot of the protagonists of Walt’s day, and I don’t even mean just the princesses. I’m also thinking of characters like Pinocchio or Bambi, little fellows who are also experiencing this world for the first time. Their storylines generally had them exposed to both the wonders of this great big world as well as its dangers. These characters were often punished for their naivete only for their resilience to help them triumph over the forces that would do them harm, revealing something about the underappreciated strength of kindness and hope. 

And that’s exactly what happens with Anna. Being turned away by her sister yet again and even being betrayed by Hans does not extinguish her warm heart. It’s because of these experiences that her ultimate decision to sacrifice herself for her sister hits so deep. She’s seen the real cost of choosing to carry your heart with you, and yet she chooses to do the noble thing anyway. And it’s that same display of love that puts the world back together.

         Even if this is your first day on earth and you’ve never seen a Disney movie before, there’s still something moving about Anna choosing to walk away from Kristoff’s salvific true love’s kiss to protect her sister. The action itself carries deep emotional resonance that transcends the external dialogue trying to justify it. This is why the movie has rewatch appeal even after the curtain has dropped, which isn’t something I can say for something like Deadpool. (I’ll admit I offer that diagnosis somewhat delicately. I understand that Deadpool occupies the same space in the hearts of fifteen-year-old boys that Frozen does for six-year-old girls.)

    Even elements that feel purely toyetic, like Olaf’s little ditty about being a snowman and summer and displaying his obvious obliviousness to these things, they serve a thematic purpose. Olaf is that sort of ambassador representing Anna and Elsa’s childhood, and the possibility that they might find that again. The leap Anna has to make in order to close that gap is reflected and even parodied in this impossible dream that this snowman has–he’s a snowman who wants to experience summer. Is that any more ridiculous than a princess who wants to reunite with her isolated sister? 

    So Olaf in all his reckless benevolence becomes a sort of inflated version of Anna, and he teases the possibility that Anna’s own ambition can only have a tragic ending. The scene where Olaf finds out what happens to snow when it gets hot happens right after Anna is at her lowest, when she is most in the position to question the viability of her own romantic ideals.

    But Olaf’s insistence that some people are worth melting for is just what Anna needs to remember to heal this relationship and repair this world. Olaf is obviously here to sell toys, but as with the best of the Disney sidekicks, his real contributions are in guiding the narrative’s thematic development.

         For most of us who were in the Disney camp, I don’t think any of us were really surprised by Frozen. Like, we were a little surprised that other people were catching onto this too. But none of us went home after the Hans twist reevaluating our life choices. Really, the people who travelled the greatest distance were the outside crowd who were reckoning for the first time just how powerful this kind of storytelling can be.

         The things that really made Frozen so tasty actually had to do with how it went out of the way to speak to the interests of Disney fans. 

The Snow Glows White on the Mountain Tonight … 

I had considered writing about this film some years ago for the film’s 10-year anniversary, following the same model I did for Tangled. But in hindsight, I am humbled with relief that I waited until now to unpack this film, until after the "Wicked" movies landed and the larger world could appreciate what it might have meant to Disney fans in 2012 to be teased with this idea of us getting our very own version of “Defying Gravity”—which is exactly what “Let it Go” ended up being.

Let me back up …

Disney culture has been intertwined with Broadway culture at least since the days of Howard Ashman, the songwriter who drew upon musical theater storytelling to give Disney Animation the strongest films across their entire history–we’ll talk more about him in a little bit. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and their successors, these are all functionally Broadway productions painting on a much larger canvas. And a huge part of Disney finding its footing again was with them finding a place for those kinds of movies. Scott Mendelson made the link in his review for Frozen when he described, 

“It is the songs that often come to mind first when one thinks of a given Disney 'classic', and it is those songs that is the key to the long-standing Disney legacy even as its competitors make their stand for box office supremacy. It is the tunes like ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’, ‘Bear Necessities’, ‘Part of Your World’, and ‘The Circle of Life’ that gives the Disney films their immortality," calling Frozen "a wholehearted embrace of that musical legacy."

Of course, the music was, and remains, one of the most common darts detractors will try to weaponize against the film. “Go ahead! Tell me what’s so great about Frozen WITHOUT talking about the songs!” (I imagine these guys go to a lot of parties with the crowd still insisting that people don’t like James Cameron’s Avatar, they just think it’s pretty.) 

But why stop there? While we're dropping such harsh truths, isn’t it about time we all admitted that nobody would like Jurassic Park if not for the dinosaurs? For that matter, can somebody please tell me what’s so special about Billy Wilder’s The Apartment without mentioning that screenplay people won't shut up about? And when will people accept that nobody actually likes Cinema Paradiso–they just like the reminder about the irreplaceable role the movie theater has in shaping individuals, communities, and relationships? And so on … 

Lea Solanga, singing voice for Jasmine and Mulan

    In the days of and following the Ashman-Menken musical, the voice casts for these films were also composed largely of Broadway stars like Judy Kuhn, Nathan Lane, Lea Salonga, Jerry Orbach, Angela Lansbury, and even Susan Egan—whose big Broadway break was with the staged production of Disney’s own “Beauty and the Beast.” This was a popular method of developing their movies during their high-period in the 90s until the studio was pressured into leaving that genre behind.

Once Disney started reinvesting in this artform, it returned to stage casting a little. Anika Noni Rose had been on Broadway prior to voicing Tiana, as had Donna Murphy before she voiced Mother Gothel. But most of the cast for either film was filled out by TV or pop idols like Mandy Moore or Zachary Levi. It wasn’t until Frozen, where you had Broadway celebrities like Josh Gad, Jonathan Groff, and Santino Fontana, all big names in the musical theater world, that Disney started treating musical theater like a reliable pool for voice talent. In the lead, we had Kristen Bell, whose most famous works were in film or television, but even she had still participated in Broadway and stage productions.

So Frozen had basically cast its own little Broadway show full of veteran stage icons here to star in this animated stage. This is something animated musicals are particularly good for, as I explored in my essay on the Disney musical as a subgenre.

And when these Disney kids of the 90s come of age at the start of the century and suddenly have some expendable income, a very specific Broadway production would hit New York, and it is in this fandom that the Venn diagram between Disney lovers and musical theater is almost a complete circle … 

It’s easy to see why Wicked in particular would be a major hit specifically for Disney fans. Even in the context of other hit Broadway productions, Wicked is known for its explosively “popular” music, its vibrant color palette, and its life-affirming themes about friendship and goodness in the face of opposition. Wicked itself also owes at least part of its success to the likes of the Disney Broadway productions from the previous decade for normalizing large-scale musical productions for fantastical stories, which previously were not very common. And across the 2000s and early 2010s, these two fandoms were more or less converged. 

Much of the crowd that was just eating up Tangled in 2010 would have also been very familiar with the cast album for this emotion-driven musical spectacle. They definitely would have known about this Idina Menzel figure who was rumored to be voicing this “Snow Queen” character and who was rumored to be launching a song every bit as bombastic and empowering as the power ballad at the center of Wicked. 

    I would have been invested in this movie no matter what, but the specific factor that drove me, and many others, to obsession was the promise of hearing “Elphaba” sing in a Disney movie. And I maintain that observers continue to overlook just how essential this connection was. From the moment that rumors of Idina Menzel’s involvement started hitting the internet, circa May 2012, the Disney fandom started speculating on what kind of song Disney would supply the vocal goddess who introduced us to “Defying Gravity.”

         Elsa's central number was also a turning point within the development of the film itself. "Let it Go" wound up being the first song written for the film that landed in the finished work. And you can see how so much of the story hung on that specific development. Once Elsa became a character who had hopes and fears, and once she was put in a position to feel something like liberation, the way that we related to her had to evolve. In Lee’s words, “As soon as we had ‘Let It Go,’ we knew Elsa couldn't be a villain. She was too sympathetic.”

         The song was performed live at the 2012 D23 fan convention, where we were told it was going to be performed by this Elsa character. Fans who got to be their live gave detailed reports and even reenactments, as seen with this video. 

        Bloggers, online forums, all those things that people forget absolutely exist for Disney enthusiasts, they knew what this new Frozen movie had with “Let it Go,” whose parallels to Menzel’s signature anthem only became more evident with every new leak. And by the time the convention returned the very next year, there was absolutely an audience for when Idina Menzel performed the song herself for the public for the very first time. The craze around the song reached such titanic proportions that I can't say for certain whether Disney fans were the ones who showed up for "Let it Go," but at the very least, we were the first to see what this song could become.

         I specifically remember watching this movie for the first time in the theater with my sisters, who were also in a position to appreciate who Idina Menzel was. And when the intro for “Let it Go” started playing, we could barely contain our enthusiasm. We saw the show with some cousins who had no real context for her and who were also very … perplexed at our response. But I also remember around the time Elsa was strutting across her ice palace and into the sunlight, they leaned in just a little.

(“Into the Unknown” and “Show Yourself” are still superior songs, though, but none of you are ready for that conversation.) 

  For everything else Disney has tried to recapture the Frozen lightning, it’s surprising to me that they haven’t put in much effort to cast musical theater celebrities in their animated films. I guess the only time they attempted since was with Ariana Debose in WISH, but she was their only offering in that film. And either way, that was hardly the most suitable vehicle. (Oh, Ariana, you were so squandered …)

Go ahead, Disney. Make Eva Noblezada a Disney Princess and see if we won’t bite.

 

 

Here I Stand in the Light of Day

         The Frozen marketing odyssey is very much the “Empire Strikes Back” of the Tangled experience. I covered this all in my essay on Tangled, but if it’s beyond you to check that out at this time …

        Around the turn of the decade, Disney had learned that, yes, audiences were hungry for the Disney fairy-tale, but no one wanted to admit that they were. Getting audiences to a point where they were willing to pay to see one of these singing princess movies in theaters was sort of like trying to feed medicine to your dog. You have to kind of hide it in something they already liked, some idea they were already willing to believe. 

After Princess & the Frog had muted box office returns, Disney decided they’d have to take a different approach with their next fairy-tale movie, which was already in the thick of post-production. Their “Rapunzel” adaptation was rebranded as Tangled, and the trailers all made it look like this Dreamworks-style adventure in which this swag thief dude was forced to baby-sit this blonde personage (who you can’t prove is a princess!) to the tune of lots of slapstick and general hijink. That worked, somehow, which made them wonder if they could repeat the process, motivating them to expedite this Snow Queen project, which they likewise rebranded as “Frozen.” 

Disney fans absolutely knew that this movie was coming, and we knew that this movie would be their response to the success of Tangled. And those of us on the Disney discussion forums were ready to consume and dissect any bit of promotion for this movie we could get our hands on. 

"Thank you, Disney, for this singular piece of concept art. 
This is definitely all I need to get me through the year ..."

    --The Professor in 2012    

    And … we just didn’t get any. Not even anything like the classy teaser for Tangled smuggled onto the "Snow White" DVD. The few sneak peeks we did get, like the "Let it Go" recreation, were kind of wrested from the hands of Disney.

Part of this, we now know, is because the movie had a very turbulent production. Things were being tossed in and out so quickly that it would have been difficult for Disney to know what they should be airing. The song “For the First Time in Forever,” arguably the film’s central number, was not recorded until summer of 2013, with only about three months until the film was supposed to be ready to ship out. (This isn’t so damning. Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast also had compressed production timetables and/or major story shifts during development.) 

Part of this, we also know, is because the marketing just did not know what to do with this sucker. Here was a singing movie about two girls that was entirely bereft of fart jokes. "How on earth are we supposed to trick Tyler and Tommy into seeing this?" So the team basically had to contort the film to look like some kind of Minions analogue.

         Our very first trailer lifted some of the footage of Olaf and Sven from the film transplanted onto an original scenario in which the two are fighting over Olaf’s carrot nose. Neither of the princess characters were seen or referenced. Then two months before the film was set to drop, we got our first trailer with like … actual footage from the movie. There are exactly two shots with Elsa, who has no speaking lines. 

In the years since, Jennifer Lee has gone on to say, “It was very hard for me, because it was a film about sisters, and I'm a woman filmmaker. It was less the musical part, because I understood sometimes people will say, 'Oh, musical? No,' versus giving it a chance. But I struggled with how much [the marketing] didn't feature the women. I want to be respectful to the team; marketing wasn't my job skills or training. But also, it was something as a woman filmmaker that I found hard to navigate at first.”

    Jonathan Groff, voice actor for Kristoff, added, “It was totally a Trojan horse. I really remember thinking like, oh no, what they're promoting is not what the movie is. Even the first poster was us just our heads popping out of snow. I think because Ice Age was such a huge sensation at that time, they were trying to lean into the comedy of the snowman and the reindeer. They were totally tricking everybody to come and see a classic Disney fairytale movie.” 

         But Disney fans must have had some sleeper agent in the ranks of the marketing team, because some four weeks before the movie dropped, fans did get a proper look at the film. This was the first bit of promotional material to actually spotlight The Snow Queen herself (and was dubbed by fans, as such, as “The Elsa trailer”). And could we be hoping too much, or was it possible that this same trailer also had ... singing? The preview itself arrived very late into the marketing train and was tied to no major film releases. Like, I halfway wonder if Disney wasn’t secretly hoping that no one would actually see this thing.

         It was in this same bit of promotion that Disney also made the daring pronouncement that Frozen was the biggest Disney event “since The Lion King”. This was both an act of audacity and also a declaration of loyalty toward the people who recognized that the introduction of a new “Disney classic” was in fact something to anticipate and celebrate.

And it’s hard to say whether this last-minute disclosure (“Yes, this new Disney movie is in fact 'A Disney movie'”) was responsible for all the hoopla that followed, but despite their worst fears, it did not hurt it. Entertainment Time wrote that, 

“... it’s great to see Disney returning to its roots and blooming anew: creating superior musical entertainment that draws on the Walt tradition of animation splendor (this is the first wide-screen feature cartoon since the 1959 Sleeping Beauty) and the verve of Broadway present. The impact of this sisterhood fable on viewers should be as warm and rapturous as Olaf the snowman’s dream of summer. Child, teen or septuagenarian, you’ll warm to Frozen.

But perhaps the movie’s most rewarding achievement wasn’t even in the buckets of money it made or even in the thumbs up it received from critics. The Oscar for Best Animated Picture had been in place for over ten years by this point and was enabled largely in part due to the attention Disney Animation had brought to the medium in the 90s. But by the time The Academy formally instituted this award, Disney had sort of fallen off the wagon and couldn’t really compete with the offerings put out by the likes of Dreamworks, Pixar, or Studio Ghibli. It made sense for a while why Brother Bear wasn’t going to pull one over Finding Nemo. 

    But even after Disney finally got their act together, The Academy was still hesitant to recognize the studio for its contributions. Wreck-it Ralph lost to Brave, one of the rare duds to come from Pixar, and Tangled completely missed the nomination. So for Frozen to win Disney Animation’s first ever Academy award for Best Animated Film, it was overdue to say the least. (This goodwill didn’t last, though. Frozen II would miss out on the nomination in the same cycle that the abominable Toy Story 4 would secure the trophy.) 

The culture by this time had become very comfortable discussing Disney as this progenitor of very banal, juvenile entertainment. Weightless, save for that little chance that they might teach your little girls that they can't be doctors. Yet somehow this little cartoon had become the dominant force in culture directly competing with the likes of the MCU or other major blockbusters. 

  So critics, and people who wanted to sound like critics, had to decide that there was something radical about these movies, that this movie was cut from a different cloth than the likes of The Jungle Book or The Little Mermaid. And the way to do that was to put this presentation in direct competition with the Disney legacy. "These aren’t your grandmother’s princesses, they're princesses for today!" This was relatively easy because, again, this movie had been designed as a remix of Disney fairy-tale truisms.

And a huge part of was that this movie boasted a superpowered princess, and that her central anthem was not augmented or validated by the presence of a prince. This is also where you saw things like speculation on whether or not “conceal, don’t feel” Elsa was intended as a queer icon as a sort of send-up to the company’s conservative fanbase. (This was all happening during that brief time when liberal journalists were still teasing The Walt Disney Company with the idea that they’d start being nice to them if they started doing what they wanted. No. That phase didn’t last either.)

But again, this is where the conversation tends to skip over some things.  

    Elsa’s story is one of self-acceptance, of learning to be comfortable in her own skin while also discovering she has the capacity to feel the embrace of a community. In this way, she also has strong parallels to the protagonists of Renaissance Disney: Ariel, Belle, Beast, Aladdin, Tarzan, and so on. All displaced misfits who came to find belonging, fulfillment, and understanding. And these lone dreamers all have a common ancestor.

As I mentioned in my study of Disney and the culture wars, much of what made Disney Animation such a force to be reckoned with in the 90s came directly from the pen of Howard Ashman. Ashman was the lyricist behind those films that raised the crowd we would now call “Disney Adults.”

         And these legendary songs, they emerged from the heart and imagination of someone who was himself a displaced misfit. Howard Ashman was a queer man living during the height of the AIDS crisis. Ashman himself would pass away from AIDS complications during the finishing run of Beauty and the Beast and the early development of Aladdin. Basically everyone in the Disney fandom knows who Howard Ashman is and what he gave to the Disney story. It's the people who think that Disney only started "queering" with Elsa who are late to the party.

  So applying something like the radical queer reading onto Elsa’s character only reinforces this movie’s connections to traditional Disney. The audience that was raised on the romanticized outcasts of the Ashman musicals absolutely recognized the generational echo with Elsa and her journey to finding peace with herself–first by striking out on her own, and then by opening herself up to the love of her sister and her community.

    And this is the paradox of "Frozen - Disney's Revisionist Ultimo Supreme": If Anna is sort of a callback to the protagonist of Walt’s day, and Elsa a homage to the leads of Ashman's day, then I think we understand the real comment being made about the Disney legacy in a film where these two icons join together to carry this legacy into its next phase.

 

I Like the Open Gates

None of this is some admission of genericism or formulaicness—fans like me have declared for a while now that there is absolutely variety and nuance within the Disney library in terms of genre, theme, aesthetic, and so on. And Disney absolutely broke new ground with Frozen as well. 

    While I don’t think that “If only there was someone out there who loved you” is the devastating kneecap to Disneydom that Buzzfeed thought it was, I find this exposé of nice-guyism supremely satisfying. Frozen also came along in the same window of Silver Linings Playbook where even in heightened films like this we started to see more textured depictions of things like mental health. And then, of course, where Disney films had long standardized the “Over the Rainbow” song for every Disney Princess, Frozen discovered that this kind of character could also really benefit from something more in the style of “Defying Gravity.” 

Those worked in orchestra with the storytellers focusing in on what the Disney story tradition has always done best. Even if the film was designed as a rebuttal toward the Disney aesthetic, to me it only winds up proving its structural integrity, that even if you have to bait the audience with a specific gimmick, the world at large has always had it in them to be astounded by what the Disney library has to offer.

         Of course, in the same way that Marvel took most of the wrong lessons from Guardians of the Galaxy, Disney took mostly the wrong lessons from Frozen. There is a clear, if thin, line between the subversive incentives in making this “Snow Queen” movie a new kind of fairy-tale and the Frankenstein monstrosity of last year’s “Snow White” disaster. But the major stipulation I’d add there, which makes the whole thing that much more tragic, is that these new directives were mostly internalized into the deeper body of the Walt Disney Company, not Disney Animation specifically.

         Disney Animation continued to have an impressive run in the years following Frozen, including with the victory lap of Zootopia barely two years after this, which would also gross a billion dollars worldwide and take home the Oscar for Best Animated Film. And when Disney supplied us with another Frozen in 2019, it somehow wasn’t the discombobulated disasterpiece that it should have been–made even more impressive given that it doesn’t really concern itself with rebutting any Disney tropes the way the first movie did. (Well, I guess you could potentially argue that the film winds up being a sort of deconstruction of the “dead parent” trope in Disney films. Even so …) Disney Animation itself was generally responsible with the trust earned by Frozen.

    It was with something like the chaotic Disney remakes that the studio, perhaps trying to give audiences what it thought they wanted, ended up burning their public goodwill. And it was Disney Animation that stood the most to lose. While Hollywood in general is always finding new holes to poke into its hull, Pixar and Disney Animation’s non-franchise titles, like Elemental, are struggling to keep afloat at the box office here in a streaming war battlefield that is particularly unkind to non-franchise animation.

I think it is also worth reflecting on how this Frozen's struggle to be taken seriously as an article of girlpower filmmaking ran parallel to its struggle to be taken seriously as a singing princess cartoon. The conversation very much puts these two things in competition–“a film can’t pretend to be feminist while also being this dish of corporate Jell-O, obviously!” And this poses some valid questions about just how helpful it is for feminist causes to be grilling something that is so inherently linked to femininity. 

For all the hoopla around the film, the culture still somehow never really understood what we had with Frozen. There’s a lot there that I could read into, have read into, and will no doubt continue to read into about what that all says about the way that the culture chooses to define what is worth celebrating. But I am going to choose to end this piece on a high note and reflect instead on the cycles of birth and rebirth that are so inherent to the process of creation. 

The dressings may change. The signposting may change. But some things are true across time–such as the way that an act of true, sincere love really can thaw a heart frozen by fear and distance. Each new generation deserves the chance to rediscover what those are for themselves, and in whatever way rings the truest for them. But I think that the ultimate discovery is understanding how nice it can be to be a part of a tradition.

                --The Professor