Frozen

[asterroc]

I just saw Frozen yesterday after my quals (which incidentally I think went really well and I'm pretty sure I passed, I'll find out for sure Weds-ish) and I really liked it.

It's loosely based on Hans Christen Anderson's "The Snow Queen," which is already far from the original Disney princess ideal (first wave or something?) in that it isn't about some helpless girl being saved by a deus ex machina handsome prince, but instead is about a girl saving a boy. So it starts off as a quite feminist story, and then Disney makes changes (as they always do), nearly all of which make it even more feminist.

If you've seen the US trailers for it with the snowman and the moose, they don't tell anything about the film other than its humor. I just came cross the UK trailer though, and it's better.

Spoilers.

The younger sister Anna is impulsive and she learns the consequences of her poor choices. She is the Player Character of the story (and her voice actor is first billed), who decides to go on a quest and finds others to help support her on the way and help her reach her goal. There's a little bit of "oh that clumsy little girl, let's have the big man help her" to Anna's story, but she's not portrayed as incompetent, but as eager and determined, and doing the best she can with the skills she does have, which include finding others to make up her many lacks. If Anna's a PC, her build includes high Cha and Will (yeah I know these're different types of attributes, whatevs).

The older sister Elsa is stifled by her parents from childhood through their deaths in her teen years - she is born with magical powers of winter, and when she accidentally hurts her sister Anna her parents' solution is to lock her away and try to suppress her powers, rather than for her to try and train them. I want Elsa to be the main character, and in many ways she is, but she doesn't really act on her own at all, simply reacts to bad situations. Elsa's either a PC or an NPC in a 1-person campaign, and she's got high Int, Wis, and probably Fort b/c of how she doesn't feel the cold, etc.

I said spoilers right? seriously, SPOILERS

I really like how the romance plots played out. Anna falls head over heels in true love with the first guy she meets when she first gets out of the castle, and Hans is a beautiful prince who falls for her too and proposes on that very same night. Anna then goes on her adventure attempting to find Elsa and restore summer, leaving prince Hans behind to keep her little kingdom running in her absence, and picking up Kristoff along the way to help her find Elsa. There's a really funny sequence where Kristoff chides her for getting engaged on the same day and quizzes her about Hans, and Anna answers all his questions in detail.

What makes this so refreshing is that Anna spends the whole movie with Kristoff, and there's even another funny sequence where Kristoff's adoptive troll family attempts to set them up together, and yet there's no UST (unresolved sexual tension) at all between them. I'm so sick and f'ing tired of romance plots being the be-all and end-all of films, this was wonderful. And *then* Anna gets hit by the shard of ice in her heart and only "an act of true love" can save her. I started to get little twinkles in the back of my head that maybe it wouldn't be romantic love here, but pushed it away, not expecting anything good would come of indulging those twinkles, since they couldn't be true.

And then prince Hans rejects her, revealing that his "true love" was all a sham to get control of a kingdom. And then Olaf the snowman comes and restarts the fire that Hans put out and start melting, and for a bit I think maybe he's going to die saving Anna, and that's the act of true love, a friendship type of love (philia). But then he keeps not melting, and she keeps pushing him towards the cooler side of the room, and then Anna realizes Kristoff has loved her all along, and we see Kristoff barreling back down the mountain to save her, and I'm like, "okay, well that's fine, an unexpected love is better than an entire movie with stupid people mooning over each other."

And then Anna runs out over the frozen fjord to try to get to Kristoff before she freezes to death, he's running across the frozen fjord realizing his kiss is the last chance to save her, but then she sees Elsa about to be killed by Hans, and Anna turns from Kristoff, turns from her only chance at salvation, to save Elsa, and she freezes solid in the process of saving her sister's life. And of course because this's Disney, Elsa cries for a bit, and then Anna melts, and they explicitly state that it's Anna's act of selflessly saving her beloved sister which saved Elsa from the curse. So it really isn't romantic love (eros) which saves Elsa, but sisterly love (storge).

And OMG that's what's so wonderful about this movie:

1. It starts with a girl-empowering Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale.


2. Then takes away the boy that the girl-protagonist is saving and makes it instead into saving her sister (another girl) and also herself


3. It puts back in two boys but makes them both peripheral


4. Although on the surface it keeps the romance plot between Gerda and Kay as first Anna and Hans and then Anna and Kristoff, it subverts both of those romance plots


5. In the end, sisterly love saves the day
   
   1. Anna is saved from freezing by her love for her sister
   
   
   2. Elsa is saved from Hans' sword by Anna's presumed sacrifice
   
   
   3. Anna teaches Elsa the lesson of love which lets her gain control over her powers
   
   
   4. Elsa's love and newfound control over her powers saves the city from the ice

In sum: this movie is ALL about girls and girl power, and these are now my favorite Disney princesses (though I guess technically Elsa's a queen). If you liked Brave, I'm sure you'll like this one.

Also good about this movie: I really like the movements of the characters. Elsa runs around in a tight dress at one point, and it's really clear that she's struggling with it, and at the end of that song she's really strutting her stuff between adding a confident waggle to her hips, and a long slit to her skirt which (to my eye) is primarily to make movement easier. In the same song, she makes a gesture when she's singing "Here I stand" where she lifts her skirt a little bit and makes a big stomp to initiate the magic of building her castle - and seriously, if you're going to do that sort of thing in a long tight skirt you do need to lift it.

Later in the song she puts her hair down, and here it's really freedom from the restriction of the bun, with bits of it flying all over the place, it's not the stupid sexy thing of, say, the Black Widow putting her hair down before a fight in Iron Man 2. As Anna's freezing and running across the frozen fjord, there's a close up shot of her steps, as she begins to stagger from fatigue, and I just really appreciated the attention to detail of how she walked.

And now it's time to start looking up that Frozen/RotG (Elsa/Jack) fanfic. I'm sure it exists.

My list of 2014 films (only this one so far) is here.

Originally posted on Dreamwidth. comments there. Comment here or there.

Comments

[calzephyr77.livejournal.com]

We have yet to see Frozen. Part of the reason is that there are so few non 3D showings - Bud has a lazy eye and it ends up being headache vision because he can't see the effect.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I hate 3D too (gets me dizzy), as does my officemate, with whom I went to see it, so she's a great movie buddy in general. :-D And also T$ hates it (glasses on glasses is apparently no fun). So yeah, some days I'm surrounded by awesome. But yeah, make sure you see it one way or another - it would also be good on the small screen, so don't worry if you can't see it in the theater.