It’s relatively easy to pick out the lessons to be found in every Disney movie – Hakuna Matata and respect your elders (“The Lion King”), beauty is within (“Beauty and the Beast”), understand cultural differences (“Pocahontas”), or don’t let your gender define you (“Mulan”), but “Frozen” has reached a new level of morality. Past Disney movies certainly present kids with valuable life lessons (perhaps with the exception of “The Little Mermaid” … “change yourself for a man,”) but you can practically hear the Disney executive saying “Hmm, what could make us look good? Oh, a black Disney princess? Let’s check that off the list.”
It’s great that Disney has been making the effort to be inclusive and address important social justice issues, but until now, it has seemed a bit staged. With “Frozen”, the important message isn’t being thrown in your face, but rather subtly included as a regular part of life. We don’t walk away feeling like Disney had an agenda, but rather that it is beginning to conform to modern social norms that are important for Disney to support when millions of children will watch and learn from its films.
“Frozen” is a film about love, but not in the way you might think. Yes, there are romantic interests for our Disney princess Anna, but the key to the story is sisterly love, not finding a man to marry. At first as viewers, we expect the story to go in the typical direction: Anna finds a handsome prince, saves the town from an evil curse and then marries the love of her life to live happily ever after—all while only knowing this handsome prince for upwards of a few days.
But that’s not what happens. Anna does find a handsome prince and she wants to marry him. In most other films, the entire town would rejoice at this news. Their wedding would become the most important part and, to prove that everyone lived happily ever after, the ending scene would show Anna and her prince on their wedding day, googly-eyed and in love. But instead, her older sister Elsa knocks some sense into her saying “You can’t marry someone you just met.”
Disney has introduced a smidge of reality into its films, and it’s refreshing. The concepts of “love at first sight” or “marrying your one true love the second you’re old enough” are nice, surely, but it’s great to be reminded that love isn’t always so easy—and that’s OK.
Better yet, once the viewer is convinced that Disney’s little life lesson of the day has already passed in the film, it throws a curve ball. Anna’s love interest—her picture perfect prince who she didn’t know well enough to marry—turns out to be bad. He only wanted to marry her for her princess status so he himself could take over the throne. The lesson becomes more apparent — love isn’t always what it seems.
Even after all of this, another love interest pops into the picture as it is revealed that another man, Kristoff, is in love with Anna, and only he can break a curse that requires an “act of true love.” Modern day viewers are certainly already satisfied with Disney’s point that love isn’t always so easy, so it seems like the film will wrap up as Kristoff saves the day, and Anna still gets her happily ever after. She does indeed get her happy ending, but Disney couldn’t have ended the film on a better note. Instead of Kristoff saving her, she saves herself with an act of love towards Elsa by saving her from her evil-handsome-prince-ex-boyfriend. Can you say “badass?”
Anna and Kristoff end up kissing, but that detail is hardly important to the end of the story or Anna’s happily ever after. Viewers don’t even know if they end up getting married, or if it doesn’t work out and Anna’s search for love continues. The point is it doesn’t matter. The kingdom is saved and Anna can now spend more time with the real love of her life—her sister. It’s adorable and contradicts every norm we’ve come to expect from all films, Disney or not. Finally, a film that points out the reality of life and doesn’t teach kids to expect a fairy tale.
