Halfway through “Frozen,” my daughter wanted to leave. Like many a first-grader, she gets scared at some scenes even in animated movies. But I figured she’d like it in the end, so I leaned over and told her, “Don’t worry, she’ll marry the guy with the reindeer and they’ll live happily ever after.” Seen one Disney princess movie, seen them all, right?
Well, as everyone but me had already heard, “Frozen” broke the mold, en route to an Oscar for Best Feature Animated Film and grossing over a billion dollars. Feminists the world over cheered that Disney finally made a movie about strong women who go out and find themselves without the help of a man.
Fair enough — but the movie’s most important message is not that women don’t need men. It is about the dangers of assuming that marriage is the only thing that matters, that love is the only thing that matters in a marriage and that family and community can simply be cast aside in pursuit of a soulmate.
As “Frozen” opens, the king and queen of Arrendale have died at sea. Princess Anna asks her older sister, now Queen Elsa, for permission to marry a man — and the movie avoids the formula. From “Pocohontas” to “The Little Mermaid,” this conflict usually involves an overbearing, controlling father, whom the rebellious girl needs to escape in order to find true love.
But Elsa’s objections have nothing to do with wanting to control Anna and everything to do with warning her about rushing into marriage with someone she just met. (Much later, the guy does turn out to be a slimeball.)
Then comes what many see as the true moment of female empowerment in the movie, the scene where Elsa lets loose the wintery powers that she’s been told to bottle up all these years, because they can kill.
In the middle of a forest, away from any people, she can finally be herself. “Let It Go,” she sings — along with every 9-year-old girl in America for the past few months.
For the most part, the message of this chart-topping song has been embraced by mothers nationwide: Stop trying to live up to other people’s expectations of you.
As the song’s writers explained in their Oscar acceptance speech, dedicating the award to their daughters: “This song is inspired by our love for you and the hope you never let fear or shame keep you from celebrating the unique people that you are”
Elsa sings, “It’s time to see what I can do / To test the limits and break through / No right, no wrong, no rules for me / I’m free.” It’s a powerful moment and a message that many mothers may agree with — but that isn’t what Elsa does in the end.
In fact she decides she’s not free to do whatever she wants. She can’t live alone, away from her sister; she actually has some serious obligations to her kingdom. And while she may be a queen with a different style than her mother, she can’t live without the love and support of her family and her community.
In this sense, she is much different from Disney’s Cinderella and Snow White, who waltz off into the sunset, never looking back. Or Ariel, the Little Mermaid, who not only leaves her family but grows legs so she can never go back.
Meanwhile, we’re still expecting younger-sister Anna to live happily ever after with a man in the end — after a prophesied, mysterious “act of true love” that must save her. Disney could have taken Anna’s friendship with the kind and respectful Kristoff the mountain man there, affirming assumptions about modern egalitarian marriage.
But it’s not the love of a man that makes Anna whole again: It’s the love of her family.
In that sense, “Frozen” may be the most traditional movie Disney has ever made.