Not only does the film suggest that girls should not run off with Prince Charming after a day, but it reminds viewers of all ages that even someone who is outwardly kind and seemingly generous can have ulterior motives that go beyond breaking hearts. However, this critique ignores the more important power of the sequence that plays out with wonderful clarity when smiling Prince Hans (Santino Fontana) leans in to kiss Anna, but instead mocks her dying pain: beware of the kindness of strangers. There has been intriguing criticism about Frozen shattering this lovely fairy tale image for younger audiences. Of course, as anyone who is reading this already knows, directors Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck brilliantly knock this Prince Charming cliché down with a blast of ice far more potently adult than most modern romantic comedies, which often depict the foils as relatively kind and as readable as an open-book (see Disney’s own Enchanted, for one of many examples). The characters of Princess Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell) and Princess Elsa (Idina Menzel) represented two sides of modern femininity that have been mostly missing from previous Disney and other animated productions. As Dan Hajducky pointed out, Frozen was more than a breakaway from the most dated subtexts of older WDAS fare, it was a subversion of it.
When I first watched Frozen, it struck me as a wonderful fairy tale that paid homage to the classic Disney legacy while reimagining it for a younger and (hopefully) savvier audience. And believe it or not, this is a great thing for cinema. This has all paved the way for the announcement of Frozen 2 (not to mention this weekend’s ensuing “Frozen Fever”). In the year since Frozen’sbox office success, where it became the highest grossing animated film ever, that almost seems as foreign a concept as the idea of parents not being sick of “Let It Go.” But just as that song won an Oscar within 24 hours of the film crossing the $1 billion mark, it appears to have had a serendipitously charmed existence. Only four years after Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar and the current President of Walt Disney Animation Studios, lamented that the princess movie genre had “run a course,” Disney’s second princess fairy tale in as many years has been released, and it is a staggering hit.
A remarkable reinvention of the Disney musical, particularly of the Howard Ashman classic Broadway variety, Frozen has been the movie Disney fans were waiting for. I have loved Frozen since I first saw it in early November 2013.
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