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They will represent women leaders, but only when they are bracketed a particular way. But the company’s lackluster response to the outcry around Elsa’s queerness and the release of the sequel indicate that Disney has anxieties around not only queer heroines but women in power. Merida, Moana, and Elsa and Anna are all, in fact, the daughters of kings and chiefs, born and bred heirs to their collective thrones, and the films focus on watching these women train for a seamless transfer of monarchical power.ĭisney films are obsessed with power and who wields it, and Frozen is no exception - which is why so many of us fully lost our minds at the obvious queer undertones of Elsa’s story. Probably one of the most successful aspects of recent Disney princess films is that audiences often forget that the princesses are, in fact, princesses : Critics of the genre can get caught up with the term as it applies conceptually to a pastel-pink childhood femininity and anti-feminist subjugation.
#Frozen subliminal messages movie
How much does women’s independence, agency, or bodily autonomy support or threaten the state? This is the project that every Disney Princess movie of the past 10 years has engaged in. But what particularly stood out was how uniquely committed Frozen II was to continuing Disney’s overarching project they have taken on with every princess film since their co-production with Pixar, Brave : the relocation of anxiety around women’s agency from romantic relationships to the stability of the nation-state. The sequel illuminated and confirmed a number of issues, among them a range of already-existing problems within the Disney canon when it comes to the representation of people of color and Indigenous populations, along with a particular desire to have your cake and eat it, too, when it comes to attempting to right the wrongs of colonialism. Exciting as the #GiveElsaAGirlfriend campaign was, the more cynical among us did not expect it to actually happen and were unsurprised that it didn’t. Critics and viewers alike interpreted Elsa as gay from the start, which doesn’t seem to have been Disney’s intention - and, based on the sequel, one they are not particularly pleased about.Īudiences anticipated that Disney’s intentions around Elsa’s sexuality would be clarified in Frozen II. Repressed powers often function as queer allegory (see: the X-Men and numerous other superheroes comic book scholar Ramzi Fawaz has argued that mainstream superhero comics of the 1960s and ’70s, themselves outcasts, responded to and expanded on the social justice movements of the era ). Elsa has been marketed as a feminist princess who “doesn’t care about romance and is focusing on herself!” But adult audiences see her for what she obviously is. Frozen has become its own billion-dollar industry within the Disney empire, in no small part because it did away with focusing on traditional romance in favor of the sibling relationship between Elsa and her younger sister, Anna: the heir and the spare of the obviously Scandinavian-inspired kingdom of Arendelle. It’s been six years, which in both gay time and Disney time is a lifetime. “Here I stand, in the light of day - let the storm rage on” was a prayer and a promise to myself, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to commit to my own healing no matter what anyone in my life thought. I had let go of so many things: my marriage, my faith, a complicated friendship with the woman I was in love with. Elsa sang “Let It Go” on an icy mountaintop, and my baby gay self sobbed my heart out, sitting alone in a dark theater, at what was obviously a coming-out anthem. I went to see Frozen its opening weekend and listened to a newly crowned Disney queen with hidden magical powers accidentally out herself after a lifetime of repression (“Couldn’t keep it in, Heaven knows I’ve tried”). The film was released in November 2013, one month after I’d sat in a courtroom, a newly out, 25-year-old lesbian finalizing my divorce from my fundamentalist Christian ex-husband. Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | December 2019 | 10 minutes (3,028 words)įrozen came out the year I came out.