For a film I’ve never seen, I really, really hate Frozen. For those who don’t have children and don’t look into shop windows and don’t buy toys and are oblivious to merchandise, it’s the blockbuster, Academy award-winning Disney film, the most successful animation of all time and apparently the source of unending annoyance in car journeys, on account of children’s habit of singing the songs out loud. (The director, Jennifer Lee, has just issued an apology to parents everywhere.)
My own children loathe it without any encouragement from me but they can’t get away from it either. My son had to sing the songs from it with his choir at a sell-out singalong at the Albert Hall – he and the boys wanted to do Matilda but they were outvoted by the girls. My daughter is, I gather, getting a Frozen themed T-shirt for a Christmas present from a friend, on the basis that everyone thinks little girls will like it. Elsa, incidentally, is now one of the 100 most popular names on account of Frozen.
I’ve been trying to put my finger on an unsettlingly distinctive feature of the thing, and I think I’ve got it. Looking at the stills and the merchandise (at a Primark near you), the eyes of Elsa and Anna, the heroines, aren’t round, like Snow White’s – whose open eyes suggested innocence and goodness. Nope, they’re big but slightly slanted, especially Elsa’s, suggesting feistiness, feminism, and eyes slightly narrowed with determination – without being in any way intimidating, obviously. In most of the pictures, the eyes have that ever so slight crooked slant, while still being enormous. God knows how much effort went into the angle, but we’re not talking old style Disney girl eyes here, which were just cute.
I haven’t a clue whether Elsa has indeed a message for the LGBT community and whether her song Let It Go is in fact a code for coming out, though the director’s explanation about her character doesn’t leave us much the wiser:
‘this concept of letting out who she is[,] that she’s kept to herself for so long[,] and she’s alone and free, but then the sadness of the fact [sic] that the last moment is she’s alone. It’s not a perfect thing, but it’s powerful.”.
What I do know is that the film is quite fabulously irritating, even without going to the trouble of seeing it. It’s loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen, apparently. Just as well he’s dead, eh?
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